No smoking

I don't smoke. I never picked up the habit. No taste for it, no nicotine itch to keep me coming back for more.

I live with smokers. The lifelong commitment kind of smokers. The pack-and-a-half — maybe two — per person kind of smokers. Gray smoke drifts over the television and dinner table in steel wool clouds. Gray ash gets ground into wood grain and upholstery in black half-circles like punctures, gets into clothes and jackets and hair and everything else.

Everywhere I go, there's smoke. If I somehow manage to not die of lung cancer from second-hand smoke, I'll be terribly surprised.

–

Cigarette smoke fills the car on the highway when I'm passing faded billboards for diet pills and thrift malls on my way downtown. That's what happens when you travel with smokers. It likes to swirl over me in the comfortable pocket of head-room promised at the dealership when I got my generic Japanese compact car. Music on the radio fills the space between the smoke drifts, tinny chords from the Nixon presidency, like a 1970s counter-culture movie poster. It's a nice juxtaposition against my clean white economy car and the Starfleet Academy campus parking permit hanging from my rearview mirror. Some people have fuzzy dice or cardboard pine trees hanging from theirs. I like to keep it real.

At work everybody smokes, too. I always find them hiding outside between breaks on cold concrete under the fat Fort Worth skyline. Cell phones in hand, thumbs callused from too much texting. They play with novelty lighters and have long skinny paper filters between their teeth, wet from spit and licking lips, jittery from the nicotine withdrawal and the double-shifts at our generic customer service job. When you work with the dumb needy consumers of the greater Fort Worth area all day long, I can't blame you for needing a cigarette,

When I pass by, somebody blows a stream of steel wool and says between their teeth, "Hey. You want a cigarette?"

I just say, "No thanks, I don't smoke."

People always smile and nod and say, "Yeah, that's good. It's a disgusting habit." Then they suck the rest of their cigarette down, flick the butt away and walk inside.

I never know what to say to that.

–

Bars are filled with smoke, yellowed teeth and ashes under fingernails where people tapped their cherries in the ashtray and missed. I try to avoid them. I get enough of that at home.

–

Twice now I've spent the weekend in San Diego, in the non-smoker's oasis of palm trees and city ordinances banning smokers from bars and restaurants. I've seen the people there spit and snarl whenever they saw smokers. Standing outside cafes or bus stations or convention centers, in the faraway corner roped off and twice marked Smoker's Lounge, indulging in their pack-a-day habit where nobody had to see them. Still people turned on them, canines bared, spit stringing their lips together as they cursed people's names. You would've thought it was an allergic reaction, smoker-induced anaphylaxis, like a demon seeing the cross.

Never mind the homeless people all over San Diego. The ones sleeping on street corners and begging for money outside my hotel room at all hours of the day and night. The ones people keep walking by like they don't exist. Let's not worry about finding places for them to stay or get help or even just a warm meal. Those smokers, man. It's always those goddamn smokers. Scourge of the earth and all. Let's pass twenty-seven city ordinances so we can spit on smokers, beat their children and run over their puppies.

Yeah.

Let's do that.

–

When I tell people that I come from a family of one-to-two-pack-a-day smokers — lifelong commitment smokers, whether rain or snow or dead of night — they always ask me why I don't smoke. I have a list of reasons, really. It's too expensive. I don't like it. It's too politically charged an issue. Blah blah blah. It's not really any of their business, anyway.

Sometimes I turn around and ask, "Well, do you make a habit of doing everything your parents ever did?"

They look at me a little funny. "Well, no," they say, "of course not."

"There you go."

Not smoking is my private rebellion. Take that, Mom and Dad. Now excuse me while I go waste my life on writing and drinking cheap whiskey.