On nicotine, night terrors and facing the abyss
I remember excruciating cravings back then that would begin even before I opened my eyes in the morning, tug at my nervous system all day and hound me until I fell asleep each night.
I’m writing this on Wednesday, April 22, in the afternoon. A stiff wind rattles the greening trees outside my office window. And I haven’t had a cigarette in two days. I have quit smoking. I have made this boast before. Once I even managed to quit for a couple months before the relapse. I took a job at a restaurant where everybody smoked in the employee lounge, which was located right behind the Dumpster in the parking lot. It was where all the action went down: good shifts up for grabs, good gossip flying around, possibly a bit of intrigue… the usual restaurant stuff. For political reasons, I told myself, it was in my best interests to start smoking again. I remember excruciating cravings back then that would begin even before I opened my eyes in the morning, tug at my nervous system all day and hound me until I fell asleep each night.I cherished secondhand smoke when I came across it, thinking, Some lucky bastard is smoking a cigarette, and inhaling deeply. I have been smoking cigarettes for a long time — let’s call it 25 years — and I’d like to say I’m quitting because of a sudden realization of my own mortality, a resolution to take responsibility for my own health, a will to better myself by eliminating a weakness. All of these things are true, but for the most part I’m quitting because I’m cheap. The price of a cartonof cigarettes has gone up by about $15 this year, causing me to reach my tipping point. It had become a math problem, and in the long run I’d rather keep the money. I started smoking for the same reasons everybody else did: I thought it looked cool, and it seemed to really piss off a lot of adults when they saw me doing it. I bought them at Raoulston’s on Clinton Road, just over the Hempstead line, for 90 cents a pack when I was 14 years old.
They cost a buck and a half over at the 7-11 by the time I was in high school — my high school, like pretty much all the others in the ’80s, had a student smoking section. We used to chip in for smokes in college, especially when we lived in the dorms and stayed up all night cadging each others’ cigarettes. When I started bartending I would just grab a handful of quarters out of my tip jar and plunge them into the smoke machine, one at a time.
At some point in the mid-’90s, every bartender in town got a carton or two a week for free from RJ Reynolds and I had a freezer full of them. I enjoyed my time as a smoker, enjoyed smoking, very much — all except the smell and, in later years, the inconvenience and the itchy, hacking cough I developed. I became very proficient at smoking; I could smoke a Winston Ultra Light faster than anyone I know. But I’m serious about quitting — this time I’m using a very trendy prescription drug which has enabled two of my old friends, Atom and Big Tiny, to shake their two- to three-pack a day habits, and ifthose clowns can do it then I certainly can. I take the little blue pill in the morning — I won’t name it until someone coughs up some product-placement money — and it almost immediately makes me nauseous. It also blocks the nicotine receptors in my brain, making my withdrawal much more comfortable than it should rightly be. I believe the drug is truly a miracle of modern chemistry.
And aside from the nausea, it comes with just one other unfortunate side effect: night terrors. Not nightmares. Night terrors. Here’s the difference: I dreamt the other night that my wife left me for some French guy and became famous for starring in his arthouse films. When I awoke, the anguish I felt was real, if only for moment. And unlike nightmares, which generally dissolve upon waking, I am still able to recall every detail of that nocturnal episode. A couple nights later I dreamt I killed a man, shot him in the back until the gun went “click.” The guy clearly had it coming — a long story, which again was frighteningly realistic and inexplicably detailed — but when I awoke I felt as if I had actually made a conscious decision to pull the trigger. And in my mind’s eye I can still see the tiny bubbles forming in the blood that leaked out from the hole I put in his lung.
There’s a vaguely shamanistic quality to this experience, like I’m facing my fears in the dream state to help me conquer my demons in the waking world, or like I’ve accidentally eaten peyote for dinner. And I can see how it would convince others that they might just be better off smoking than waking for a few weeks with the feeling like they’ve done something unspeakably terrible.
Me, I looked into the abyss long ago and felt its dead, empty gaze looking back. Terror doesn’t scare me anymore. But emphysema does.
