The First Vice…
At this time in my life, I was very withdrawn. Also at this time, the laws about selling tobacco to minors became much more strict.
I don’t know if this made me want to smoke or what, but one day I was wandering up the dirt road to the corner store and I decided just to see if the girl would sell me a packet of cigarettes.
She did.
So I snuck off one evening at sunset to have a cigarette. I didn’t particularly like the first one, although it didn’t make me turn green and hack and cough the way it does in the movies. I did, however, have a slight head rush afterwards, I was a little bit dizzy, and I thought, Great. This is what Cancer feels like. I’m dying.
But the feeling subsided and afterwards I felt relaxed and happy. At the same time I was anxious because I was ever so sure that my parents would look at me and know, instantly, that I’d been smoking.
But I wandered out for a walk the next night and the night after that, with a can of pop hidden out in the bushes, behind an old shed, behind the public school in town, and I’d sit alone and I’d smoke and I really, really enjoyed those evenings. I was alone, I had time to myself. I wasn’t a loser during my smoking time in the evening: I didn’t have to watch television shows focussed on people with social lives, I didn’t have to listen to the phone not ring for me.
Smoking made me ok during that time. Smoking made me have something to look forward to in the day, something I could have all to myself that no one could take from me. I felt that as long as I had a packet of cigarettes, I would make it through another day.
And thus, smoking became the first vice.
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