Here's my story.
I was in my mid 20s and had just come out of a divorce. It wasn't one of those divorces where the two leave on good terms, no. It was the kind where one has an affair and the other blames themself and allows the offender to walk away with everything in hopes that they'll come around like a sucker. I was that sucker.
I started working Security in a college housing complex in a team of four. Four might seem excessive, but this place was a fucking zoo during the summer. Breaking up huge fights every night, trying to keep the small time drug peddlers out, preventing property damage, arson, you name it.
It wasn't until the gangs came in dealing drugs that things got really ugly. By contract only one of us out of the four was allowed to carry a firearm (It wasn't me), what a crock of shit. I was working a job that paid too little for a job that was too dangerous for a boss that was embezzling money, ghosting sites under the clients' noses, and of course taking a very generous slice of the proverbial cake we four rent-a-cops baked out of our blood and sweat (the client paid him 25$ an hour per guard, we made $8.90 an hour). I couldn't turn the job down, or 'stick it to man', because it was a point in time where the job market was at an all time low in my area, I knew it was this or nothing.
The night I started smoking was the night it was too much. It wasn't the fight that broke out. I was accustomed to getting roughed up. No it wasn't a blow to the body, it was a rake across my mind. Adrenaline coursing through my veins was only fueling my thoughts as I was coming down from 'the rush'; Expelling these drug peddlers who slithered around the law to make money, and here I was working for a corrupt agency with a boss who supplied firearms and weapons to these very people. I wouldn't quit, I wouldn't go back to being that jobless manchild, after all, not having a job was one of the reasons she gave for straying and leaving. Maybe these peddlers were in the same boat. I saw the debauchery that went on in the nightlife of my generation. The same life she said having a gold band was leashing her from. This was that life; individual voices of competent minds coming together in doped up congregation and devolving into incoherent white noise.
When something is bothering me I don't let it show, or so I thought. I suppose that night even my best attempts to keep a poker face while I sorted my thoughts out were in vain. My rounds partner came up to me and said "That was some crazy shit, huh?" I lifted my eyebrows and nodded, lips pursed, you know the kind of bullshit expression your face contorts to when you're hiding something. "Fuck man, you look like you're gonna explode! Here!"
There it was. A Marlboro 72.
I was never vehemently against smoking (I definitely didn't like the idea), but it wasn't for me. I lit up and inhaled. I immediately felt my worries wash away, I remember actually smiling about it. Ever since then it's been a pack a day.
I'm now in a much better place in life these days. Things are going pretty good.
But these cancer sticks take their toll on my wallet, make my clothes reek of garbage, keep me from passing a physical for the law enforcement career I dreamed of (15 seconds too late and I was coughing the whole way) and of course are eating days off of my lifespan.
But it's not the physical toll that bothers me. It's the mental toll. You see... these little bastards have done a number on my mind. I wish I could quit, I'd love to quit. I think about how even-tempered I've become since that day. I'm almost a different person. Is it because I've grown as a person or is it because I've been constantly sedated by nicotine since that day? Will I go back to being that man from before? The man who stood there feeling helpless when she walked out the door. The man who accepted futility. The man whose nerves bested him.
No, that man is dead. Good riddance to him. Yet, I can't help but wonder if it's these 'coffin nails' that are keeping his casket sealed.
I can't take that chance.
I sincerely wish I had never started.
