CHAPTER THREE:
I stayed up pretty late that night reading The Price of Menthols. (Spoiler alert: The Price of Menthols is cancer.) It wasn't an Imperial Addiction, but the cigarettes sounded fairly enjoyable despite killing, by my count, no fever than 118 individuals in 284 pages.
So I got up late the next morning, a Thursday. Mom's policy was to never wake me up, because one of the job requirements for being addicted to cigarettes was generally not wanting to do things, so I was kind of confused when my mom poked me with a stick to see if I was still wheezing.
I reached for my vape. It was too early for this.
"It's only ten!" she said incredulously.
"Vaping helps with side effects," I told her.
Mom picked an empty carton from off the floor with a look of disappointment. "Did that boy give it to you?" she asked out of nowhere.
"By it, do you mean cancer?" I asked.
"You are too much," Mom said. "The cigarettes, Hazy. I mean the cigarettes."
"Nah. I got 'em from Eyesquit. He's going blind so he never notices them missing."
"I thought we talked about this."
"Stealing?"
"Smoking."
I followed each word with an inhale. "Can't. Talk. Vaping. Withdraws. Fighting."
"Well," Mom said, "it looks like we'll be celebrating after all."
"It's National Vaping Day?" I said excitedly.
"Did you seriously forget?"
"Maybe?"
"It's Thursday, March twentieth!" she basically screamed, and I nearly dropped my carton of cigarettes.
My head was spinning, trying to remember what had been so important about this day.
"HAZY! IT'S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD DEATHDAY!"
"Ohhhhhhh," I said. My mom had started celebrating my deathday every year when I started lighting up. She loved parties and fanfare so she wanted to celebrate all the years I would inevitably shave off my life from my poor life choices.
"What do you want to do on your very special deathday?"
"I want to get more vapes," I said.
"Would you like to invite to invite Patch?" Patch was my nicotine patch dealer. His product helped me cut back on the real thing. He sold that too.
"He's going to meet us there."
Mom drove me directly from school to the vape store attached to the mall, where I purchased both Midnight Drags and Requiem for a Cigarette, the first two sequels to The Price of Menthols, and then I walked outside to vape. My watch still said 4:20 —I had to get that fixed— and at 4:20 precisely, I noticed Patch swagger in. He wore a leather jacket and a knee-length charcoal coat that smelled like cigarettes; it seemed to permeate the air around him. I suppose he thought made him look suave.
"How's it toking?" said Patch.
"I'm vaping now, actually," I told him, tapping the end of my vapes. "Health is good, I presume?"
"Cigarettes are better," Patch said, lighting one up. I had to force myself not to inhale the second hand smoke I so desperately craved. It was a gateway puff.
I grabbed my vape and took a long drag, trying my best to long for the cigarettes I could no longer have. "Wait till you try chocolate," I said.
We went to the vape store. As we were shopping, Patch kept picking out cigarettes he wanted to try. Mayfairs. Lucky Strikes. Winstons. Camels. Menthols. Lights. Cigarettes of all kinds, all equally cancerous.
"Vapes," I tried to tell Patch. "They have to be vapes. I can't smoke cigarettes anymore. I'm sober now. The cigar doesn't burn at both ends for me like it used to."
"Can't smoke cigarettes," Patch pondered to himself, seeming to consider the statement, as though it were ridiculous. He snapped his fingers. "Of course!" Patch held up a bag of Mary Jane. "Do you want one of these?"
I gasped, slapping the weed straight out of his hand. "What the frick frack snick snack?" I yelled. "I'm in recovery," I hissed. I knew it had medicinal properties that helped him with his cancer, but I had to do this right. I couldn't just go shooting off with half-baked ideas.
"Sorry Haze," Patch said. "I didn't realize how serious your commitment was to quitting. You know if you're so committed to being healthy, I could help you quit vaping too."
I gasped, clutching the vapes to my chest. "Monster!"
I ended up just picking out some grape vapes and some more chocolate ones. I watched Patch speak to the clerk. She was showing him all the ins and outs of vaping, though he seemed skeptical of the whole idea. I kind of wanted to take out Midnight Drags and read it for a while, but I was afraid reading about smoking and being so close to a store that sold them would be a bad idea. As we exited the store, Patch donned his new vapes in hand. He took a puff and extended his arm, "Wanna a hit?"
"I should head home actually," I said, gathering up my vapes. "I wanna watch America's Next Top Chainsmoker."
"Sure, of course," Patch said. He blew a wisp of smoke on both cheeks as a parting gesture. "Smoke be with you," he said.
"And also with you."
I didn't go home, though. I walked back into the vape store and purchased more vapes. I'd told mom to pick me up at 6, but my watch said 4:20 so I wandered around aimlessly until a mall cop saw me smoking and chased me to the end of the street corner.
I looked at my watch again and remembered it was broken.
I found a bench with a Stamp Out Smoking ad and started reading Midnight Drags. It featured a sentence to corpse ratio of nearly 100:1, and I tore through it the way me and Puff had torn through those cigarettes. My favorite was Seargent Ashtray. His pack of choice was Camel.
(Spoiler alert: He dies.)
I locked my vapes up early that night, slamming the vaulted door of my double-bolted safe before curling into the covers the way tobacco did into the fibers of rolling paper. And then I started reading An Imperial Addiction for the millionth time.
AIA is about a girl named Ash, no relation to Midnight Drag's Ashtray and her cock-eyed mom, who is a professional tobacco farmer, and they have a normal life in Cuba until her daughter Ashtray starts smoking the supply.
But it's not a stop smoking book book, because stop smoking books suck. Like, in stop smoking books, the author always quotes you these preachy statistics on tobacco like how one person dies every 6 seconds from a tobacco-related disease or how cigarettes are made with the same chemicals used in prison executions, rocket fuel, rat poison, batteries, car exhaust, and nail polish remover, or how your pet cat is like two times as likely to get cancer if its owner smokes. I mean, who wanted to know that one cigarette butt soaked in a liter of water killed half the laboratory fish at San Diego State University in their comprehensive studies or that in the U.S. tobacco kills more American's than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, murders, suicides, drugs, and fires combined? No. I couldn't stand stop smoking books. Those were the worst. I mean, what kind of self-loathing addict would want to read something like that?
Also, Anna is honest about her addiction in a way no one else really is: Throughout the book, she refers to herself as a chainsmoker, which is just totally correct. Chainsmokers are essentially side effects of the relentless stress that made the misery of life possible. So as the story goes on, she smokes more, the carcinogens and toxic chemicals racing to kill her, and her mom falls in love with this Dutch tobacco trader Ash calls the Dutch Tobacco Man. The Dutch Tobacco Man has lots of tobacco and very eccentric ideas about how to smoke it, but Ash thinks this guy might be a cop and possibly not even a farmer, and then just as she's about to get busted for underage smoking, the book ends right in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a cigaret—
I understand the story ended because Ash got busted for smoking under eighteen and this was supposed to symbolize how abruptly life can end and whatever when you take up smoking, but I needed to know what happened. I needed to know for sure if Ash had been arrested. I'd written a dozen letters to Smoker Van Hookah, each asking for the same answers about what happens after the end of the story: whether Dutch Tobacco Man is a cop, whether Ash ends up in juvie, what happens to her hamster with cervical cancer, whether Ash's friends ever stop smoking or post her mother's bail money. But he'd never responded to any of my letters. To be fair, they had been smeared with cigarette ash.
AIA was the only book Smoker Van Hookah had written, and all anyone seemed to know about him was that after the book came out he moved from the United States to Cuba and became a really bad poker player. Like seriously ridiculously bad. I'd heard he'd lost five premium cigar boxes to a pug in a fuchsia leotard. But it had been ten years since An Imperial Addiction came out, and Van Hookah hadn't been spotted once. Not even to buy cigarettes. From what I'd heard, his assistant Lighterfluid ran most of his errands.
As I reread that night, I kept getting distracted imagining Puffgustus relapsing. I wondered if he'd resist the temptation, or if he'd find the strength to fight it. Then I remembered I had purchased him a nifty shock collar that zapped him whenever he tried to light up a cigarette. All was well, I told myself, letting the wisps from my vapes lull me into the blissful oblivion of sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, it was to Puffgustus texting me incessantly.
Tell me there's an off button for this shock collar.
Hazy Vapes, tell me there's a way out of this thing. I need my cigarettes.
OH MY GOD IT'S SHOCKING ME ME I AM LITERALLY DYING TO DEATH
YOU ARE STABBING ME IN MY SOUL
PLS
Then came the last text:
I guess that shock collar wasn't so effective after all, huh?
I groaned. Puffgustus had managed to break free from his restraints. Not only that, he had found a way to take the collar off. This wasn't good. I grabbed my keys, forgetting my vapes altogether, slamming my foot on the petal as soon as the car door slammed behind me. There was no telling what he'd do to his body with free reign over his secret stash. I wasn't stupid enough to think he hadn't held back.
When I finally arrived, I skidded into the driveway, power walking, on account of my chronic asthma, straight into the house and downstairs where Puffgustus and Eyesquit were playing video games. Eyesquit was lighting up. Puff already had two going.
"Hand them over," I said, sternly. "You too Eyesquit."
"Or what," Eyesquit said. "You'll decide you never want to see me again."
Puffgustus high fived him but it was a bit awkward seeing as Eyesquit hadn't anticipated the movement. A red palm print lingered on his cheek from where Puffgustus' hand had smacked his forehead. "Maybe one day we'll see eye to eye," Puff said, patting him on the head.
"Cigarettes," I gritted. "Now."
Puffgustus sighed, handing over his stash.
"Now you," I told Eyesquit. "We're all in this together."
"Go easy on him," Puffgustus said, gently. "He just broke up with Harmonica."
"Why would anyone ever dump Eyesquit? Is she blind?"
"I know," Puffgustus agreed. "I just don't see it."
"I dumped Harmonica. I couldn't handle it. She was always singing loud and off key. Then one day I just couldn't stand it anymore so I shoved a fistfull of cigarettes in her mouth. Just a few. Just so she'd shut up. Then I felt so guilty, I lit one too. It snowballed from there. I started taking smoke breaks so I could go five minutes without hearing her disgusting voice but then she followed me everywhere. And the more she smoked, the more hoarse and raspy her vocal chords became. Her singing became even worse. I regretted it. I regretted lighting up as soon as I took that first drag but it was too late to stop. Too late to take it all back."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"Two months into it, she said she couldn't handle it," he told me. "The whole time she kept saying 'tomorrow' to me. We'll quit 'tomorrow', she'd say. Right after this cigarette. Then it was the next one and the next one and the next one. I finally put my foot down and I told her we had to quit. That it was the cigarettes or me. She promised me she would. That we'd go away somewhere and leave the cigarettes behind; live healthy lives that didn't involve extensive cardio or long-winded bouts of tabletop karaoke. Both of us. Together."
"I take it she didn't keep her promise."
He nodded his head grimly. "Cops caught her last night in a Dave and Buster's bathrooms with two cartons and a zippo." Eyesquit stifled a sob. "I asked her if she saw a future with us. Turns out she couldn't see it either."
"Sometimes people don't understand what they're signing up for when they start smoking. Not everyone has your willpower, Eyesquit. For some people, quitting it's really really hard. Like insanely difficult. Almost impossible."
"Right, of course," said Eyesquit. "But you quit anyway. That's what self preservation is. It's putting down the thing that kills you and walking away." He sighed. "I would've given it all up for her. My lighters. My menthols. Everything. But now, what's the point?" Eyesquit took another hit. No, literally, he took another hit. Puffgustus tripped him and he banged his knee on the coffee table on the way down.
Puffgustus looked over at me, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and half smiled. "I can't stop thinking about Ashtray."
"Puffgustus! You literally tripped Eyesquit."
"I just need to know what happens," he continued. "Does she get arrested? Does she get clean? Was the tobacco man a narc?"
"Valhala's balls," I said, cradling Eyesquit's bleeding head. "I think he's hemorrhaging!"
"Hazy," Puffgustus said, urgently. "Look at me." He shoved Eyesquit out of the way and into a nearby china cabinet. "You're sure he never wrote a sequel?"
"No," I told him, watching Eyesquit stumble into a nearby wall. "He moved to Cuba which makes me think he's writing a sequel featuring the Dutch Tobacco Farmer, but he hasn't published anything. He's never spotted out in public -not even to get cigars. His assistant does all his shopping and when he does get out, the press can never get a good shot because his head is surrounded by a permanent cloud of smoke." Then I suddenly realized… "Eyesquit!" I ran over to him, where he was still fumbling over the floor.
"Relax," Puffgustus said. He stepped towards Eyesquit, leaned down, and placed a cigarette in his mouth. "Feel better?" Puff asked.
"No," Eyesquit wheezed, his chest heaving as he took a drag from his cigarette. "But I can't stop."
"That's the thing about cigarettes," Puffgustus said, putting his lips to Eyesquit's filter and taking a drag. Then he glanced longingly at his cigarette. "They demand to be smoked."
