Nicotine Read online

  Sometimes I imagine there’s an overlay or function on Google Maps that would show me all the places I’ve ever smoked – a tiny, black flag for every cigarette, or a blue one for every self-rolled Van Nelle that I smuggled over the border into the boarding school; an orange one for the Finas, the flat, ovular, oriental cigarettes which I have to thank for some of my best literary ideas; and a red one for the filterless Pall Mall cigarettes that I bought before my first flight to America in the summer of 1982. As the flight attendant handed me the sealed bag for customs, the last doubt was dispelled from my mind that I had managed the passage into adulthood. I spent my first American night in a tiny room in the Vanderbilt YMCA on 47th Street. I turned on the ventilator because the window was welded shut and the geriatric, rattling air conditioner was overworked. I lay down fully clothed on the far too short steel-tube bed, lit one cigarette after another and stared at the small television affixed to the ceiling. I noticed too late that the ventilator had been blowing the ash out of the shallow tin dish I had balanced on my chest. I smoked until I felt sick, I hadn’t eaten anything since the inflight lunch. At three in the morning, after I’d given my window another shake, I opened the quadruple bolt lock of my bedroom door, released a swell of smoke into the dazzlingly lit corridor and took the ancient, jittery lift to the lobby. The night watchman let me out. I walked through the vacated, stinking alleyways, marvelled at the first graffiti I had seen since arriving, saw rats flit across the sidewalk, torn open rubbish bags and smouldering manhole covers. (It’s possible that a few of my memories have become interwoven with Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, which would come out a few months later.) I walked – no, I danced down deserted Fifth Avenue at the head of thirty or more zombies moving like robots and who seemed to be an extension, no, a reproduction of me, I kept breaking formation and even jumped onto the roof of a parked car until I reached the park where I gave a one-legged man a cigarette. What’s a dime? I replied when he asked me for some change. I honestly didn’t know. The worst thing about being an adult is feeling overwhelmed with embarrassment time and time again when we recall these moments in which we were so unbelievably clueless. The man hobbled and ranted after me for a while. For an hour, maybe longer, I walked through the gloomy, vacant Central Park, gladdened and agitated from jet lag and from my cigarettes. I later found out that in those days not even muggers would go wandering in the park at night out of fear of getting attacked by other muggers, sex murderers and raging crack junkies half dead with thirst. Perhaps the crack junkies were afraid of the muggers and preferred to stay home that night too. Maybe I was lucky, and out of the criminals’ fears of one another a no man’s land had opened up, a silent wasteland between the trenches, which I wandered through as if sleepwalking during a lull in combat. (The official New York statistics registered 174,833 violent crimes in 1982, including 107,842 robberies and 2,013 murders.)

  I smoked the best cigarette of my life at a lake in a former gravel quarry near the Dünnwald wild boar park – a flag belongs there too. I must have just turned eighteen. I hadn’t smoked for a few weeks, maybe due to money, and had gone on a two-day art trip to Cologne with my school class. As soon as we got out the bus in front of the Schnütgen Museum I ran off and took the tram to my father’s house. My mother’s long in the tooth steel-blue Range Rover stood in the driveway. I slipped into the house, looked in every drawer for the car keys and soon struck it lucky. I started the car and slowly drove in the direction of Leverkusen-Schlebusch, where the stunning Eliana – who I’d recently fallen in love with – lived with her parents and brother. The coast wasn’t clear at Eliana’s house yet, so about half way there I turned left onto a narrow sand track and drove through a small patch of woodland until I reached the quarry. I got out and sat on the warm bonnet of the powerful car and pulled a fresh pack out the pocket of my patched up suede jacket. I found the lighter and lit my first ever relapse cigarette, and while I released the sumptuous smoke from my mouth and nose my gaze wandered out into the distance. Even though I’d only been to the cinema three or four times, the scene I found myself in didn’t escape me. Only instead of the sublime, furrowed landscape of the American southwest lying before me, it was the lead-grey mirror of a lake in an old quarry in North Rhine-Westphalia. Two empty, battered row boats bobbed up and down in the water, a plank walkway held up with narrow stilts with a tube hanging off the end into the water like the trunk of a gigantic mosquito stuck out into the middle of the lake. I wondered what the cowboy from the cigarette adverts thought about when he looked out over the bright red mesas of Arizona. What moved him, what was going on inside his head? He didn’t have any memories, I’m sure of that. He probably didn’t even have the capability to remember. And he didn’t worry about his future, if he even had one. He only existed in this image-moment. Yes, he breathed. His breath, the two, three drags he took, were his entire existence, the viewer vicariously partook in his experience through them. You could even hear how the cinema audience inhaled when he took his first drag.

  Yes, I thought, I know this first drag… I closed my eyes and felt how the nicotine shot through my veins after the long abstinence, how it crackled in my brain like a thousand tiny explosions, I felt this magnificent firework, the titillation in my nerves, the rush of my first relapse cigarette! I sat by the quarry on my dead mother’s 4 × 4, pulled the smoke in right to the tender, inflammation-prone tips of my lungs, the dopamine flooded my mesolimbic system, and I understood that the rush of relapsing is a very special gift – much more of a reward than what I had avoided in the weeks of deprivation, much more than just a catch-up effect. Through my renunciation, through the many weeks of deferral I had saved something up and knew that an intense experience awaited me. I had earned it after all. What I had experienced – this firework – went above and beyond: it overshot all of my estimations, the cigarette at the quarry had a completely new quality. I understood that my attempt at abstinence was a kind of investment that would be paid back five or ten times over.

  What the first cigarette, the relapse cigarette, meant to me was always the last cigarette for the writer Italo Svevo. I never understood Svevo in this respect. His alter ego Zeno Cosini, a wealthy idler and incurable womanizer up to mischief in Trieste in the early nineteenth century, celebrated this last cigarette possibly a hundred times, so often in fact that he ended up using an abbreviation in his notes: LC. If the smoker sits down to (once again) enjoy his last cigarette, he is, according to Cosini, on the best path to conquer himself and to take the final steps towards a new life of health shaped by empowered action. It’s the awareness that the new, better, purer existence lies immediately before him that bestows the smoker extraordinary pleasure, giving the last cigarette its unique, especially haunting flavour. The subject gets a similar treatment in Blue in the Face, a follow-up to the aforementioned film Smoke, which includes a few lines that would be a better motto for a self-help book than the false quote by Mark Twain. Jim Jarmusch playing Bob visits his friend Auggie (Harvey Keitel) in his tobacco shop to smoke his LC with him. This is it, man, he says, and fumbles the last Lucky out of the soft pack. Adios cigarettos, Auggie replies, I am touched that you would want to smoke your last cigarette with me. Auggie knows how important this moment is in his friend’s life. Or could be – after all, they’re both aware of the statistics. Nevertheless they take a photo as a souvenir, you never know, maybe it’ll work this time. They talk about their early smoking experiences. Hollywood’s to blame for everything, Bob says, Marlon Brando and all the rest of them making smoking look so sexy. Then he voices the natural fear that not smoking after sex could be especially difficult. Auggie doesn’t understand: You’re giving up sex too because you can’t smoke afterwards?

  Unlike Bob and Cosini, I have never celebrated the last cigarette. I’ve always smoked them with a conscious disgust, in the knowledge that I’m just giving in to my inner, obviously already overcome weakness. Why am I smoking it at all, I would ask myself, this enormous endeavour, t
his immeasurable sacrifice awaits me anyway. I’ve just made a decision, the most difficult of my entire life! But doesn’t the decision itself signify a victory over addiction? Of course! If I’ve decided to do something I’ve practically done it, my resolution is the real achievement! (This is the reason it’s so absurd when a smoker, like in the statistics cited earlier, announces he could quit if he only took it upon himself to make the decision to. There’s no more perfidious a statement as: You just have to want to.)

  So, why the last cigarette? Why should I smoke it? Why should I enjoy it like Cosini? I’ve already shown how strong I am! If I’m able to renounce a lifetime of any kind of smoking pleasure, every possible cigarette, if I’ve decided this and am sure of it, why not this one too? Why, when I’ve already come to terms with this resolution long ago, do I open the rubbish bin in the kitchen and retrieve the half-empty packet that had been thrown away a few minutes ago? Why do I go into the street and beg for the last LC and – even though it’s the absolute last LC of my life – make do with a substandard straight; a straw-dry filter cigarette, a Virginia offset with a glycerine and styrene-acrylic polymer? Why do I even toy with the idea of picking up a cigarette from the cobbled pavement outside my house? This LLC is perhaps the most important cigarette of my life, the cigarette that I’ll still remember in old age long after cigarettes have become illegal: I pull it out the bin, I smoke it standing up, I smoke it in haste, unwillingly, and it stinks. I don’t know how many last cigarettes I’ve smoked in my life, but I know that I’ve felt ashamed and hated myself a little when smoking all of them.

  The current – well, the only true – LC is the only one I actually enjoyed. I didn’t know that it would be my last. Considered this way it was nothing special, it probably would have been long forgotten if I hadn’t thought about it over and over again retrospectively. I was sitting with M. and a friend visiting from Munich out front of our favourite restaurant on a summer’s evening in Berlin and, after a light dinner, I tapped the last American Spirit out the pack that I had shared with our friend. Maybe she’d forgotten her cigarettes, I can’t remember, anyway, I gladly shared it with her. When we’d smoked the pack the dinner was at an end as a matter of course. It wasn’t necessary to initiate a farewell by referring in some way to all the work we had to do the following day. On the way home M. said: I was just about to start again. I felt so left out, I had such a longing afterwards to share this pack with the both of you. Yes, I say, I can understand that. That’s terrible. I’m going to stop. Right now. M., who must have immediately sensed how serious I was, smiled and nodded and didn’t say a word. I thought of my father, of his incessant insinuations about weaknesses and smiled too. When we were in the apartment I began my often-practised ritual: I threw away ashtrays and lighters and threw open the window. I removed everything that reminded me of cigarettes from my apartment and out of my life. When it was done, I tied up the rubbish bag and took it downstairs. I was dog-tired, utterly exhausted. When we turned out the light at eleven thirty I fell straight to sleep.

  The decision that ultimately allowed me to write this book, at least the final chapter, from the point of view of a victor may have been spontaneous, but it was preceded by a long phase of decision-making, or rather decision-fixing: I knew that I would have to stop at some point. I had known it since the Thai girl gave me a light in the bar. On a number of occasions I’d managed not to smoke for months or even years at a time, and I remembered very clearly how good I felt as a non-smoker. Which is why at no point in my final, almost manic smoking phase did I believe that I would go through life as a smoker and grow old a smoker and die – most probably through smoking – a smoker.

  My decision was less down to the fear of an early death (what, after all, is too early?), and a lot more to do with the immediate worry about my quality of life. I wasn’t doing well. I wanted to be back out there, back in the mountains, but suffered with my shortness of breath. On top of this I couldn’t forget the strange mixture of sadness, disgust and horror in the eyes of a friend of mine while she sketched out in very few words her mother’s battle with cancer and her final weeks of agony. My fear of an agonising death has always been far greater than the fear of death.

  It was therefore only a question of time, I just had to get used to the resolution and find the right moment to take the plunge. In the meantime I’ve come to realize why this (spontaneous) attempt was successful. First, I found the notion that M. could start smoking again because of me absolutely unbearable. It was also very apparent that I would have practically no chance of quitting if she started smoking again. We would have re-established our co-addiction and would have possibly had a long, long wait for the right time for us both to be ready for another attempt. Secondly the pack had just become empty, the last cigarette had been smoked in an extremely pleasant setting, in a friendly atmosphere, in the best of Berlin’s summer weather. I had smoked the LC without knowing it. I hadn’t celebrated it, and that also meant that I didn’t build up or inflate my addiction. In this moment and in the days that followed I considered it less significant than it actually was, in fact I almost ignored it. (With the distance that I’ve won, I now do the opposite: I think about it every day, I seek out the memories, it all flashes before my eyes. I’m only able to write this book by admitting that this addiction was a dominating factor in my life. I’m only able to make this admission, in turn, because it no longer dominates me.)

  The third and perhaps most decisive factor has to have been the time, or rather the timing. Namely, I smoked the final cigarette without planning it, just at the right time of day – around ten o’clock in the evening. Sleep is what helps get you through the first and most difficult phase of withdrawal. If I’d smoked the last cigarette an hour earlier the withdrawal would have kicked in before sleep and I would have spent the night rolling to and fro in bed sweating and aching. Or I would have relapsed before sleeping like Cosini. If I had smoked the last cigarette right before sleeping I would have woken the next day with the feeling that I’d not yet achieved anything. But if I had invested nothing in this attempt, I would have probably not resisted the temptation of the first cigarette. If it hadn’t cost me any effort, one cigarette, one day, one pack, wouldn’t have mattered so much.

  Fourth and lastly, I benefitted from experience: I’d quit smoking often enough, I knew what I had to do. M. and I had our agreement: for a long time the subject of smoking was taboo, which I felt would be for the best. In addition to this I rearranged my habits, especially my eating habits and indulgences, and took up sport again on day one. I drank tea instead of coffee and went without newspapers and alcohol for a few months. Already after three days I felt my condition improving. I breathed deeper and easier while I simultaneously raised my running speed and heartbeat step for step, and over a timeframe of six weeks I’d conquered two of Berlin’s rubble mountains, the flak towers in Humboldthain, the parliamentary district, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt on the Spree, the Tiergarten up to the overground station, and finally the Salzufer strip and the grounds of the Charlottenburg Palace on my runs, and integrated them into my routine.

  Have I succeeded? No. Because the first cigarette, the cigarette with which I smoke to break the fast, the one I end the long withdrawal with every time, always had a far greater significance for me than Cosini’s beloved LC, praised endlessly by him over the course of long chapters. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been in danger of relapsing, I ultimately know what awaits me should I fail. I know that I would be rewarded for my weakness a hundred fold. The first cigarette not only offsets the deficit, it brings back a moment in my life that made the greatest impression on me – the moment of absolute presence of mind that I experienced back then at the quarry, a brighter high informed by sharpness, clarity and mindfulness. When I smoke the first cigarette – and I always smoke it alone – it’s as if I can look inside my own brain, as if I can discover every thought in its formation, every thrill in a neural pathway, every synaptic leap, every sem
inal feeling developing from my thoughts.

  It would have been much better for my health and my wallet if I were to understand the matter of my own, eternal struggle with addiction the way Zeno Cosini does. Right? Those who celebrate the last cigarette like a fetish object ultimately always have a reason to quit, as the right to have the last cigarette is only earned by those who really intend to stop. I can’t enjoy a cigarette as the LC if I know that I won’t see it through. Maybe it’s happened once or twice that I’ve fallen for my own lie, but I soon lose faith in myself. Only those who believe themselves in that decisive moment can really enjoy the last cigarette as the last and best of their life. Smokers tend to be apt at deception, but self-deception seldom goes far enough for someone who isn’t seriously willing to quit to indulge in this last cigarette and enjoy this last cigarette like Zeno Cosini.

  Those, like me, who love the first cigarette above all others, always have a reason to start again. Naturally one has to have quit first. But those who only forgo smoking because the first cigarette winks at them like a reward won’t last long and they therefore put themselves in a position where they will relapse as soon as possible for the true reward. The first cigarette tastes better the longer the abstinence has lasted. Naturally, Zeno must have also started smoking again to enjoy his final cigarette. Only the first LC is not preceded by a relapse. (When we meet the somewhat mellow hero Cosini in Svevo’s novel, he’s already highly experienced in relapsing). It is this first LC more than any other that Cosini enjoys with the intention of conquering his addiction once and for all, and which he smokes long before the novel’s action begins. He still believes in himself, maybe he’s not aware of even the possibility of relapsing in this moment. In this sense this first LC is the best of his life, even if the victory that Cosini had carried out against himself (fancied he carried out) didn’t have to be fought very hard. Only those who have relapsed a few times truly know how powerful their addiction is.