Nicotine Read online

  I said at the outset that the very repetitive nature of smoking calls forth anecdotage – but really it’s more profound than that. Rather, it’s the way a smoking habit is constituted by innumerable such little incidents – or ‘scenes’ – strung together along a lifeline, that makes the whole schmozzle so irresistible to the novelist. Gregor Hens believes his very authorial persona was forged in the crucible of his emergent addiction, for, on experiencing his first nicotine rush: ‘I became myself for the very first time.’ And the sort of self he became was a writerly one: ‘I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. In this way, I was offered for the first time an experience that was communicable. This is precisely why I can remember this night with such wholeness, precisely why I can write it in this form.’ Hens puts it all down to the drug itself, but for me this is secondary – perhaps because I’ve taken so many other, more egregious drugs. In my case it’s the juxtaposition between a diachronic and an episodic sense of self that smoking affords, which makes it so very hard to let go of. Am I the same person as that child, leaning out of the Crittall window of a semi, the smoke from his No. 6 blooming in the suburban night? Or was he somebody else altogether? Every time I spark one up, I’m invited to consider the relationship between all of my smoking selves: are we a unitary being, or merely disparate characters striking many different attitudes? Am I reborn each time I smoke – a fag-wielding phoenix? Or, like a dormant seed germinated by fire, is there only one essential me, who, au fond will always be smoking?

  On the last day of June 2007 I ate with my friend, the artist Jon Wealleans, at St John’s restaurant in Spitalfields. After the plates had been cleared but before the coffee arrived, I offered Jon one of my two remaining Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robustos. We lit up, and soon a great writhing cloud of smoke swirled about our table. None of the other diners – for all that they weren’t smoking themselves – made any objection. The ban on smoking in public buildings in England was still three hours in the future. Nowadays I tell anyone who’ll stand still long enough to listen that the increasing prohibitions – legal, social, cultural – on smoking are nothing but a good thing – I barely smoke cigars at all anymore, since the context within which it was pleasing to smoke them has entirely dispersed. My piping is no longer Pan-like since Dunhill stopped selling its superb hand-blended tobaccos. Nor do I smoke many cigarettes, since none of my narcissistic puffing selves likes this image: loitering about by wheelie-bins in alleys, whey-faced and vampiric, hanging on to a fag unto grim death. For the past eight years I’ve more or less rigorously ‘controlled’ my smoking, interpolating scenes from my smoking life with others from my ruminant one. I chew nicotine gum – I even became obsessed enough with snus, the little teabags of snuff you see bulging beneath the lips of Scandinavian TV detectives, to invest in a miniature fridge so I could keep the beastly stuff fresh. I absolutely accept that once the number of non-smokers exceeds that of smokers, the game – such as it was – is up. What resentment I may feel towards governments who trumpet their public health ‘victories’, even as their economic policies drive thousands into poverty-induced sickness, is emphatically besides the point. In lieu of pursuing my obsession with tobacco, driven on by the hounds of my nicotine addiction, I have focussed my energies on this ‘control’, and rolling with Allen Carr and Arthur Schopenhauer, settled for temporary relief in place of true abandonment.

  The only thing I want for in this strange liminal realm, in which every time I stub out a cigarette I swear it’s my last, is someone to talk to about it; and not just idly chat, but intensely recall, debate and rhapsodise my relationship with La Diva Nicotina. The problem is that like the man in the park, they just won’t stand for it, having long since packed smoking in themselves, never smoked at all, or because they are still shamefacedly puffing. Which is why Gregor Hens’s essay is such a delight, for here we have a writer who’s prepared to really indulge his habit in the only way that matters: on the page. Here we have an ex-smoker who absolutely understands that au fond he will always be smoking – moreover, Hens is unafraid to pull the severed horse’s head of habituation from the waters of Lethe, and anatomise the eels that writhe from its mouth, nostrils and eye sockets. Personally, I love eels – especially when they’re smoked. The act of reading is always a dialogue between reader and writer, and in Hens I have found my ideal interlocutor, which is a great relief to me, because for the committed smoker there’s only one thing worse than not being able to smoke, and that’s not being able to talk about it.

  Will Self, London, 2015

  ‘Negating an act is somehow similar to changing the direction of a moving body. A break, a zero velocity, is necessary in between switching from one to the other.’

  — Moshé Feldenkrais

  NICOTINE

  I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me. I even enjoyed a few of them. I’ve smoked OK, great and terrible cigarettes; I’ve smoked dry and moist, aromatic and almost sweet cigarettes. I’ve smoked hastily, and other times slowly and with pleasure. I’ve scrounged, stolen and smuggled cigarettes, I’ve obtained them by devious means and I’ve begged for them. I once paid thirteen dollars for a pack at a New York airport. I’ve thrown out half-full packs only to fish them back out of the rubbish to render them useless once and for all under the tap. I’ve smoked cold cigarette butts, cigars, cigarillos, bidis, kreteks, spliffs and straw. I’ve missed flights because of cigarettes and burnt holes in trousers and car seats. I’ve singed my eyelashes and eyebrows, fallen asleep while smoking and dreamt of cigarettes – of relapses and flames and bitter withdrawal. I’ve smoked in over 45 degree heat and in minus 25 cold, in libraries and seminar rooms, on ships and mountain tops, on the steps of Aztec pyramids, furtively in an old observatory, in basements and barns and beds and swimming pools, on air mattresses and in thin-hulled rubber dinghies, on the prime meridian in Greenwich and the 180th meridian in Fiji. I’ve smoked because I was full and I’ve smoked because I was hungry. I’ve smoked because I was glad and I’ve smoked because I was depressed. I’ve smoked out of loneliness and out of friendship, out of fear and out of exuberance. Every cigarette that I’ve ever smoked served a purpose – they were a signal, medication, a stimulant or a sedative, they were a plaything, an accessory, a fetish object, something to help pass the time, a memory aid, a communication tool or an object of meditation. Sometimes they were all of these things at once. I no longer smoke, but there are still moments when I can think of nothing but cigarettes. This is one of those moments. I really shouldn’t be writing this book. It’s too much of a risk.

  But I won’t be deterred. I will write about it all, without mystifying or demonising it. I regret nothing. Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked was a good cigarette.

  There are people I’d really like to smoke a cigarette with: friends I haven’t seen for a long time, artists I admire. That this won’t come to pass isn’t solely down to me and my resolution. Most of them don’t smoke anymore. Some of them are already dead. I’d have liked to have smoked with my grandfather, whose huge, calloused hands always made the cigarette look so thin and fragile. He died too soon. I’m convinced that he died because his cigarettes were taken away from him when he was admitted to hospital after a fall, even if he only smoked five to ten a day for sixty years. My grandfather was an extremely restrained man. When, on occasion, he spent the whole morning sitting in his kitchen in Koblenz-Pfaffendorf sorting lentils or peeling potatoes or polishing eggs dyed bright colours for Easter on a laid out newspaper with a piece of bacon rind to stop them going bad, the pack of Lux with the matchbook hidden inside lay beside him like a promise.

  I often dreamt of smoking in an art museum. I imagined how I would sit on one of those smooth, solid wood benches already warmed by the obliquely angled afternoon sun in front of a quickly painted and austere group portrait by Frans Hals, for instance, and light up a Finas Kyriazi F
rères, a filterless oriental cigarette that sadly vanished from the market a few years ago. I’ve no doubt that this would be a moment of absolute clarity, perhaps my greatest moment of happiness.

  This will never happen. I no longer smoke. But I can write about it. And as I circle the subject of my addiction – a central theme in my life – through writing, I might as well ask myself a few questions: How did I become a smoker? What was it that I needed? Did the countless cigarettes I smoked throughout the course of my life satisfy this need? How did I deal with my addiction alongside the occasional fear of not being able to control it? Was I not afraid of the risks?

  There’s no need for me to set out my reasons for quitting. Everyone knows the arguments, the social and the medical. Smoking is a compulsive behaviour. He who conquers his urges gains his freedom. I’ve failed often enough to know that I’m right at the beginning. I’ve decided that this time I’ll write my way out of my addiction by telling its story. I’m devoting my undivided attention to a structure that governed nearly my entire life and that at certain times I actually mistook for being life. I took many of my patterns of behaviour, automatisms and thought processes for granted, I never even noticed them. It’s only now in retrospect that I can engage with them and begin to make sense of them.

  Something staggering occurs to me: I’ve smoked over a hundred thousand cigarettes and with the best of intentions cannot say whether the paper crackles when you light one like in the old cinema adverts. I’ve never noticed, not once.

  A service station on the A1 somewhere in Westphalia, Germany, in the mid-nineties. A blue and white petrol station, the roar of motors and the blare of tyres behind dusty West German thorn bushes. I’ve parked my car and I’m waiting for my brother to take me to Delmenhorst where our great aunt lived – a woman whose retirement terms included a century-long cigarette allowance, irrespective of whether she was still alive to receive it.

  A Danish haulage lorry rolls to a standstill, the hydraulics hiss. The driver is wearing pleat-fronted trousers and a light-coloured plaid shirt. He appears fresh, you could even say athletic. I sit in front of the shop on a stack of shrink-wrapped firewood, drinking coffee out of a paper cup and looking up into the matt sky. I don’t know what to do with the swizzle stick. The Dane comes over, stands next to me and lights up a Gauloises red. He offers me one wordlessly. I point to the petrol pumps with the stirrer. Too close, I say in German. Then: Too close. Boom. He laughs. A silver-grey Maserati pulls up in front of us. The side window lowers, my brother pushes up his glasses and asks: Been waiting long? I nod to the Dane and walk around the low car. Boom, he repeats, grinning and miming an explosion with his hands. Like an exotic flower blossoming in time-lapse, I think, like a New Year’s Eve firework. I steady myself, duck my head in, slide into the bucket seat. Stefan looks sceptically at the Dane and then at my paper cup. He doesn’t like it when I drink in the car. My father was the same. Stefan pulls away. We don’t talk a lot. We smoke, and sometimes Stefan says something like: I don’t think she was lonely. Or: Did you know she still went on booze cruises to Heligoland? They are merciful sentences, sentences that I don’t have to respond to. They pulsate for a while afterwards before they’re drowned out by the sound of the Autobahn, the deep drone of the twelve cylinders. She had made it to eighty-two.

  Shortly before we reach Bremen we leave the Autobahn. My brother steers assuredly through the area, he still knows his way around. He’s four years older than I am and can remember it more clearly. There’s the shopping centre, he says, do you remember? And that’s the way to the place where we ate kale and pinkel sausage. I try to imagine what I would have seen, what I would have noticed, if I had been a bit older at the time. Once a year on a Saturday afternoon in January, our aunt would pay for the whole family to eat at the best restaurant in Bremen. There was kale and greasy, corned sausages, iced schnapps. I recall wooden benches with padded cushions, thick, rug-like tablecloths, waitresses who would ask disbelievingly if I had finished it all by myself.

  We drive past a school. I recognize the red clinker façade, the white railings, and the sports field with its modest stands comprised of six staggered rows of benches. The images are evidently still stored in my brain, somewhere. I remember that children would be running around the playground when we came to visit at the start of the summer. Their holidays began later. They must have seemed very strange to me, as if they lived in another country, in a different time zone. Who were these children behind the railings? Did we speak the same language?

  We turn into the residential estate as the wind speeds in the Baltic and North Seas are reeled off on the radio. The estate is composed of white bungalows tucked away behind tall hedgerows and bushes that shimmer with a silvery sheen. A boy on a BMX rides straight at us, pulling off a casual, one-handed swerve at the last moment. The driveway’s clear. Stefan drives across the ramshackle flagstones right up to the garage door, which has a dent in it. Aunt Anna sold her car immediately after the accident, she never drove again. She had been wearing the wrong shoes, the clutch had slipped beneath her smooth Jackie Kennedy pumps. The car must have sprung against the garage door in a single jump, like a hop toad. She’d only had the dent painted over – why hadn’t she had it repaired? That wasn’t her style.

  A middle-aged woman stands in the doorway. She’s wearing pink marbled glasses that are far too big for her face, and a fur coat is draped over her arm and pressed to her chest as if she were afraid someone might take it away from her. She seems tense, nervous, who knows how long she’s been waiting. We get out of the car. Stefan speaks with her. The woman talks at him insistently in rapid, clipped sentences. I light a cigarette and take a look around the garden. When the house was first built my great aunt had a swing installed, even though we only visited for one, two weeks a year at that. For the other fifty weeks the swing was a visible sign that something was missing in this house.

  The woman hands Stefan a set of keys and a note with her telephone number on it. Have you got thirty marks? my brother asks. She takes the money that Aunt Anna owed her, gives thanks with a short nod and walks down the drive. She was the cleaner, my brother said, sometimes she played rummy with Aunt Anna. She was the one who called the ambulance. Fräulein Meyer, Stefan says, first she called her Fräulein Meyer, then suddenly her Aunt Annie. I don’t believe for a second that our aunt really left her that coat.

  Aunt Anna’s house seems to have barely changed.

  It has been nigh on twenty years since I’ve last been here. A walking frame stands in front of the bedroom. The mottled, dark red accordion door that leads to the kitchen is closed. The fan heater whirrs quietly. I can’t find the light switch. I feel my way around the living room and pull back a curtain. The room remains dim, the bushes in front of the terrace haven’t been trimmed in a while. Armchairs – heavy, practically immovable armchairs with lace covers, armrests wide enough to rest a crystal ashtray on. Armchairs like this always make me think of Deng Xiaoping.

  This is where we would often sit and watch Spiel ohne Grenzen – the West German It’s a Knockout – and listen to shellac records, which would fall with a clatter from the arm of the record changer, on the sound system housed in a shiny, polished cherrywood cabinet. Aunt Anna knitted colourful acrylic blankets that nobody wanted because they didn’t actually warm you up in the winter. The house smelled of chicken and omelette soup, smoke and carpet cleaner. The TV was always on. When the terrace doors were open in the summer and a lighter, cooler breeze came in, the Chinese lantern she had brought back from Hong Kong would tinkle above the dining table.

  Fresh, balmy peat dug up from the surrounding land was heaped onto the beetroot plants, bushes and the bases of the trees. I knew from my aunt’s stories that directly behind the school, immediately beyond the limits of the town, was a mystical place populated by peat diggers and bog mummies. Out there, my young brain imagined, it was teeming with the eternally restless undead, ditch wardens, feral spirits and doppelgängers. Out there
beyond the town the peat diggers uncover the skeletons of entire chain gangs, the tiny bodies of unwanted children, the corpses of abortions, bastards and mongoloids. In the morning the gangs move out to the bog to work. Digging beneath the searing sun, home is what we yearn for.

  On the off-white walls of the living room’s vestibule hang mounted and framed – in some instances, gold-framed – photos of work meetings and office parties. In a few of them Fräulein Meyer is alone, and in others as part of a larger group including the chief executive of Brinkmann Inc. Sitting on top of the TV – a Grundig – are several photos of my mother. I tread on the grating for the underfloor heating, listening to its peculiar, resonant rattle and think about all the Lego bricks, marbles and dice I’ve lost down the duct. Stefan stands in the bedroom in front of the secretaire, he’s pulled out drawers, dug out paperwork. With his left hand stuck in his trouser pocket he casually leafs through a small stack of bank statements and correspondences, standing there like he just wants a quick look at the post after a long day at work. He’s looking for a provision order, instructions for the funeral, he explains. Hadn’t she already bought a grave plot, picked a coffin and chosen suitable flowers? If we don’t find anything, he says, we’ll have a cremation. What do you think? Fine with me, I say. Stefan taps off his ash in a pewter plate depicting the statue of Roland of Bremen, as if sealing the deal.