Wanting to Smoke

I want to smoke.

No, really. I want to smoke. Light up clumsily (the opposable thumbs gene seems to have skipped me - my comically flat thumbs are useful for thumping tacks into boards. But using a cigarette lighter without looking like a complete muppet? Darwinistic fail). Inhale through my nose (I still can't really inhale properly. Asthma). Flick off ash and stare darkly into the abyss.

OK, so there's no abyss close by. Just empty parking spaces outside the church, showing that the God-fearing folk of small-town Sweden are on holiday, worshipping the sun rather the son of God.

But I've hardly been drinking, I've been doing all sorts of healthy things AND I'm on a boy-detox. I guess they're all subject to revision. When or if my gut feeling changes. But at the moment, I'm flailing around for a vice. And my brain has latched on to smoking.

Books aren't helping. BOTH the books I was reading last night ("Christine Falls" by John Banville writing as Benjamin Black and "The Confession of Max Tivoli" by Andrew Sean Greer) INSIST on using smoking as a device to show young female characters coming in to their own. Potentially disappointed by life. But coming in to their own. And while it SORT OF works, and makes all sorts of Freudian sense (while reminding me of wanting to smoke), it still strikes me as a really superficial way of dealing with female characters. "She's smoking. She's sexually aware, rebellious but wary. Look at her mouth. Ingesting smoke. Like the world. Empty."

But really, all those film noire-y stereotypes of the wounded-but-tough Betty Bacall Dame aren't AT ALL what interests me about women smoking. Women smoking make me think of my mom, who gave up smoking because my father disliked it but still, forty years later, longs for cigarettes and the day when her doctor gives her the go-ahead to chimney it up. I like the "bad mother" jokes surrounding a family friend, who's first photo with her newborn baby, now a balding thirty- something photographer, proudly showed her smoking Marlboro Reds. It reminds me of desperate missions across the Chinese border to Macau, where I'd stand in line for hours at the crossing, only to get hold of the cigarillos I smoked and loved.

Cigarillos. Small, brown and unhealthy. Not entirely unlike me. Sat in my favourite pub, in England, so ridiculously long ago I really shouldn't remember it with clarity. "Fitzsimmons, you love staring at the smoke from those things, don't you?" the then-love-of-my-life asked me.

(He gets me, he really, really gets me, I thought.)

Not even giddy, because that understanding was something I thought I'd somehow deserved, that I'd always have, I grinned. Impishly. Lifted my half-drunk pint of ale. "The Old Speckled Hen". Finest beer in the universe - I'd tested many, never found one quite like it. Left hand holding cigarillo, always-surprisingly-pretty smoke coiling upwards, outwards, elsewards. "Why can't you smoke cigarettes, like other girls? You look like a damn gangster smoking those things." My face must have melted with shock, quickly covered by a smile that fooled neither of us. "Well, I like them," I said. He 'got' me, allright.

I'm sure his new girlfriend doesn't smoke at all. Definitely not cigarillos.

Am not sure that this boy-booze-caffeine detox is making me a more zen and sane person. Just had visions of myself grinding out half-smoked Marlboro Lights on a filthy sidewalk with dirty, un-pedicured feet. Dancing and laughing and doing 'The Twist' to music only i hear. Sticking it to the man, cigarette-style.

Shit like that never makes it in to novels by the stylistically savvy.