BOGEY AND THE SULTRY SEDUCTRESS

No, Folks, this isn’t a piece dealing with a sex-intensified movie review. In actual fact, it could hardly be more remote, as we’ll now proceed to explain.

The title should really make direct reference to the evils of tobacco use, since that’s what we’re writing about. However, had we used words along those lines, you’d probably be looking elsewhere for something to read.

Consequently, provided we haven’t lost your attention, here comes yet another essay on an already overworked topic, but with what we consider a pretty strong punch-in-the-mouth approach.

If you happen to be a heavy smoker, principally of cigarettes, in our book you stack up as not only being stupid, but further possessing no will power whatsoever. As an ex-consumer many years back of 30 to 50 fatal disease-generating objects per day, you can’t say we don’t know the score. We’ve been there, as the saying goes, right up to the brink of imminent danger.

For openers, we’ll cite a few statistics, beginning with the basic presumption that your habit adds up to one pack a day – twenty cigarettes. Since no smoker takes Sundays and holidays off from said activity, this means 7300 per annum. Let’s also say you began at age 20 and have now reached 45. Multiplying 7300 by 25 gives us 182,500. Personally, this writer finds such figure rather frightening, and potentially even more so if you’ve been indulging longer than that and at a greater consumption rate. That’s an awful lot of drawing, inhaling, and blowing out, undoubtedly supplemented by frequent coughing, not to mention an occasional chest congestion feeling. Besides, the cost hasn’t been exactly minimal.

The next point we wish to drive home with no holds barred is that you heavy smokers are indeed a bonanza for the funeral directors’ trade. The sooner you can manage to inhale yourself to death, the quicker they’ll make their money, to an early disadvantage for your surviving relatives.

On that particular score, what are your wife and children supposed to do thereafter? Blame the tobacco companies for coercing you into an excessive and deadly habit? On what truly logical basis can you deem them responsible for your untimely demise?

Did Liggett & Myers or Benson & Hedges or Philip Morris send arms-bearing thugs into your bedroom every night to hold a machine gun to your head and warn that “Either you’ll smoke (your own personal quantity) a day or we’ll come back and blow you away!”?

Of course they didn’t. They had no need to. Tobacco consumption is strictly a do-it-yourself venture.

For how many years now have you been consoling yourself with words like “Just one more won’t hurt”, as you slip yet another into your mouth and reach for the matches? How long have you laughingly said to friends “Quitting smoking is an easy matter. I’ve done it lots of times.”?

Frankly speaking, we fail to see the humor in such a remark. Why not tell jokes about people dying of cancer instead?

These wily cigarette manufacturers have already spent decades denying that their products will cause such diseases as lung or pancreatic cancer, emphysema, heart ailments, and the like. They claim the evidence isn’t sufficiently conclusive. Even though we realize they’re all damn liars, too many of you don’t seem to care. Those ridiculous warnings which adorn every pack may sway one habitué in half a million or so, but little more.

If this writer had his druthers, universal law would require that every street corner post, mailbox, office building wall, elevator, and wherever else appropriate would bear a simple 8½ by 11 two-word sign reading CIGARETTES KILL. At least this would provide an unceasing reminder, which just might bring about a few more dedicated quitters.

We often find ourselves in the company of another person who will politely ask “Do you mind if I smoke?”, to which our standard response has long been “No. Go ahead and kill yourself.” Hopefully, such remark might have helped at least one unfortunate soul to shake off a disgusting and dangerous habit.

A pertinent question which might be put to an uncontrollable cigarette addict, perhaps like yourself, is “How did your start this messy business in the first place?” Obviously, everyone has a different story to tell, so we can only cite our own personal experience, for what it might be worth.

This writer’s fateful step came at around age 15, long long before any announcements were made linking cigarettes to dire lung, heart, or other organic disease. The reasoning was simple defiance to “orders” dished out by parents in between puffs, or school teachers who would sneak off to the boiler room or somewhere else several times a day between classroom assignments, telling us to cease and desist for better health purposes.

We teenage kids found such “Don’t do as I do, but as I say” doctrines to be rather hypocritical at the very least, thus holding mighty little water.

Not only were we registering defiance to authority whose sincerity appeared highly questionable, but – and at last we’ve come back to our opening title – in our eyes, a cigarette dangling out of our mouth supposedly created a rough-hewn Humphrey Bogart image. In turn, our fellow-smoking girls considered themselves to appear as sexy hot-to-trot lasses while they puffed away.

Unfortunately, by the time we’d grown to realize that we didn’t actually look Bogartish or streetwalkerish, we’d become hooked on the habit, in most cases for too many years to come.

In this fellow’s particular case, the day finally did arrive around two decades later, when permanent cessation took place. Should any reader by interested, we’ll now render a brief description of what transpired.

The means employed more or less paralleled that which a drug addict knows as cold turkey, or a fully abrupt stop. Personally, we visualize no other suitable way.

Success was quite readily achieved, partially due to a pair of so-called blessings. The first was having a non-smoking wife who might have otherwise driven me crazy having to watch her carry on before my eyes. In addition, a close working “across the desk” every day colleague had chosen to quit himself a couple days before, and had become worried to death about having to associate with me. This proved to be a marvelous coincidence for both of us, without which the entire effort might have failed.

Punctuating the cold turkey approach with a page from the recovering alcoholic’s textbook, where the instructions are to take one day at a time, I looked forward to each occasion when a falloff would be apt to occur, in order to face the problem head on – after each meal or coffee break session, or whenever just having picked up the telephone, or upon starting an office conversation with someone, or watching an actor smoke on the TV screen, and so forth.

It worked. After two weeks following Day One, the ordeal was over. The desire had left completely, at least from the conscious mind standpoint.

However, the subconscious was yet another matter. Believe it or not, that element has never given up fully. The urge for a smoke still remains to a minor extent, but with the bodily effect greatly diminished over the long years in between. At the present time, we can estimate the lingering urge to have been reduced by roughly 99%.

The specific effects imposed on the body by the subconscious were as follows:
1. Initially, a frequent sense of numbness in all ten fingertips.
2. Then a spreading of the numbness as far up as each wrist.
3. Gradual progression of such feeling up to each elbow.
4. Waking up at least once every night during the wee hours, to find both fists tightly clenched, with both lower arm muscles extremely tense.

Stated quite simply, certain nerves and muscles were reflecting the need for a cigarette, as promulgated by the mind. How long this condition persisted isn’t recalled, but probably lasted several weeks.

Countless years later, an occasional dream occurs wherein a Lucky Strike is being held and puffed on, while this writer calmly proceeds to tell himself “I don’t smoke anymore”.

We’ve apparently arrived at a conclusion that “once hooked on tobacco, you may never succeed in scoring a 100% victory over it”. Although iron will prevailed at quitting time, and promptly achieved success in warding off the enemy, some degree of caution must always be exercised thereafter, so as not to find oneself slipping back, no matter how long the time span in between.

A while ago we watched a fairly prominent film and television actor telling Larry King about having licked the alcohol habit. One point he made remains well remembered. In order to emphasize the need to never stop being on the alert, he said “I’m four years away from my last drink, but arms length away from the next one”.

We find his words to have sound meaning, and have translated them into relative smoking habit terms by stating “I’m ump-tee-ump hears away from my last cigarette, but a single match stroke away from my next one”. We consider the potential backsliding problem that serious. The need to remain braced against sudden unexpected failure, thus reverting to supposedly forgotten bad days, appears mandatory. The subconscious is apt to play some mighty dirty tricks.