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We smoked cigarettes. We smoked cigars. We smoked pipes. We liked smoking. We liked lighting things on fire. We liked controlling the fire. We liked matches and lighters and fireworks. We liked to cut hollow reeds into short lengths and smoke them. 

We hid cigarettes in our rooms, and we hid cigarettes in each other’s rooms. We cut class to smoke. We left campus at lunch and drove around, smoking. Some afternoons, we would end up in Tijuana drinking pitchers of Margaritas and never make it back to school. 

We drank beer and whiskey and anything we could get our hands on, but we were always smoking. We would go down to the cafe by the water and spend 75 cents for a large ‘coffee of the day’ – I hated coffee, but I drank it because it made me feel like I was flying…for about twenty minutes. Then, I crashed. I often wouldn’t finish. The coffee was OK, but we loved cigarettes. 

We could also afford cigarettes. They weren’t necessarily cheap, but they weren’t that bad. You couldn’t get a sandwich for the price of a pack of smokes then. We were communists with our cigarettes. We were bums, bumming and passing out smokes like communion wafers. 

We could sit for hours, blowing smoke into the azure blue sky and watching it dissipate, wafting into indistinguishable cloud shapes. We could stand under a streetlight and send plumes up into the sick, halide glow. We could do this for hours. We did do this for hours.
We knew people with pickup trucks! We were happy to sit in the back of a truck and smoke. Kings and Queens. The smoke was our robes. The smoke-rings our crowns. Our scepters tipped in orange, shattered the night. 

I don’t smoke anymore, and it grosses me out now, but I know there was a time when cigarettes were something I needed…not the nicotine, but the process. The crutch. The thing to do with my hands. That thing that helped me not feel as anxious.
I met a lot of cool people smoking cigarettes. Some are dead now, but not all of us.