Casual
Carlson, Tucker
Casual THE QUITTER By the time this appears in print I will be—my fingers freeze at the thought of typing the word—a non-smoker. Someone who doesn't smoke. A smoke-free person. The guy who used to...
...What if we collude and decide to jump off the wagon together...
...He's already lined up an entire pharmacy's worth of chemical aids: nicogum, the patch, the nicotine inhaler, and some sort of pill—"It's not an anti-depressant," he keeps telling me—that is supposed to make you want cigarettes less...
...Come on, Bobby," he coos in the most sinister possible way, "take a hit...
...The older kid looks disgusted...
...We're quitting together...
...There's nothing cool about hurting your body, I told myself...
...With two of us quitting, we can keep each other honest...
...About two months later, I had to face the horrible truth: The anti-tobacco people are lying...
...The guy who used to chain at his desk all day but doesn't anymore...
...First, I woke up the other day and realized that I've been smoking, heavily, for 17 years...
...Like the New Yorker who goes camping and brings his portable genera-I tor, VCR, and pasta maker, my brother doesn't plan to rough it...
...This time around I know I need moral support, someone to face the agony of dorkiness with me...
...I've had a wonderful time doing it, but it's getting easier to visualize what happens at the end...
...Without Camels, there's not a lot separating me from your average commercial real estate guy with a BMW and a health club membership...
...Which was probably inevitable...
...He chains through who-knows-how-many packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, and he does it with the gusto of a starving man trying to suck a milkshake through a straw...
...I'm quitting for two reasons...
...Only dopes do dope...
...On the other hand, it occurred to me recently, what if we don't...
...The older one produces a joint, lights it, and tries to pass it to the younger boy...
...Just as I'm sick of being unable to eat in certain restaurants, of being accosted by security guards for lighting up at the baggage claim, of being thrown out of bars in California for violating the state's lunatic anti-smoking laws (only one bar, actually, but it was unpleasant...
...He loves cigarettes...
...I might as well mount the StairMaster, start yapping about my tech stocks and cholesterol level, and otherwise join the Yuppie horde...
...And I'm less cool for not doing it...
...Smoking really is cool...
...The last time I quit smoking cigarettes, I did my best to empathize with Bobby...
...And he has an elaborate plan to stop smoking them...
...in deadpan mock horror) but I'm sick of using it...
...Even the most addicted smoker stops berating his loved ones after half a year or so...
...After 17 years, of course, I've got a stock response ("You've got to be kidding...
...The main problem with quitting is not the physical withdrawal...
...My brother may be the only person I know who smokes more than I do...
...I thought you were cool," he snorts...
...I need something stronger to keep me from smoking, something to blackmail myself into abstinence...
...The moral I took away from it was: Bobby is a dork...
...I no longer have the will to fight the battle...
...I'm counting on this to do the trick...
...It used to be that anti-substance abuse propaganda only steeled my resolve to pollute myself...
...Second, and more pressing, I can't take the carping anymore...
...No, says Bobby resolutely, putting up his hand...
...We are brothers, after all...
...Last week, at a single political event in New Hampshire, two different people I'd never seen came up to me, pointed at my cigarette, and said, "Don't \ you know that's bad for you...
...When I was in high school there was a much-aired public service ad that opened with two kids sitting on a playground...
...My wife is posting it on the refrigerator...
...The moral, I guess, was supposed to be that Bobby did the right thing in the face of peer pressure...
...I've turned to my brother, the one who used to do PR for Philip Morris...
...TUCKER CARLSON...
...The problem is that unlike, say, a sex-change operation, becoming a non-smoker is reversible...
...So I started again...
...I'm just going with the gum, but I think we have a good shot at succeeding...
...What I need, I've decided, is a slightly self-righteous public statement that my children could wave in my face if I ever started again...
...You're always a convenience store away from relapse...
...The dark forces of Health have won...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 22
