Title: from Nicotine

Author: Gregor Hens

In: Sport 40: 2012

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2014, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Prose Literature

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Sport 40: 2012

from Nicotine

page 257

from Nicotine

I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life. Every single one of those cigarettes has meant something to me. Some of them I’ve even enjoyed. I’ve smoked good, very good and lousy cigarettes, dried up, damp, some bitter, some almost sweet. At times I’ve hurriedly grabbed a smoke, other times I’ve smoked at leisure, savouring it. I’ve scrounged, stolen and smuggled cigarettes. I’ve got hold of them by stealth and by begging for them. At an airport in New York I once spent thirteen dollars on just one packet. I’ve binned half-full packs only to fish them out again and end up ruining them by running them under the tap. I’ve smoked old dog-ends, cigars, cigarillos, Indian bidis, clove ciggies, spliffs and straw. I’ve missed planes and burnt holes in my trousers and carseats. I’ve singed off my lashes and brows, fallen asleep smoking and dreamt of cigarettes, of relapses into the bad old ways, of fires, of the agonising cruelty of going cold turkey. I’ve smoked when the mercury has been at 45 and at minus 25, in libraries and in seminar rooms, on ships, on mountain- tops and on the steps of Aztec pyramids. I’ve smoked furtively in an old observatory, in basements and barns, beds and swimming-baths, on lilos and in paper-thin plastic dinghies. I’ve smoked standing on the zero meridian at Greenwich and in Fiji at 180 degrees longitude. I’ve smoked because I was hungry and because I wasn’t. I’ve smoked because I was up and I’ve smoked because I was down. Loneliness and friendship have made me smoke. So has anxiety. So has exuberance. Every cigarette that I have ever smoked has had a purpose. As a symbol. As a medicine. To lift me up or to calm me down. As a plaything, an accessory, an object of worship, a time-filler, a key to the unlocking of memories, as a way of communicating or as the subject of meditation. Sometimes it’s been all these things at once. I don’t smoke anymore but page 258 there are still moments when I can think of nothing else but cigarettes. This is one of those moments. I really shouldn’t be writing this book. It’s much too risky.

But I’m not going to let this put me off. I’m going to write about all of it and that’s without mystifying or demonising it. Because I have no regrets. Every cigarette that I have ever smoked was a good cigarette.

There are people I’d love to have a smoke with. Friends I haven’t seen for ages, artists I admire. The fact that it probably won’t happen isn’t just because of me and my decision. Most of them have given up smoking. Some are already dead. I would love to have had a smoke with my grandfather in whose huge, horny hand the cigarette always used to look so fine and fragile. He died too soon. I’m absolutely convinced that he died because they took his cigarettes away from him at the hospital he was taken to after a fall, even though he had only smoked between five and ten a day for sixty years. My grandfather was an exceedingly restrained man. When he would spend entire mornings in his kitchen at Koblenz-Pfaffendorf, a newspaper spread out in front of him so that he could sort lentils, peel potatoes or polish up the Easter eggs with a piece of bacon rind, the packet of Lux, together with the book of matches, its cover flap tucked in, used always to be lying next to him, like a promise.

It’s often been a dream of mine to have just one smoke in a museum of art history. I’ve pictured myself taking a seat on one of those huge, wooden benches, its smooth, polished surface warmed by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, in front of a hastily fashioned, stern-looking group portrait by maybe Franz Hals, and lighting up a Finas Kyriazi Frères, an untipped Middle Eastern cigarette. Sadly, it vanished from the shelves some years ago. There is no doubt in my mind that this would bring me a moment of absolute lucidity, perhaps my greatest happiness ever.

It won’t happen. I’ve given up smoking. But I can write about it, you see. Writing about it means that I can circle round, as if in orbit, the subject of my addiction, an addiction that has in itself been the subject of my life. When I do this, I find that I can immediately ask myself a few questions. How did I actually become a smoker? What was the need that drove me to it? Have the countless cigarettes in my page 259 life satisfied that need? How have I dealt with my addiction and the occasional anxiety about not being able to feed it? Was I scared of the risks? Why on earth do I think that this time I’ll make it?

I don’t need to list the reasons which led to my making the decision. Everyone knows the score. Social arguments, medical arguments. Smoking is an obsession. Overcome the obsession and you are liberated. I’ve lapsed often enough to know that I am still only at the start of the journey. So this time I’ve decided that I’m going to write my addiction out of my body by recounting its history. For the first time ever, I’m devoting all my attention to a pattern which has dominated almost my whole life and which, at times, has replaced life itself. Some of my behaviour and thought patterns, my zombie-like tendencies, I have always treated as a matter of course, have had no awareness of them at all. Only now, looking back, can I tackle them and begin to understand them.

And in doing this I’m struck by something amazing. And it’s this. I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes. With the best will in the world I just can’t say whether, when you light up, the paper really crackles like in those cinema adverts. I’ve obviously never, not even once, paid any attention to it.

From Nikotin © S. Fischer Verlag, 2011. Translation © Deborah Langton, 2011.