Demons
By: Bender Bender
Tags: Memoir, Asia, Habits, Education, Smoking

Part 1

I tried something new this school year and assigned Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 breakout hit Fight Club as the novel for the first semester reading assignment. I picked it because it’s short, punchy, there’s an excellent film adaptation and it’s just lewd enough to attract teenage attention without getting me fired.

I honestly hadn’t read it since a friend loaned me a worn paperback edition back in 2001, but remember loving it. All us boys loved it.

What I’d forgotten about Fight Club is:

a) It is lewd enough to get me fired,

b) The ideas are cool, but the book itself is not very well-written,

c) Palahniuk’s stream-of-consciousness minimalism gets annoying after just a few pages. Re-reading Fight Club made me flash back to the Palahniuk spree I went on after 2001 with Survivor, Choke and Lullaby and being more disappointed with each one. I imagine him sitting down in front of a typewriter and writing You sit down in front of a typewriter. You write the words “You sit down in front of a typewriter…” etc.

d) Someone left a copy of Palahniuk’s attempt at non-fiction called Stranger Than Fiction on the bar at a restaurant I was working at in 2006 and, just a few pages in during a break, I decided I wasn’t going to read anything by Chuck Palahniuk anymore.

Luckily, my students (especially the boys) loved it. Some response essays contained gems like, “After reading Fight Club I wonder why I’m wasting time at school and not out living my life,” and “The purpose of marketing is to distract us from what’s really important in life.” Deep thoughts, although I would like more specificity on what it means to “live my life” — when are you not living your life? — it was cool to see them genuinely engaged with a text. And while nobody dropped out to go “live their life,” the rate of unexcused absences went up. I’m almost positive nobody got punched, but a few boys started coming in smelling like cigarettes.

If you’re familiar with the film version, all three of the main characters are constantly chuffing cigarettes as they live their lives and beat the crap out of each other. Edward Norton is phenomenal as the unnamed Narrator and Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden is the pinnacle of cool as he sucks down a cigarette and lectures Norton on how “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world” which, admittedly, is a good line.

Brad Pitt being a badass

Helena Bonham Carter in her most iconic shot from the film

Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the character of Marla Singer, smoked so many cigarettes that she came down with a case of bronchitis after six months of filming.

It’s easy to point out the irony: Socialist rebels spending their cash on Big Tobacco, or the fun fact that there’s a Starbucks cup in every scene.

My bigger concern, though, was that my kids were smoking.

Because they thought it was cool. And it was kind of my fault.

I had my first cigarette in sixth grade, at age 12, but started smoking in earnest when I hit high school. Fight Club didn’t exist yet, but smoking was ubiquitous until the 21st century. Even before we were old enough to buy them I remember conversations going late into the night with friends over countless cups of coffee and packs of Marlboro Reds in the dining areas of the Denny’s and Waffle House restaurants that peppered our town.

Even now I’ll quit for years at a time and then bum one in a weak moment at a bar or a party. Then I won’t have one for awhile. Then I will. I’ve got a pretty good balance now, but it took a long time to get here. And while I have fond memories of smoke breaks with my father (before he died of lung cancer) and still enjoy the social aspect of smoking, the intention required when you step outside with one person or a small group of strangers for five minutes, these are accompanied by a vague sense of dread that this is the smoke that will kick the old habit back into action. The hard truth is that you never really quit. You just stop doing it for awhile. And then you do. And then you don’t. And a part of me wishes the demon had never taken hold in the first place.

Part 2

Vinnie preferred to be called Vincent, but we called him Vinnie anyway.

It made us feel cooler by association, and there was no doubt Vinnie was the coolest kid in our group of friends. His dad let him drink beer on the weekend. He was in sixth grade but was already 13 because he’d been held back a year. He claimed to have fingered a girl on the back seat of the bus. Hanging out with Vinnie, I saw the third Playboy and the first handgun of my life. When he asked me to skip fourth period and go smoke a cigarette in the bathroom, I went with him because, hey, what could go wrong. We skipped class, smoked, and I got to brag about it in my fifth period Algebra class. It was also the day I realized those cigarettes my parents had been smoking since long before I was born were pretty tasty, and could earn me some brownie points with the cool kids if I learned how to get my hands on some of them.

The first few months of developing my new lifelong habit were fun.

I grew up in south Florida and had a friend named Kevin who lived in an area known as “The Acreage,” an expanse of land on which the paved highway petered out and dirt roads spiraled to the left and right. From there, the dirt roads crisscrossed in a grid pattern, some of the grids with houses, some with larger compounds on them and some left undeveloped, full of scrub pines and creeper vines.

Going beyond The Acreage gets you into Loxahatchee.

Beyond that is The Everglades.

This is the actual setting of Susan Orleans’s The Orchid Thief.

Kevin’s dad smoked three packs a day and is almost definitely dead now, too. Marlboro Light 100’s were his brand. Kevin would steal a few and we’d meet up out in the scrub to smoke. I figured out where my parents kept their cartons (also Marlboro Light, but not the 100 kind) and that if I stole a whole pack they’d just blame each other and never think I was the one who took it.

I have one very specific memory of making a 45-minute trek on my bike to meet up with Kevin, sitting on a wet log and slapping mosquitos, cigarette smoke curling up into the canopy of scrub as the sun went down. Three years later I’d going to high school in South Carolina while Kevin was getting addicted to Ketamine and crystal meth like people did back then.

My Dad moved to South Carolina a year before we did to set up his business, a stucco company called Hobbit Plastering that he’d inherited from his father. Family legend is that grandpa didn’t want to take a day off work and sent my old man down to the registration office with three names to put on the application: Sunshine Plastering, Palmetto Plastering and Rainbow Plastering. Dad wrote down the first two and paused on rainbow, then wrote down Hobbit Plastering because he kept a copy of the book floating around in his truck to peruse over on lunch breaks or while waiting for delivery trucks. Sunshine and Palmetto were already taken by other shops, so the company was called Hobbit Plastering from that day until 2001 when “some lawyer out in California” reached out to strongly suggest dad change the name before the Lord of the Rings movies started hitting theaters.

He changed it to Ye Olde Stucco Shop, which everyone thought was lame, but it stayed that way until his death.

When the rest of my family moved up to meet him in South Carolina he put me to work and said I could bum cigarettes from his pack as long as I didn’t tell mom about it. I’d take a few extra to share with the skaters who hung out in the Taco Bell parking lot and the whole making friends with cool kids using cigarettes worked again. I was on and off at school — cutting classes, road trips on a shoestring budget and a six-month stint where I thought my shitty band would “make it” and I’d never have to work again — when dad offered to sponsor me one semester of community college, telling me Get a job using your mind. Don’t fuck up like I did, which is on my top five list of best advice ever.

I quit smoking because I fell in love with a non-smoker, started again when I lived in New York City because of a Tom Waits fascination, and eventually joined the international school system and moved to Asia where the acceptance of people smoking is comparable to America in the 1990’s in that a few of the fancier places won’t let you do it inside but pretty much everywhere else is fair game.

In Korea, women hold their cigarettes with disposable wooden chopsticks so their fingers won’t stink.

I lived there for about a year before I heard the news that dad had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and wouldn’t be alive for more than another few months. In Vietnam, cigarettes are $1/pack and cheapo brands like Craven and 555 sizzle because the companies put gunpowder in them so they’ll burn faster. I had a girlfriend there who didn’t like the idea of me smoking but let me do it anyway, so whatever.

I currently live in China where the percentage of older men who smoke is around 80%. It’s becoming popular with young women, too, although most of them that I’ve seen forego the chopsticks and raw dog it with their fingers like bad bitches.

I’ve mostly kicked the habit, for the most part (mostly), but when I’m a few beers in after dinner like I am right now I start thinking about the little tobacco shop next door that carries the brand I like, about the pretty girl who works there, about her family who sits around behind the counter playing cards and drinking tea, about how nice it is to support local businesses and my blood starts humming, thinking Maybe just one pack. Maybe not. Maybe.

Like a bad habit, a piece of writing is never truly finished with you. In the case of this piece, I’d like to end by returning to my students who are, in all honesty, probably feeling pretty cool right now. I’m sorry.

You now have a demon. You have been possessed.

I apologize on behalf of myself, Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Big Tobacco, the shopkeeper who probably knows you’re underage. If we can take one thing away from this it’s that things like the state of your health, your finances, and how you spend your free time are ultimately up to you.

People who say “Don’t smoke. Save your money. Don’t waste your free time” say so because they love you, but can’t make you do any of those things.

You can fuck up for half of your life before you decide to take it seriously.

My dad never did and I’m only sort of doing a bit better than him.

But: Don’t smoke. Save your money. Don’t waste your free time. I love you.