Free Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall

“is good for you!”
    Then the surgeon general put terrifying labels on each pack, and by the millennium everyone decent knew that smoking was unforgivable, like mass murder or Rush Limbaugh. My dear friend Alice Mattison twice bopped me on the face to dislodge a Kent. At first there were smoking areas in bars and restaurants, but shortly all smoking was forbidden in all public places. Guilty, grubby men and women gathered on sidewalks in front of buildings. Despite blizzards or record heat, people in johnnies stood outside hospitals, a cigarette in one hand and an IV pole in the other. Everyone huddled in shame, bending heads to conceal identity, and took deep drags of emphysema, congestive heart, high blood pressure, heart disease, COPD whatever that is, and cancers of the mouth, esophagus, and lung.
    For a moment I interrupt myself. Ah, that’s better.
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    My friend Carole smokes cigarettes, the only friend who does. When she visits we sit opposite each other, smoking and talking about death. We speak of how, when we’re driving or watching a game on TV or reading, we pick up a cigarette, light it, and inhale—in order to have
something to do
. Is it a masturbation substitution? There’s one advantage to smoking, about which we agree. When our breathing starts to vanish, we will not ask, “Why me?”
    Sentient, sensible human beings flee into the bushes when we exhale. When Linda stays with me, I step outside on the porch to smoke. (From cars passing at night I feel the horror and rage of motorists who witness the red tip of my culpability.) It puts off for a moment the agony of deprived addiction. Depraved. Something I haven’t mentioned about the benefit of cigarettes. When I am twisted by a hacking cough—which interrupts me as I read obituaries, or Ira Byock on palliative care—guess what I do to stop the coughing?
    Linda praises, with reluctance, another result of my smoking. She accompanies me on poetry readings, and says that my ravaged throat keeps my voice low and resonant. At the end of a reading, people line up for signatures; sometimes, interrupting the customers, I pretend to use the men’s room. When I was offered the Poet Laureateship I decided I must turn it down because I couldn’t smoke in the Laureate’s office; I changed my mind when I learned I could avoid the office. When I visited it, just once in my tenure, a librarian unscrewed a long window that opened onto a secure balcony. At an AWP convention—a writers’ group—eight thousand people registered at a Chicago hotel. When I walked through the lobby to lumber outside and smoke, I was assailed by four hundred emerging poets, and fled as soon as I could. If you smoked in your hotel room, the fine was seven hundred dollars. I cracked the window and smoked in the hotel room. The chambermaid did not snitch.
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    Kendel Currier is my assistant, who types my drafts and my letters, who bookkeeps, who solves my technical problems, who explains legal and financial documents, and who drives me places. Once she found a cigarette butt in the leather case that I leave for her on my porch. A misplaced cigarette had torched my revisions. “I couldn’t find it. I figured it went out.” Once when the snow melted, she harvested a bushel basket of soggy butts from the garden by the porch, which I had hurled all winter into snowdrifts. Another time, she drove me in my car all the way to New York, and I courteously opened the window to smoke. Somewhere around Springfield, Massachusetts, she told me I could not smoke in my own car. She parked and I walked up and down a gutter, inhaling relief. Kendel is kind, but Kendel is a hard case.
    I came late to cigarettes. When I was young, I smoked cigars in Exeter’s butt rooms. (All prep schools provided smoking retreats in each dormitory.) Later I smoked cigars in lecture halls when I taught, and on all social occasions. One friend told me