Butts

A personal essay by C. Duane Hague

With cigarettes as expensive as they are these days, it’s getting harder to find good butts.

Mastering the art of inhaling cigarette smoke is a prerequisite to addiction while separating the men from the boys. At least that’s the attitude I had in the fall of 1952, during my seventh grade school year in Empire, Oregon. My little brother Howard, was the one that introduced me to the joys of smoking. That is, if you want to call coughing so hard that you practically leave your lungs on the ground, a joy. But perseverance won over adversity, leaving me hopelessly addicted. Howard had been hanging with a gang of toughs who’d indoctrinated him. Smoking was way cool.

When school let out for the summer, my parents split up and we moved from Empire to Portland, Oregon with our mother. Dad, employed at Weyerhaeuser in Coos Bay, stayed behind. I could have stayed with him, but chose the larger adventure. I’d never seen a really big city, one with tall buildings and all. Unfortunately, my addiction to cigarettes accompanied me.

At least it was easier to find butts in Portland. In Empire, good butts were scarce; not that many streets and gutters to canvass. These pre-owned cigarettes were often soggy from the frequent fog and misty rain that seemed to dampen my entire life in those days of living so close to the bay. I can remember impatiently holding matches under them to hasten the drying process.

After the move to Portland, I immediately set out to find work, mowing lawns and doing odd jobs in the neighborhood. The money I was able to make mostly went to supporting my cigarette purchases. I wasn’t old enough to openly buy smokes, but was able to obtain them on the sly from cigarette machines. Besides feeding those quarter gobbling appliances, I wasn’t averse to picking up a few good butts and stashing them away for emergencies.

And then, there was the shop lifting. Shortly after enrolling in the eighth grade, I became friends with a guy who was adept at relieving Safeway of their stock of cigarettes, sometimes a full carton at a time. Believe me, being basically honest at heart, these forays into the realm of lawlessness took a lot out of me. I’d even buy cigarettes for him from my own hard earned money rather than consent to too many of these raids on Safeway; raids that coincided with bad weather and a scarcity of neighborhood jobs. Winter was a lean time for yard work, which was my primary source of income.

Now-a-days, cigarettes are getting so expensive that supermarkets are keeping them under lock and key. In fact, at the rate they’re continuing to rise in price, it wouldn’t surprise me if stores quit stocking them. Maybe banks will get into the act. Banks are good at finding innovative ways to increase their bottom line. At least banks have the capacity to provide security for valuables. I can almost see a smoker approaching a teller window, debit card in hand. “One pack of Marlboro please.” I pity the hooked generations. It won’t be long before getting a nicotine fix will be more costly than illicit drugs.

Generics are available for the more thrifty minded. But even those are ridiculously expensive. Of course, you won’t see teens smoking generics; that wouldn’t be cool. Personal observation has shown me that the most popular brands among teens are Marlboros and Camels, both upper scale brands. Unlike it was in my teenage days, underage smoking is blatantly touted. In my day, you smoked furtively and in secret. Now you can see seventh and eighth graders walking around with a cigarette tucked behind an ear, advertising the fact that they smoke and to hell with the law. Cool. Of course, enforcing such laws have been increasingly slack. I’ve never heard of a teen being busted for smoking, unless it’s pot.

I suppose that after having smoked for close to forty-five years, I should disqualify myself from being too critical of smokers. But on the other hand, perhaps it makes me uniquely qualified as someone from the trenches.

Up until the day I decided to kick the addiction, I usually purchased my smokes from an Astro service station in the neighborhood, the cheapest place around for both cigarettes and gas. Their house brand was ninety-nine cents a pack. When a huge state tax increase was added to the price, I quit. But that wasn’t the only reason.

My father died of lung cancer before reaching retirement age. He’d always smoked non-filtered Camels, two or three packs a day. From that, I imagine that you think I quit because I feared the same thing might happen to me. Not true, although I suppose it could have been at the back of my mind. No, the reason I quit was because I could no longer smoke at work. It was two hours between breaks, an intolerable amount of time for a heavy smoker. I simply got fed up with the constant craving. Twenty minutes after my break, all I could think about was my next smoke. The only way I could defeat this immutable torture was to purge my body of nicotine. It had gotten to the point where my work was suffering. I couldn’t concentrate for want of that next cigarette. I’m sure that craving cost me at least a couple of jobs. Being caught sneaking out of the building between breaks for a smoke doesn’t impress a non-smoking boss.

When that additional tax rocketed the price up by almost fifty percent, that did it. I bought the patches and I’ve been smoke free for over ten years now. When I’m tempted to fall off the wagon, all I have to do is look at the price. They’ve doubled and doubled again since I quit.

There’s really only one way to beat the high cost of cigarettes, not to mention the intolerable craving that one experiences in a constantly shrinking window of smoking opportunities.

Quit.