Butts
“Kiss me and you will see how important I am.”
I started smoking cigarettes when I was nineteen. I wish I had never started. But anorexia was knocking on the curvature of my rubber stomach once more, and I figured in the scheme of things, cigarettes trump anorexia. But I guess that depends who you ask. Growing up, I thought smoking was the most disgusting habit a person could pick up. That was before I learned about the habits of racism and misogyny and people who pick their teeth and flick the wedged particles to the floor as if it’s no big deal. If you ask me, that’s all worse than smoking. Anyway, my mind wasn’t changed on the subject until I moved to London. In London, everyone has a fag between their lips always. It’s funny, y’know, people always paint London as being this foggy, gray place. The sky completely lack lustre. But they leave out the smoke. I would sit on the park bench, watching the smoke clouds wind their way through the gravestones, and up through the emerald trees into the sparkling skies. London isn’t as gray as they want you to believe. Not like New York, at least. Not even like Paris. I guess the berets distract from the fact that the sky is the same color as the decaying Eiffel Tower. But I digress.
I’d spent most of the year battling bulimia and anorexia…again. It had been an issue when I was sixteen, but therapy and a boyfriend made the urges subside. I thought it was gone. I was good. Recovered. No one even knew aside from my doctor at first. No one knew how I loved to spend the time between National Honor Society meetings and musical rehearsal with a bag of Doritos, a pint of Americone Dream, and a packet of Jack Links before curling up on the bathroom floor with my toothbrush. No one knew and I didn’t want them to. Having a secret from my parents, my friends, even my boyfriend…it made me feel powerful. But what a terrible secret it is to keep. I think part of me was longing to just scream “I NEED HELP!” but I couldn’t manage it. I actually never did ask for help. Not verbally, at least. My parents heard the thud. They came running. Broke down the bathroom door. It was then that they knew. When they could see my porcelain ribs ripping through my tired flesh, that’s when they knew. Everything they’d been telling themselves “she’s been working out, she’s been eating right.” It crashed over them looking at my seemingly lifeless body shriveled on the floor of the shower, head cracked against the icy tub. A few puddles of vomit swirling down the drain.
The doctor at the ER told me my vitals were crashing. I was dying. After two weeks on intensive inpatient care at CHoP followed by a month in a residential facility, I emerged exhausted, but okay. And okay might not sound like much to you, but okay was the best I’d felt in years. I was sixteen then. I was just beginning.
The rest of high school passed by in blurry spurts. I measured the years in the musicals I was in. Into the Woods. Rent. Aida. They all passed without a second thought. When graduation rolled around, I seemed like a completely different person than the girl on the shower floor that night, hair matted down with blood. I was salutatorian. Heading off to school in London for a year before hitting NYC.
But when I hit London, I noticed the way the other girls’ hips were narrower. Their waists folding in in a way mine hadn’t done in years. And I started to crave it again. I craved the way the British guys would saunter over in pubs and they’d coo in those slick accents at girls I could have eaten if I allowed myself. British guys don’t want mad cow disease. And I was a mad cow.
I started shoveling hundreds of quid that I didn’t have into a gym membership, workout clothes, pre-workout, whey protein. I ate once a day. I’d wake up early, before any of my 8 flatmates. I’d make a piece of protein toast and slide a fried egg on top. Protein. Protein. Protein. I’d chug down my pre-workout and a litre of water. Jog the mile to the gym. Workout for two hours. Jog the mile back home. Chug another litre of water. Shower. Faint in the shower. Awaken on the floor of the shower. Chug another half litre of water. I’d head to class. Come home. As my flatmates would start cooking or coming home with plates of sushi from Itsu, I’d munch down three or four little chocolate laxative squares. The box clearly states to never take more than one. I’d find myself doubled over on the toilet for 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half. My roommates watched me perplexedly as I turned around and around in the mirror. Trying to pull my stomach in. Suck in my cheeks. The bags under my eyes growing heavier and darker with each piece of chocolate.
I hadn’t really made the friends I had hoped I would. In high school, I was overwhelmingly social, even in my darkest of times. An extrovert by nature, I thrived in the attention and affection of others. I felt washed up. Like a has-been. Like Carmen Electra or Tara Reid. Was I one of those girls who peaked in high school? Oh God. I wasn’t even that great in high school. I felt like I had several acquaintances. People I could go grab a quick lunch with between classes. But no one I could tell all of my deep secrets to. No one I could trust. No one who would care if I lived or died.
I was getting changed in my room one evening when my two roommates walked in. They looked at my silhouette and I watched a flick of pain flash across their faces.
“Andy, can we talk?”
It was Farrah who started it. I threw on a t-shirt and sat on my bed, assuming it had something to do my hair clogging the drain.
“Oh yeah, I’m sorry. I’ll pull my hair out of the drain, I just keep forgetting. My bad, guys.”
They looked at me confused and shook their heads. This wasn’t about my hair. Cory held up the box of laxatives. She raised her eyebrow.
“Andy, are you okay?”
It was the first time anyone had asked and actually cared about the answer. I felt the tears spilling rapidly down my cheeks. I started shaking my head violently. I wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. But Cory and Farrah were there and they changed everything.
They crushed the laxatives into powder and flushed them down the toilet. They went with me to the school counselor and even to my first psychiatrist appointment in London. They weren’t letting me go down without a fight.
In the meantime, they introduced me to weed. Now look, I’m not condoning illegal drug use or saying it’s a panacea or anything, but…it was a godsend and a total game changer for me. Food stopped being the enemy. I felt more connected to my body than I ever had before. I relaxed. I let go. In total hippie fashion, I felt utterly free with each puff of the spliff. The tobacco caused a head rush that seemed to melt me. I liked smoking the tobacco mixed with the weed, but I didn’t allow pure tobacco in me. Not yet.
When I went back home to Jersey for the summer, weed was more difficult to find than I had expected. Heroin was everywhere. Majorly rampant. Like everyone in my hometown was just absolutely doped out of their minds. I should mention that my town has an overdose frequency 7 times the national average. But even the kids who were in my AP classes now seemed glassy and edgy in the way only heroin can make you. I just wanted to smoke some weed on the beach and write some poetry, not ruin my entire life. I was longing for something between my lips again. Longing for smoke to fill and expand my lungs. Longing for fire and dead plants and flesh. My best friend since first grade, Margot, and I were sitting on the swing set in her back yard as I talked about my longing for a spliff, a joint, hell, even a saliva-soaked blunt. She shrugged and pulled a Parliament out of her pack.
“Want a cig?”
It was one of those moments where I kept hearing my DARE officer repeating “just say no.” Yeah, like that’s ever worked, Officer Farrell. I reached my hand out and took it. Swiped my thumb over the BIC and watched the little stick catch fire. I inhaled deeply, as if it were a spliff, more than I should have. I felt the smoke twist its way through my tired lungs. Margot laughed when I exhaled.
“You look hot when you smoke.”
“I do?”
She nodded and I blushed a little. I tried to nonchalantly pull my boobs up, pout my lips, run my fingers through my long brown hair. I looked hot with a fag in my mouth. I hadn’t felt hot in a long time. I bought a pack of Marlboro menthols on my way home that night.
I began to cling to the cigs for support. When 4 am would roll around and I’d be staring at the clouds on my bedroom ceiling, I’d tiptoe past my parents’ room and very carefully try not to jingle the sleigh bells on the back door. (My brother had night terrors when he was little. My mom was afraid he’d sleepwalk into traffic and die). I’d lie in the grass, letting the smoke enter me like a gentle, familiar lover. I’d watch the moon and think about how goddamn miniscule I am. I can be pseudo-deep even without a joint, apparently.
For a while, I told myself I wasn’t addicted. I just liked the aesthetic. And I did. I would put my long hair up in a bun, put on my cloak, and smoke hand rolled cigs I pulled from a simple silver cigarette case. The epitome of class. Frumpy salutatorian from Dopeville, New Jersey suddenly was a sexual commodity preying on insecure freshmen who would turn to a puddle under my thumb and call me Mommy as they finished on my lips. I’d lick them clean and light a stick, watching their eyes go soft for me. Boys are so easy.
Maybe smoking was a bit of a power trip for me the same way luring boys into my bed was. Or maybe I just had a terrible oral fixation. Either way, I continued my pattern thriving on ashed up lungs and semen. Perhaps I’m a little fucked up, but they became my two main food groups. Tar and sperm. I liked what it said about my psyche. I felt like Sylvia Plath meets Marilyn Monroe. Actually, no. I heard before that Marilyn was infamous for bad head, so not Marilyn. Maybe Joan from Mad Men. That seems like a satisfying combination of dark, depressed, morbid, slutty, sexy, and smoky to me. Of course, I’m not built like a Marilyn or a Joan anymore. Any trace of curves my flesh once possessed went flitting away with the nicotine and cum addiction. I wasn’t not eating because I didn’t want to. But the tobacco suppressed my appetite beautifully. I would eat small little meals all throughout the day and it gave me the slim angles that I craved.
But then a boy kissed me and told me I tasted like an ash tray and Virginia Woolf novels. Personally, I liked that. But I also liked him. And he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that I tasted of smoldering death and psychosis and neurosis and the macabre. That boy looked into my eyes and tore my soul out. He wanted to save me. But I didn’t think I needed to be saved. I didn’t want to be saved. But God, I loved how he tasted. Of cinnamon and Bukowski and boulders and sanity. As if he was everything my tongue had ever needed to taste, to feel, to bathe in. And I realized, I wasn’t addicted to cigarettes. I was addicted to him. I was addicted to the oxygen he breathed into my lungs when he’d shotgun a hit off the bong to me. He smoked his weed pure. And it made me feel dirty.
I chose my addiction to him over my addiction to fags. But after years of no soiled lungs and drinking his juice and inhaling his pure breath, I learned that love is a lot more deadly than lung cancer.
