A Smoker's Lament in a Zero-tolerant World

A Smoker’s lament in a Zero-tolerant world
I have just come back from my first visit to New York. My equally addictive traveling companion took a photograph of me standing and smoking next to a big fat chimney which belched creamy steam into Lexington Avenue to give our kind of zap sign to their ever so clean mayor, Mr Bloomberg.
Our hotel room was of course non-smoking so we dangled our arms out of a thin slit in the window to pollute the high sky and not our room for the sole reason that we were told that the hotel would fine us 250 dollars to de-tox it.
We walked and smoked and walked and when we weren’t looking up at the fabulous buildings in the sky, we were scanning the streets for an outdoor café--of course to smoke but also to sit down and absorb the street behaviour of this iconic city. This wasn’t easy. We were astonished to find that there were so few pavement cafés.
Perhaps we’ve been living in France too long: are the New Yorkers not voyeuristic like the French? Are they just too busy to sit down and watch? Are they not interested in one another? We found four pavement cafés. And we knew their suitability only by the cigarette butts on the floor.
Part of the comfort of traveling is to experience the iconic representations of a place. The great icons of New York: the Chrysler Building, MoMa, awful hot dog stands, the yellow cabs..I loved the sounds of the streets: the high-pitched sirens, the fire-engines, the huge trucks with hooters like trumpeting elephants and their big fat cabs in front outlined with disco lighting, the sudden roar of the sub-way under your feet. These sounds--and this is why I like to sit on the streets, Mayor Bloomberg, showed the underbelly of NY in direct contrast to the elegantly clad, softly-spoken humans who passed us by. But I missed the edginess. Where were the deviants who were causing the traffic cacophony? And to use Groucho Marx a bit sloppily, I wouldn’t want to belong in a city where I was the most oddly dressed.

Having written all this about this marvellous city, -and forgive me if I am making far too sweeping a generalization after only 8 days-I still wonder to myself if two mayors with their fascist clean-up campaign, together with the extravagance of the age in which we live, haven’t made New York a bit too clean and fresh? Harlem I found just bleak.

I started smoking when I was about 7. We lived in the country in a small village called Henley- on- Klip in the formerly called Transvaal. In true SA fashion we had “servants’” quarters at the bottom of the 3 acres of land and would spend our best times with the staff children smoking. My brothers and I sat around a brazier smoking grass-the generic kind- and donkey dung rolled up in newspaper. We had no matches-Bic lighters hadn’t been invented-so had to lean close and wedge the “puffie’’ as we called it, into one of the holes of the brazier and inhale deeply. My mother was always writing her play and because of this and 4 other children she never noticed that I always had singed eyelashes.
For the following 50 years I have never missed a day without many many cigarettes. And I shall be the last person on earth still smoking.
When the World started it’s clean- up campaign I wondered at the fairness of my being relegated to a table next to the toilets in a restaurant and the odious man talking loudly on his cell phone had a very nice table in the middle of the room.
Last summer I was meeting my niece in Florence and decided to take the train route along the coast from Nice. In 5 days I calculated that I had taken 12 trains in all. I could have made it much shorter of course if I had gone via Milan but I don’t measure life in terms of Time. A friend of mine who lived in Italy warned me that catching a train in Italy, neurosis is simply prudent behaviour. He hates the chaos of Italy and on my return, I told him with glee that in about 20 hours of train travel, Trenitalia was just 3 minutes late. The only problems were on the French side. The thing is that if you’re taking so many trains, you have as many connections and if one train is late the domino effect kicks in with its concomitant neurosis.
On my return, just at the Italian/French border in Ventimiglia, as I was catching train number 11, I should have become a tad suspicious as the only French train on the board had “supressioso” next to it.
My panic set in the moment I got off my penultimate train in Nice. It was 7.30pm, I had been traveling for almost 12 hours-without a cigarette- and the station should have been nearly deserted. Hundreds of people in chaos-mode were rushing around. When I looked at the board I understood the reason: my last train home didn’t exist and in it’s place was succinctly written: “Greve National. National Strike. For more information consult www.sncf.com.” I thought this was a bit useless and because I didn’t see anyone with a wi-fi lap top, I stood in the queue at Information and was told that the only train traveling in the whole of France was one to Paris and it did stop at my small station in the middle of Provence. I didn’t believe him. But what I really needed was a cigarette and a glass of rosé. I dragged my luggage to the grumpy buffet and ordered a glass of rosé. She said she was closing and that the glass would be a problem. Such was my need for what she had on offer that I wasn’t going to go into the lack of logic here-especially seeing that there were still 15 minutes to closing time. I produced my own glass from my heavy hold- all and she filled it up to the top. This is why I shall always smoke and drink (and carry a glass): the satisfaction out of 2 very simple actions makes life immeasurably pleasurable. I sat on the platform on one piece of luggage, balanced the glass on the other and smoked and smoked and sipped and wondered if I were going to spend the night there. Suddenly the station master rushed past me. He stopped and turned around. I thought he was going to crap on me for smoking on the platform which is now prohibited. With a big beam he said “Bravo Madame!”. This Frenchman truly recognised the perfect anti-dote to a crisis.
On the same trip to Florence I was having a lovely lunch on a beautiful piazza. The restaurant was outside and the terrace was not covered. After lunch, I lit up. Behind me I heard in a broad Australian accent: “Well, I’m just going to fahhrt on her food”. We could split hairs here as to what is the most offensive act-his threatened fart on my food or the exhaled smoke from my top orifice? We smokers don’t bullshit ourselves-we know that smoking is irrefutably bad for us and for others. And we don’t need pictures of atrophying lungs on our packets of cigs to drive it home.
Yet……oh yes, hypocrisies abound. Besides Mr Bloomberg’s chimneys, I have seen Mothers on bicycles in Munich with their babies in flimsy little trailers behind them in full city traffic, squeaky clean Canada with one of the world’s most rigid anti-smoking laws is about to make the world’s dirtiest fuel. But these double standards aside, I fear that the Western world has become too sanitised.Too sanctimoniously clean.
I am sure I would have preferred New York 20 years ago—smoky, seedy and a little bit dangerous.

My immense thanks to:
Edmund for letting me smoke in his Porsche.
Paris restaurants for supplying heaters and blankets on the terraces outside.
Frankfurt airport for its glass booths.
My husband who has never once whinged about the millions of cigarettes he has passively smoked.