I smoked my first cigar at 18. I bypassed sneaking my first cigarette before I could legally smoke and went straight to the cigar. I feel like this explains so much about my life -- why start small? While my friends all have the variation of the story of sneaking a cigarette from a family member's pack of Marlboros to try behind the family garage or friend showing up on the playground after school hours with a single cigarette to try while giggling and looking furtively around to ensure no adults are nearby, I waited to have my first smoke of anything at 18 on my senior class trip to Washington D.C.
I don't remember much of the details, other than a majority of my friends were all 18 on that class trip. Somewhere along the line, we decided to buy cigars to smoke in celebration of one of my friend's 18th birthday, which occurred toward the end of our week-long D.C. trip. So, like the classy midwestern kids that we were, we popped into a dirty convenience store on the walk back to our hotel from one of the historical sites that we visited that day and contemplated which cigars to buy. Our chaperones for the school trip -- several of my friends' dads -- watched us all with amusement. We had various levels of smokers among our group: some the occasional cigarette, cigar, or Swisher Sweet smoked while fishing; some regular smokers that spent most of our school lunch period hanging out in Smoker's Alley across the street, leaning against the brick wall of Larry's Grocery Land, slightly bored and just killing time before the next bell rang; and the rest, who had snuck the aforementioned Camel/Marlboro/off-brand cigarette. I was the only one who had not tried smoking by that point. I don't remember the actual experience, other than us opening our hotel window wide, my friends' telling me to "suck harder" to actually light my cigar and keep the smokey char going at the end of the cigar, and me being deathly afraid that I was going to slip to my death from the sixth floor of our hotel room, to which my obituary would reflect the clumsiness that has plagued me my entire life and might make a blip in the Washington Post: "Iowan Girl Plummets to Death While Clutching a Cigar Like Groucho Marx". Luckily I remained upright in the hotel room, and choked that cigar down until it was a soggy nub.
A few days after returning home, my friends and I went fishing. On the drive there, one of my girlfriends passed me a cigarette to try. I was fascinated by the mechanics of the filter, how the cigarette burned down with each drag, how it just magically disappeared. I kept staring at the cigarette, to which my friends found entertaining: they knew my analytical mind was more curious as to how the cigarette worked versus the actual taste, nicotine, or experience of it.
Despite not trying smoking until I was of legal age, I had always been fascinated by cigarettes and smoking. The only person in my family who smoked was my step-grandmother. Her cigarette of choice was menthol Virginia Slims. I loved the way that she smelled, her perfume intermixed with a smokey, minty undertone. She had long, slender fingers that ended with perfectly shaped fingernails. I always thought she looked so elegant smoking those thin cigarettes, sometimes letting it purse out of the corner of her glossy lips while she played cards or stirred her mixed drink. I was convinced that she used a cigarette holder and carried her cigarettes in a brass cigarette case when she was younger - I envisioned her in her youth to be elegant yet bawdy and feisty, like Katherine Hepburn, all with a Virginia Slim dangling between her index and middle fingers.
I'm pretty sure my step-grandma stopped smoking years ago, when it became less socially acceptable to smoke and more difficult to find establishments that one can legally smoke in, when her health started to fail due to the natural deterioration that comes with old age. On the rare occasion, when I find myself to have had one drink too many and I bum a cigarette from someone or when my brother and I smoke cigars on St. Patrick's Day, I still think of my step-grandma smoking Virginia Slims. In my mind, while I envision myself being as graceful and mysterious as to how she looked to me when I was a girl, even then I know that I'm nowhere the same level of delicacy that she had with it.
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