Did you know that every time you have one it shortens your lifespan by five minutes? FIVE?
Your teeth will fall out at fifty!
Can I bum one?
For years I heard these public service announcements from people who wanted to crush my smoking habit. They bounced off my armour but left small bruises that, over the years, became a festering source of guilt. To be fair, this was usually outside Pakistan where everyone looks at smokers like they’ve got cooties. I haven’t actually been to a place where it is easier to light up than Pakistan, whether inside or outside a building. And that sense of tacit approval did wonders to bolster my commitment to my smoking habit.
The one thing they don’t tell you, however, the one fact that they keep secret through all the cancerous chest X-ray ads and the photos of amputated feet and lost larynxes is this: you get fat. Real fast.
For some, the consequences of quitting smoking can be a 'muffin top
Suddenly the fact that fashion models smoke religiously makes all kinds of sense
There is no way around it. You just do. Suddenly the fact that fashion models smoke religiously makes all kinds of sense. Some of you smokers may think you’re fat already (welcome), but I feel it’s my duty to disclose that no matter how big you are, you can get fatter. Yes, you breathe better and you live longer (if I get hit by a bus after all this, I swear I’m going to come back as vengeful lighter fluid) but you are slightly rounder the whole way through it.
I know it’s not a massive price to pay for the health benefits that I am (allegedly) receiving after kicking my nicotine habit, but tell that to the pair of jeans I had tailored a few years ago that now give me a muffin top so distressing I buy more muffins to feel better. Part of this may be just aging and a slower metabolism, and part of it may be that you snack on stuff as a cure for an oral fixation. That said, doctors and online support groups all shake their heads and shrug their shoulders as if to say, “Well, yeah. Fat happens.”
Well, no. Not again. It’s not going to happen to me. So I go to a gym every day in an effort to curb my curves. My gym is in this hip place called Union Square, and though it’s not an expensive place, I did see the actor who played Mr. Big on ‘Sex and the City’ on the treadmill next to mine one day. Its centrality attracts - for my sins - all sorts of fit people. As if the general indignity of the locker room shuffle (suck in tummy, wrap towel, walk carefully, cry inside) wasn’t enough, imagine having to do it in the presence of real-life fitness models. These aren’t trainers, or generally athletic people. These are men and women who make a living on how defined their abs are and then are photographed for the fact. When they look at me, hapless in my makeshift towel robe, I feel like a sea lion. Of course they carelessly discard their designer sweatpants and stand around near-naked checking their phone and flexing their stomach because they can, and I take my leave as quickly as possible, dreaming of a time where I could smoke my troubles away.
Hillary Clinton is also the name of a bartender who is currently embroiled in conflict with the author
The same urges follow me at night, as I navigate my latest neighborly catastrophe. I have moved into a place above a bar, which is admittedly not my brightest decision. Every evening at 5 pm the music comes on and for the next eight hours there are steady sounds of bass and drum beats. Did you know the folks at Guantanamo Bay used deep bass rhythms as a form of torture and sleep deprivation? I did. The UN has a whole paper on deep bass, a print-out of which I handed to Hilary Clinton, the bartender downstairs. You’ll think I made this up, but I promise you that is her name. Hilary Clinton. The bartender from Hell. She understands the irony, and uses it as a kind of self-effacing humor, which I now see for the cracked façade it is.
I started off sweet, telling her nicely to turn it down or occasionally asking her to move the speakers, and she was actually quite nice, initially. As the weeks have gone on, though, the sound has gone on without interruption and my sleep has gone somewhere I can’t find it. Last night the thumping was so deeply annoying that in a burst of fury and frustration I started manically stomping on my floor like an extra in an African dance troupe in the hopes that they turn the music down slightly. I immediately got a text from Hilary telling me that all her framed pictures on the shelves came crashing down.
Needless to say, I am now at war.
The thing about being in my situation is that it makes you feel like such a… square. You’re the annoying neighbor that they have signs asking to respect. You’re the old man upstairs with no patience, the antichrist of fun, the party pooper of paradise. I am not a party pooper and I resent having to be made to feel like one, especially when I am feeling fat in a noisy apartment. It’s at times like these that the memory of a Marlboro Light rises up in my mind like a siren, reminding me that no matter how bad things used to get, I always had a friend in my pocket.
Stupid lung cancer. In the words of Lata/Dimple/ghost from Lekin, “Ye jeena bhi koi jeena hai? Yaara silly silly….”
