There have been times in my life when I've felt like I grew up in one of about ten American families that were not the least bit dysfunctional. I would go to friends' houses and everyone would be screaming at one another. There was very little screaming in our house and it never lasted long. More often than not, it would be immediately followed by apologies and offsetting affection.
Part of that, I'm sure, was because of my fortuitous lack of siblings. Most of it was due to the kind of people my parents were. In our household, no one ever got drunk. No one ever got into legal or financial trouble. In most of these essays, I'm telling you about the problems because, you know, there's no interesting story when the airliner lands safely; only when it crashes. I'm running out of memories of where there was trouble in my childhood because there just plain wasn't very much.
The biggest family trauma probably occurred when I was in my early twenties and decided it was time to move out and get my own apartment — a decision I probably should have made two or three years earlier than I did. My father did not want me to do that. When I mentioned the possibility, he scrunched his face, looked sad and said, "Oh, why would you want to do that?"
I couldn't tell him it was because women didn't like to sleep with a guy at his parents' house with Mom and Dad in the next room. Instead, I told him — and this was true — that I needed a lot more room for my comic book collection and my profession required a lot more workspace, especially now that I was writing with a partner. Once or twice, my father put forth a suggestion that he probably knew would never fly: I should rent an office nearby, work there during the day and then sleep at home. That, obviously, would not have solved the part of the first problem, the one I couldn't mention to him.
When the day finally came that I rented an actual apartment — one that was a good 15-minute drive away — he was very upset and we had some father/son melodramatics. But he accepted it and I moved out.
I had another reason for moving out though I didn't know it at the time.
My nose had never worked well…for breathing purposes, I mean. I could barely take in air through my left nostril and not at all through my right. When I was a small child, my pediatrician had said, "Well, maybe that will fix itself as he gets older. If it doesn't, you may have to look into surgery."
As I got older, it didn't fix itself. If anything, it got a little worse. But since I was breathing fine through my mouth, I didn't look into surgery or any other treatment. Actually, about the time I reached sixteen, I hit a prolonged spell of Good Health and didn't even have a regular doctor to call until I was well past 40.
One evening about six months after I got my own apartment, I was out on a date with a lady named Teri. We'd been to a movie in Santa Monica and were sitting in Zucky's Delicatessen on Wilshire eating Knackwursts when I was suddenly overwhelmed by the aroma of the one before me. I could really smell it. I could smell the mustard and the pickles and potato salad as if they were right under my nose instead of a foot or two away on the table. I began gasping and taking deep breaths and holding my hand under my nose to feel whatever air was rushing in and out.
Teri thought for a moment I was having some sort of attack and asked, "Mark, what's wrong?"
I couldn't quite believe it but I began to say to her, "I may be wrong…it seems impossible…" I felt like I was in a scene in a comic book and my next line would be, "…but I seem to have developed super-powers!"
Instead, what I said was, "…but I think my left nostril just opened up all the way!" A few days later, I noticed for the first time ever, a slight flow of air in my right one.
Since I didn't have a doctor, I called my dentist. He referred me to a respiratory specialist in his building who wandered around in my nose for about ten minutes, then said, "Everything seems pretty normal. Have you changed your diet lately? Anything you've stopped eating?"
I said no but I told him about moving out of my parents' house. He said, "Do either of them smoke?"
"My mother does," I replied. "Incessantly."
He said, "Well, there you are" and then did a test or two which confirmed it. Being around the smoke all those years had impaired my ability to breathe through my nose. Being away from it for six months had allowed things to partially heal.
Don't let anyone ever tell you that Second-Hand Smoke is not harmful. And when you think about it, how could breathing non-pure air not be bad for you in some way?
Sitting in that specialist's office, I remembered something. I hadn't been back to the house I grew up in for several months. My father came to my apartment to visit once a week and slightly less often, I'd meet him and my mother at a restaurant for dinner. But it had been a while since I'd been to their home and the last time I was there, the smell of cigarette smoke was uncommonly overpowering. It was most unpleasant and while I hadn't said anything, I also hadn't stayed long.
That evening, I went over there to see them. I walked in and could barely breathe. My mother, who had her 20th or 25th Marlboro of the day going didn't smell it, of course. My father didn't, either. He'd built up a tolerance or immunity to the smell (though probably not its harmful effects) as I'd once had. But mine had worn off and I could not stand to be in the house. I opened a window and stood near it as I explained what had happened. Eventually, even that got to me and I had to get out.
My mother was quite upset. She had smoked since she was 14, working her way up to somewhere between 1.5 and two packs per day. Various habit-kickers had been tried — special chewing gums and cigarette substitutes, most of which had the syllable "nic" in their names. They failed so totally that she accepted her addiction as unfixable and gave up even trying. When someone said to her, "It's going to take years off your life," she just replied, "Well, then I just won't live as long."
Other times, she'd say something like, "If it came down to living forty more years with cigarettes or fifty without, I'd pick the forty. The fifty without would be so horrible and agonizing, I wouldn't want to live."
What no one said to her — and it wouldn't have done any good if someone had — was, "The smoking might not just kill you. It might mean that the last two decades of your life before it did, you'd be going blind, you'd lose your ability to walk and you'd spend an awful lot of time being carted off to hospitals in ambulances."
After that evening when I had to leave though, she decided she had to do something. She couldn't keep fouling the air such that her son couldn't stand to visit. She was also concerned about what it was doing to her husband, a man she loved as much as any woman ever loved a man. Within days, two changes were initiated.
My old room was still sitting empty. My father half-joked with a hopeful subtext, "It's waiting for you if you decide you want to move back." What they did after I explained about my nostrils opening and the smell driving me away was to convert it into a den for my mother. The walls were repainted and decorated appropriately. Then they brought in furniture to go with my old TV set which I'd left behind and fans were installed to circulate air in and out the two windows. Henceforth, my mother would smoke only in there.
Then she tried to see how much she could cut down.
A few months earlier, I'd suggested something I'd read about. We totaled up how many cigarettes she was smoking a day. It was around 38. "Why don't you try just cutting down by one every few days? Try getting by on 37. Three days from now, try just smoking 36 and so on." She'd convinced herself she could never quit altogether and somehow that became a reason to not even try to smoke less.
Now, she got a calendar and marked it off to cut back by one each week. To her considerable amazement, she got down to 25 without too much torture. After that, it got rougher and it sometimes took several weeks to lower the daily allotment by one more cigarette. After a year or two though, she got down to 16 a day.
From there on, she concentrated on not smoking them completely. When I'd come over — and by this point, I could — she'd point to an ash tray full of partially-smoked cigarettes. She had a ruler and a little diagram and she'd show me: "See? I used to smoke them down to here and now I only smoke them down to here." It was about half the length.
"I'm lighting sixteen a day," she explained. "But I figure I'm only really smoking eight." Well, sort of. Whatever it was, it was better than before. In the last few years of her life, she got down to lighting ten a day, which she figured was really five.
All this time, her doctors — especially her heart specialist and her podiatrist — urged her to quit altogether. Her general practitioner said she had fifteen different ongoing ailments and that every one of them would be lessened if she didn't even smoke the "five." She insisted it was simply not possible.
I threatened to forbid her caregivers from buying her cigarettes. She showed me that she had phone numbers for several markets and pharmacies that would deliver…so I switched to outright bribery.
Before I offered this, I ran it past her doctor and he said, "Go for it." My mother loved seafood…shrimp, scallops, fried clams. Especially fried clams. She also loved the clam chowder at the Santa Monica Seafood company so I proposed a swap: The cigarettes for daily deliveries of clams and crustaceans. She thought about it for a moment, then passed. So I went back to threats.
She had this button she wore 24/7 around her home at night. One push would alert an operator who would notify me and dispatch the paramedics, usually in the middle of the night. I said if she wasn't going to quit smoking, I was going to quit responding. But that was a bluff. She knew it. I knew it. And she knew that I knew that she knew it.
Then came an awful four weeks of hospitalization — two weeks in a hospital, two weeks in a nursing facility. It started with one of those middle-of-the-night alarms and then while she was in the hospital, I was called in twice in the wee, small hours because they thought they were losing her. They wanted me there to see they were doing everything humanly possible to save her…and if they couldn't, to authorize them to discontinue treatment as per her advanced directive. She made it — but she became acutely aware of how close she'd come to dying…and what she was putting me through.
The day before she was to go home from the nursing facility, I went in, sat on the unoccupied bed next to hers and said, "We have to discuss smoking." She said, as she always had, "I can't give it up."
Ah, but this time, I had a new response to that. I told her, "You have."
She looked at me puzzled and I went on. "You haven't had a cigarette the entire time you've been in here. You've quit. The only question is whether you're going to be dumb enough to start again."
There was a brief silence as she thought it over and she finally said, "No, I don't think I'm that dumb."
By that point, it really didn't mean much for her health. Her eyes and her legs were never going to get better and she didn't think they would. I'm convinced the main reason she quit was because she was hoping it might mean one or two less times I'd be summoned out of bed at 5 AM to rush to her house, meet the paramedics there, follow them in to the hospital, spend half my life there talking with doctors, etc.
I can't figure exactly how long after she quit it was that I lost her. I'm guessing six months with one or maybe two late-night Emergency Room visitations in there. When her doctors would allow it, I brought her clams and crustaceans. She said, "Hey, you promised these to me every day if I quit." I told her, "You passed on that offer, remember? You should have made me shake on it before you gave up the cigarettes."
One day, and it may have been the last time I saw her, she said, "You know, I still miss smoking. It's been a long time since I enjoyed it but I still miss it."
I asked, "Do you miss smoking? Or do you miss not going through withdrawal pains?"
She said, sadly, "The second."
I asked, "Was there ever a time when you truly enjoyed it?"
She thought for a moment and said, "There must have been. But it was so damned long ago that who the hell knows?"