The Last Puff

by: Joan Hitz

In 1951, a thirteen-year-old boy walked into a convenience store in Rockaway Beach and purchased his first pack of cigarettes, unfiltered, for fifteen cents. An industrious boy, who already had a fifty-cents-an-hour summer job at a hot dog stand, and a dollar weekly allowance, his pack-a-day habit was comfortably fundable, and, when funds were low, helped along by the practice in those days of the storeowner breaking open a pack to sell “loosies.”

The boy’s parents smoked, too. Back then, smoking was sanctioned. Cigarettes dashed about like white hyphens, connecting a huge percentage of socializers everywhere you went. 

The boy grew, and so did his intake. By his thirties, two packs daily. They cost more now, but his grown-up, post-hot-dog-stand job, in the air freight business, had a post-hot-dog-stand salary.

Even supporting a wife, two children and a three-bedroom house, cigarettes didn’t dent the budget. The children grew up watching, and breathing, the man’s habit. It was still socially sanctioned--no one knew. 

In every way that was important, the man was a great father. He worked long hours away, but when home, he taught the kids to fish from the docks, to eat raw clams, to do cannonballs in the pool.

Sunday mornings, he sang, while cooking a “gashouse” egg (a fried egg covered with toast, a hole cut from its middle so the yellow popped through). He’d give the buttery circle of cut-out bread to whichever begging child hadn’t received it last Sunday.  

And on the topic of, well, yes, gas, he also did that universal “dad thing”--extended his finger and said, “Pull.” The ensuing ... gashouse ... was room-emptying. 

Twice during the children’s childhoods, the man tried, hard, to quit. By the 1970s, commercials were broadcasting the dangers of smoking. The man tried gum. Hard candies. Fake cigarettes. The man really tried. 

The daughter remembers looking out her bedroom window one night and witnessing the second “failure.” Her father leaned, in black silhouette, against the old gold Chevy. A shimmering cigarette tip moved like an orange-colored taillight on a stealth plane sneaking through the night. The daughter even remembers the smoke signals rising with each puff: Smoking again, said the puffs. 

Smoking. 

Again.

The daughter crept back to bed in a state of confusion not unlike smoke itself, wavering, shifting between discouragement and understanding, realizing the bleak intractability of this habit but hoping it could still be stopped. 

By the man’s forties and fifties, stressful times jolted the habit into the six-pack-a-day stratosphere. The goal wasn’t to quit. It was to survive, day-to-day, even on 120 cigarettes. 

The children grew up, got educated, got homes. Their paternal grandparents died, the grandfather of smoking-induced emphysema. The man kept being what he was--a very good person, well-liked for his sweet and steady kindness, and, a man who smoked. A lot.

The man also became a grandfather, to two baby girls who arrived on earth bearing free admission to his heart.

On June 28, 2002, the grown daughter received a gasping phone call from her father: come ... quickly ... can’t ... breathe. 

Breaking traffic laws along the streets of two towns, she raced to his house to rush him  to the emergency room. But not before ...

He leaned against her car, sent an “I’m-still-your-father” warning look, extracted his lighter from his pocket, and lit up.

From a wreath of fumes, he said, “They’ll admit me. It’s my last chance for one.”

The daughter, in forbearing pain, let that cigarette happen.

But inside the gigantic memory of the million that’d been smoked before, the man was silently, and deathly, frightened. Later, at the hospital, when he received the diagnosis of pneumonia, he startled his son and daughter by tossing his hands up in celebration. 

“Thank God,” he said, “it isn’t emphysema.” 

And then he promised to quit. Really. He wanted to watch his granddaughters grow up.

Today, 2011, a sealed carton of cigarettes lies on the man’s kitchen table. Taped to it is the old plastic hospital wristband, with a slip of paper which says: “Reminder--June 28, 2002, 12:25 p.m. Last puff.”

Cigarettes ... habits ... are heartbreakingly tough to stop. But sometimes, it’s simply time. After fifty years, the man finally quit--cold turkey--on a hot June day. Victory.

The man was (is) my dad--Andy Hitz, Sr. He’s coming up on nine years without a smoke.      

The granddaughters, now 11 and 8, continue to grow up while he continues to watch.  My father has also acquired, through my brother’s marriage, an extended family composed of legions of tumbling children and upright adults.

And every one is very glad he’s here.

(first published on May 25, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)