Let's Face It: Smoking Was Cool

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I’ve never known what to do with my hands. Unless I’m actively using them to dice onions, climb plastic boulders, type bitter essays, or shovel food into my gaping maw, they tend to sit there, half curled and useless. In photos from my races, they’re worse: I’m not even making fists, just these pathetic little half-closures that look like I’m atrophying from the wrist down. When I see any photo of myself, I zero in on my hands—they’re small and misshapen. I just don’t know what to do with them.

In the reality outside of my head, my hands are probably quite average-looking, if petite. My fingers are relatively slim and well-proportioned, I don’t have old-man skin yet, and the broken bone on my right ring finger has healed enough that you wouldn’t notice it unless you were hunting for it. At the same time—on the other hand?—my nails are and always have been wretched: flimsy and trimmed too short. Hand modeling was never an option for me.

But what I long for, whenever I’m getting my picture taken, is a cigarette. Because cigarettes just look cool. This is aesthetics here: The long, skinny, artificial cylinder simply plays well against the human face and human limbs, highlighting their organic curves and contours. It’s two branches of geometry colliding beautifully. More broadly, the cigarette conveys a subtle kind of action: Either a person is smoking, actively inhaling the cigarette, or they’re waiting for a drag, the cigarette dangling from their mouth or held in an outstretched hand. Every aspect of the subject is in play, in use. We look on in suspense.

It’s not just photography where this matters but real life, too. Smoking and its paraphernalia—the pack, the lighter—gave people something to do with their hands while they talked without requiring concentration or becoming a distraction. Because smoking was common, it built rituals into people’s lives: the smoke break, the intimate lighting of another’s cigarette, cigarettes and coffee, cigarettes after sex. In movies and television, characters who smoked had dozens of ways of conveying their thoughts and feelings without needing to speak—they could light up, puff hard, take their time with each drag. There are too many movies from the 1930s to the 1950s to cite, but I’m partial to the end of Heathers, when Winona Ryder’s Veronica puts an unlit cigarette in her mouth as she watches her psycho ex-boyfriend J.D. blow himself up; the heat from the blast turns it almost to ash. Fictional or non, smokers knew they were being watched, and the smoking was part of their performance.

I say all this as someone who has never smoked a cigarette in his life. Okay, maybe a couple of cloves, and my share of joints and blunts in my twenties, but never a plain old tobacco cig. And I never wanted to. In my family, smoking a cigarette was the worst thing you could do—worse than any other drug. Of course, every one of my grandparents smoked, and it killed at least one of them, via emphysema. My parents smoked, too, though they quit, I believe, around the time they had me. I grew up in an era of TV PSAs warning that if you smoke, it’ll make you “cough and wheeze and choke.” Which was correct. My grandmother smoked, and I had asthma, and it got a whole lot worse whenever I stayed with her, which was maddening because I loved her. Smoking is and was one of the worst things you can do to your own body, and to other people’s bodies. When New York City banned smoking at bars and restaurants, in 2002, I was relieved—doubly so when no backlash emerged to overturn the new law.

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Maybe it’s because I never smoked that I can romanticize it now and lament the loss of the rituals it enshrined over most of the twentieth century. The posing, the interactions with friends and strangers alike, the ubiquity that turned cigarettes into both currency and a last treat for the condemned—they’re all gone now, and the diseases they caused are on the decline.

The problem is that we haven’t replaced those rituals with anything new, and we need such rituals now more than ever, to give us something we all can share, to force us to interact in casual, friendly ways, and to offer us (okay, me) something to do with our stupid hands.

It’s hard to think of a candidate to replace smoking, though. It definitely won’t be vaping—that’s just push-button solipsism, the most grotesque of technologies. And it can’t be anything to do with our phones, either. They’re ugly, they’re unnecessary, and they’re overly personal—you’d never let a stranger near yours.

I wish it could be the coffee break, especially the way Italians do it (or we imagine they do it): You pop out of the office with a co-worker or two, hit the corner café-bar, chat with the grizzled owner, sip an espresso—whose comically small cup serves an aesthetic purpose vis-à-vis the human face and hand analogous to the cigarette’s—and then you’re done. Back to work!

This, however, can’t happen in today’s America. For one thing, we’re all working remotely now (right?), so a coffee break is indistinguishable from any other trip into the kitchen—it’s scarcely even a break. And for those who do work in offices, coffee itself is the problem: We’ve overthought it. Some people prefer Starbucks, others Dunkin; among the fifth-wave aficionados, you find even more viciously divided opinions; and let’s not even talk about tea drinkers. In Italy, the local bar’s espresso may not be stellar, but it’s not much different from the other bar around the corner, and besides it only costs a couple of euros at most. In America, wherever you go, you’ll wind up spending eight bucks—fifteen if you get a terrible pastry. You’ll wish you stayed at work.

What made the rituals of cigarettes (and of coffee) so powerful, beyond the aesthetics, was that they were rooted in necessity: addiction, sure, but a biological craving for stimulation, whether from the taste or from the drug. Any replacement ritual has to capitalize on that same uncontrollable impulse—the ritual exists because our need exists.

And so I have but one candidate to offer: communal pooping. The biological urge is there, of course, so no boss can (or should) argue against it, and the break it requires necessarily takes us away from our duties^1 2. Yes, it might be embarrassing at first, but I think we can make this work. Many offices and restaurants have embraced unisex bathrooms, our social feeds are full of bidet and wet-wipe ads, people are infinitely more comfortable talking about poop than two decades ago (e.g., Al Roker admitted he shit his pants at the White House), and half of us are apparently thinking about Ancient Rome all the time anyway. So why not bring back the foricae? Let us forge new rituals around our group pooping; let us engage in them with friends, colleagues, and strangers alike; let the new aesthetics of excretion bloom, in real life and onscreen, and usher in an unprecedented era of health and style. I’m still not entirely sure what I would be doing with my hands for most of this crap break—though I do have some ideas—but as long as you don’t take my picture, I think we’ll be okay. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Donald Yatomi

By day, Montana-based Donald Yatomi is a concept artist for video-game makers such as Activision Blizzard. But in his spare time, he’s an oil painter, blending traditional techniques with modern subject matter, like video arcades, bars, laundromats, airports, and Tabasco bottles. It’s totally my kind of thing—I just wish I could afford it:

Notes

1. You might Slack from the can now, but only because no one knows you’re there. If they did, you’d go back to playing Block Blast.

2. Heh heh: “duties”!

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