My Weekend at Auntie Anne's, Part 5

My Weekend at Auntie Anne's  (Part 5)


	As my week with Grandma and Auntie Anne was coming to a close,
thoughts about how I was going to be able to smoke at home continued to worry
me.  I knew that mom would never let me smoke, especially since I was only
eight years old, and getting and hiding a ready supply of cigarettes was going
to be a major problem.  Auntie Anne had tried to talk to me about this last
week, but I guess I was still so excited about her letting me smoke that her
words probably didn't sink in.  However, spending the extra week with her and
Grandma did buy me some extra time to think about it.

To help ease my transition from being allowed to smoke whenever I wanted, to
that of being an occasional smoker, Auntie Anne gave me two packs of her
Marlboro Light 100's from her carton then Grandma reached in and gave me
another one.  They cautioned me not to smoke in my room and if my mother were
to find the cigarettes, I was to say that I had taken them from their cartons,
lest we all get in trouble.  Loving them as much as I did, I would rather be
thought of as a little "cigarette thief", then get them in trouble.  I agreed,
and once properly outfitted with a clean change of clothes, a pack of Juicy
Fruit gum and a little dash of Auntie Anne's fragrance, we set out for the
drive home.  Since I had the gum, Auntie Anne acquiesced and let me have a few
puffs of her cigarette on the way home, and that had to hold me for quite a
while.

When I got home I managed to hide the three packs of cigarettes in my bureau
drawer along with the one cigarette and lighter I had taken from mom.  Auntie
Anne and Grandma stayed for dinner, and I pretty much followed them around
like a shadow, especially when they lit a cigarette, and they were able to
sneak me a few puffs here and there before dinner.  After dinner, I asked
Auntie Anne to come up to my room to see my dollies, and when mom and dad
weren't watching, placed two fingers up to my lips so Auntie Anne would bring
her cigarettes.  I went on up and a few minutes later Auntie Anne came up to
my room with her purse.  Without a word, she opened her purse and handed me
her cigarette pouch and I quickly pulled one out and lit up.  I managed to
smoke most of that cigarette while Auntie Anne sat on the bed making the
appropriate "oohs & aahs" in all the right places.  When she thought we had
spent ample time looking at my dollies, she took the cigarette from my hand
and we went back down stairs.  Satisfied for the moment, but knowing I smelled
like cigarettes, I stayed as far away from mom and dad as I could for the rest
of the evening.  Looking back on this now, it's hard to believe we were as
sneaky as we were and that we actually got away with it. 

Even though I had only been smoking less than two weeks, having a cigarette
was all I could think about.  I realize now that, although I was not
physically addicted to nicotine, I was psychologically addicted to them and to
the act of smoking itself.  From that first cigarette with Auntie Anne, I knew
I was going to love smoking cigarettes.  I loved the look and the feel of the
long, white cigarette in my hand, the feel of a full pack of cigarettes, the
smell of a freshly opened pack, the act of lighting a cigarette and especially
inhaling smoke into my lungs and watching a long stream of smoke come out of
my mouth when I exhaled.  In short, I just loved everything about it.

With mom being a kindergarten teacher, and home all the time during summer
vacation, it was really hard for me to find an opportunity to smoke.  We lived
in a residential neighborhood, so I just couldn't go "out in the woods" to
have a cigarette.  We did have a fairly large fenced back yard and we had one
of those big metal barn-like tool sheds next to the garage.  It couldn't be
easily seen from any room in the house, but neither could I see if anyone was
coming.  Even so, it did provide a fairly safe haven for me to sneak a
cigarette occasionally without being seen.  Since dad was in and out of the
shed all summer getting the lawn mower and such, I couldn't risk smoking in
the shed too often, so I'd usually huddle behind the shed, between it and the
fence to sneak my cigarettes.  I'd even dug a little hole to bury my butts and
covered it with a rock.  This system worked pretty well and after only a few
weeks, my stash of cigarettes was all gone.  Rainy days were the worst though.
I really couldn't go outside to have a cigarette because mom would get
suspicious and I couldn't smoke safely anywhere in the house. 

By this time, I had developed quite a "taste" for cigarettes.  Actually, I
think I was pretty well addicted to them.  At eight years of age, I really had
no idea what addiction was, but I did know that I was craving cigarettes on a
constant basis.  I had heard mom say on more than one occasion "she was dying
for a cigarette" and now I really knew what she meant.  Since I had depleted
my stash some time ago, I was now forced to rely on the infrequent puff when
mom left her cigarette briefly unattended or sneaking them from her open packs
on an almost daily basis.  I was even bold enough (and lucky enough) to sneak
whole packs from her carton on occasion.  I even remembered to keep one of my
empty packs so I would have a place to keep my pilfered cigarettes.  Every
time mom opened a fresh pack and had a couple, I made sure I was around to
help myself to a couple more.  During the summer, mom usually smoked a pack to
a pack and a half a day, but with me "helping" her, it was closer to two packs
a day.  God bless her, she never caught on (or so I thought.)  

When she started back teaching, her cigarette consumption was reduced
dramatically.  She would only have a few in the morning before work, wouldn't
smoke at all during the rest of the day, then have a few more after work and
in the evening.  She pretty much cut her smoking down by two-thirds during the
school year and that made it that much harder for me to get cigarettes.  With
my opportunities limited, I started to sneak some out of her pack while she
was showering in the morning and again at night if I could while she was
cooking dinner before dad came home.  The only times I was shut out were if
she had only two left in a pack or there were only one or two gone from a
pack.  In dire times like these, I would then have to check out dad's Marlboro
Reds.  Although they were better than Grandma's Salem 100's, I didn't
particularly like them because they were a lot stronger than what I was used
to and they were much shorter than mom's Marlboro Light 100's.  Half-full
packs of mom's though were a treasure chest for me, because I would always
take two or three at a time.

Things didn't get any better for me with the start of school.  None of my
friends smoked and I didn't want them to know that I did either, so it was a
very difficult period of adjustment for me.  Now that I was in the third
grade, Health was one of our required lessons.  Naturally our teacher taught
us that smoking cigarettes was very bad for us, but I didn't believe a word of
it.  After all, I smoked cigarettes and I just loved them.  I just knew she
couldn't be talking about the same cigarettes that I liked.  I wasn't able to
satisfy my cravings for a cigarette at all during the school day.  Although I
got home before mom, I had to stay with a neighbor until she got home.  Until
it started getting dark early, I did have a little playtime before dinner each
day, and it was then that I was able to feed my growing habit with one,
sometimes two cigarettes.  If I was lucky, I could sometimes manage one after
dinner as well.  Since mom and dad smoked all the time when they were home,
the faint smell of cigarette smoke was ever present in the house.  With the
onset of winter and the end of daylight saving time, I was getting pretty
desperate to smoke.  It was then that I broke my promise to Auntie Anne and
Grandma and took to sneaking an occasional cigarette in my room or in the
upstairs bathroom.  

While out in the shed one day, I found one of the black plastic ashtrays that
mom kept for use on the patio, so I took one and put it in my room.  I washed
it real good and put it on my bureau as a sort of "catch-all".  My plan was to
get mom used to seeing it there, so she wouldn't give it a second thought.  Of
course, I started using it almost immediately for its intended purpose.  After
smoking my cigarette, I would take it to the bathroom and flush the evidence
down the toilet.  I would then wipe the ashtray clean and return it to my
bureau.  Being late Fall, I would just about freeze to death with the window
open, but hey, I really needed my cigarettes.  On rare occasions mom would run
to the grocery store leaving me home alone, and I would take the opportunity
to run to my room and retrieve a cigarette.  I would then head back down to
the kitchen, open a window, light up and smoke.  Sometimes, I got brave and
had two.  But these occasions were rare indeed, as I usually had to accompany
mom on these trips. 

  Having to sneak cigarettes like this really made a drastic change in my
smoking habits.  No longer able to smoke as much as I wanted, I often had to
go a day or two without any.  Auntie Anne and Grandma would supply me with
cigarettes when they could, but we just did not see them all that much, at
least not as often as I would have liked.  It was getting very difficult to
think of anything but smoking a cigarette.  The longer I had to go without a
cigarette, the more intense my cravings became.  With my growing dependency on
nicotine, and smoking so infrequently, my shallow, tentative puffs soon gave
way to deeper and more frequent drags to fill my urgent need for smoke.  I can
still remember the first time I took multiple drags on a cigarette.  Hungrily
inhaling one drag while exhaling the previous drag through my nose and
watching the lit end of my cigarette get long and hot.  And oh, the head rush
I got from inhaling all that smoke.  I felt a little dizzy, but oh so
satisfied.  Yes, I was already really hooked, and I loved every second of it.

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