Age 9
I’ll just open with my first cigarette. Seems too obvious, but here we go. I am 9 years old, outside the back door of my Dad’s church (he was the Pastor), shaved head, lighter in my pocket I probably stole from the kitchen at the Church. There I am, saw a mostly smoked Marlboro Light smashed into one of those white sand ashtrays, with the MOST brilliantly trashy hot pink lipstick on it. Some woman from the congregation, her name was Pat and she loved her cigarettes, had snubbed it out before leaving after the service that day and my Dad was still up in his office finishing up whatever he had to finish up. I flipped the cigarette around, I didn’t want to touch the lipstick cause that was gross. Immediately lit the filter end, choked and tossed the cigarette and ran off. I’m gonna assume you’re a smoker, but just in case you aren’t, lighting a cigarette’s filter isn’t exactly the most pleasant experience.
That was my first cigarette.
I did not think, in that moment, well, this is a terrible mistake that will define the next two decades of my life and nearly kill me. I thought, that was gross. And then I went back inside the church, ate some of those butter cookies they always had at fellowship hour, and forgot about it.
You have to understand what Virginia was like in 1993.
My family had just moved. New state, new house, new everything. My mom was pregnant with my sister. My dad was the new pastor at this church, which meant he was there constantly. Mornings, evenings, weekends, anytime someone needed counseling or the furnace broke or there was a potluck that required spiritual oversight. The church was his world, and by proximity, it was mine too.
The church sat down the road from a public pool. That pool was my babysitter. Dad would be in his office doing whatever pastors do… writing sermons, taking phone calls, praying, I don’t know… and I’d be at the pool. Or I’d be on my bike. Or I’d be somewhere in the general vicinity of the church, theoretically supervised, practically feral.
This was the nineties. Kids were feral. That wasn’t neglect; that was Tuesday.
And everywhere, everywhere, there was Joe Camel.
He was on billboards. He was on magazine ads. He was on T-shirts and hats and lighters. He was everywhere a nine-year-old’s eyes could land.
Studies later showed that by the early nineties, Joe Camel was as recognizable to six-year-olds as Mickey Mouse. Six-year-olds. Kids who couldn’t tie their shoes could identify a cigarette mascot from across a parking lot. R.J. Reynolds spent over $75 million a year on the campaign, and Camel’s market share among underage smokers went from 0.5% to 32.8% in three years.
I obviously didn’t know any of that in 1993. I just knew that Joe Camel was cool. Skateboarding was cool. Punk rock was cool. And smoking was cool. These were not separate categories in my nine-year-old brain. They were all part of the same package. This is the thing you did if you weren’t a boring kid who followed the rules.
And I was not a boring kid who followed the rules.
I got a lot of attention from “adults,” older kids in my life that thought it was hilarious to give me cigarettes or just believed my confidence meant I had to be old enough. I could buy my own packs from the gas station, which is insane to think about now. Often times I could just say it was for someone’s Mom. Sometimes we would go out of state for Church mission trips and I would convince whatever college kid volunteers we had helping out to take me to get smokes and stuff. I think they thought it was just fun to see the pastor’s kid smoke. Different times.
Here’s where it gets into degenerate territory, and I say that with nothing but fondness.
There was a family in the neighborhood. Older kids. And when I say they were a bad influence, I mean that in the most appreciative way possible. These kids had it all: porn magazines stashed in every conceivable hiding spot, VHS tapes that would make a sailor blush, and most importantly for this story, access to cigarettes. Cartons of them.
Absolute degenerates. Some of the best memories of my childhood.
Through them and through the older kids at the pool, I went from bumming single cigarettes to having my own supply. I figured out the system fast. Some gas stations had pull-handle vending machines, the old kind, where you put in your quarters and pulled a metal handle and a pack dropped down. No ID check. No cashier giving you a look. Just quarters and gravity. I mapped every single one of those machines on my bicycle route like a little nicotine-seeking Indiana Joe-nes Camel.
When the vending machines weren’t an option, I’d get older kids to buy for me. Stand outside the gas station, hand somebody five bucks, ask for Newports or Marlboro Reds or Camel Filters. Whatever they’d grab. I wasn’t picky. At nine, ten, eleven years old, brand loyalty wasn’t the priority. Having a cigarette was the priority.
And I smoked them everywhere. Behind the church. Behind the pool shed. In the woods. On my bike, one hand on the handlebars, cigarette in the other, feeling like the coolest human being who had ever lived.
I am absolutely certain I did not look as cool as I thought I looked. I was a tiny kid on a Huffy, shaved head, puffing on a Newport short from a box like a tiny, wheezing James Dean. But in my head? In my head I was the man. The pastor’s kid who smoked. Who flicked his cigarette butt across the road with that perfect arc, the one where it hits the asphalt and sparks scatter. I practiced that flick. I perfected that flick. I referred to it as my John Travolta cigarette flick.
I was nine years old, and I was already building my identity around smoking.
This is going to bother some people, and I want to address it head-on.
My dad smoked a pipe. A tobacco pipe, the old-fashioned kind, with the nice-smelling tobacco. Captain Black. And I loved the smell of it. When he’d be outside his office, at Church, at that same ashtray and smoke that pipe, the whole parking lot smelled like warmth and leather and something vaguely sweet. It’s one of my favorite smell memories.
But I have never blamed my dad for my smoking. Not once. Not even a little. I still don’t. I just thought smoking was fucking cool.
I am a marketing guy, that’s how I make my money. That’s how I’ve always made my money. And I understood something early on.
The tobacco industry spent billions in the nineties, and I mean billions with a B, specifically marketing to children. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This is documented fact. Internal memos from Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and others were released during litigation that showed, in black and white, that these companies deliberately targeted minors. They studied adolescent psychology. They understood that the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for long-term decision-making, risk assessment, and impulse control, doesn’t fully develop until you’re about twenty-five years old.
Twenty-five. Not nine. Not twelve. Not fifteen. Twenty-five.
So when a nine-year-old picks up a cigarette and thinks this is cool and I want to do this again, that’s not a moral failing. That’s not bad parenting. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a child’s brain doing exactly what a child’s brain does, seeking novelty, seeking social acceptance, seeking that neurochemical reward, and an entire industry exploiting that biology for profit. Fucking Geniuses.
The nicotine hits your brain in about ten seconds. It triggers a release of dopamine; the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. In an adolescent brain, which is essentially a novelty-seeking missile with legs, that dopamine hit lands like a bomb. The developing brain is more sensitive to nicotine’s rewarding effects and less sensitive to its aversive effects. Translation: a kid gets more of the buzz and less of the nausea. The game is rigged from the first puff.
R.J. Reynolds knew this. Philip Morris knew this. They all knew this. Joe Camel wasn’t an accident. He was a weapon.
And he got me. Hook, line, and sinker. Standing outside a church in Virginia at nine years old, I didn’t stand a chance. But I looked cool. Right?
Here’s where I stop being gentle with you, because this is where it matters.
If you started smoking young, if you were nine or twelve or fifteen, if you were a kid who didn’t know any better, if Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man or your cool older cousin handed you your first cigarette, I get it. I was there. You were a child, and the deck was stacked against you from the jump. The entire system was designed to get you hooked before you had the neurological hardware to understand what “hooked” even meant.
That is not your fault. I need you to hear that. Starting was not your fault.
But you’re not nine anymore.
You’re not twelve. You’re not standing behind a pool shed with a stolen Newport, trying to impress some kid you barely remember. Even if your story started way later, for whatever fucking reason you decided “I will start smoking today.”
Well, today you’re an adult. You have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, or at least as developed as it’s going to get. You can assess risk. You can understand consequences. You can read the surgeon general’s warning on the pack and comprehend, on a real and personal level, what those words mean. And you should, because that’s probably how you are going to die.
If you’re still smoking, and you’re still telling yourself the story about how you started young and it’s just who you are and you can’t help it, I need you to stop telling that story. Right now. Today. Because that story is a cage you built for yourself, and you’ve been sitting in it for years, and the door has been open the whole damn time. They will tell that story about you later and man, you sound like a real special kind of idiot when you say it out loud.
You got hooked. None of that was your fault. Even if you did know better, I’m going to venture to say you’d take it back.
You’re not a kid anymore. And staying hooked? That’s a choice. It’s a choice you make every single day, every time you tap that pack against your palm, every time you flick that lighter, every time you stand outside in the rain because you can’t go ninety minutes without nicotine in your bloodstream.
I started at nine years old with a lipstick-stained Marlboro Light that I smoked backwards outside a church. I was a child who didn’t know what he was doing.
I stopped at thirty-four. As a man who finally did.
You were a kid then. Or a distraught 20 year old. Or just wanted to have one with a beer. Well, it’s time to stop blaming the past for the decisions you are continuing to make every single day.