Memoirs of a Flower Child, George S Geisinger [books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

Memoirs of a Flower Child
George S Geisinger

Smoking
Chapter 1

I began smoking cigarettes, believe it or not, at the tender young age of five, when I was “running away from home,” so to speak, on a daily basis, trying to keep away from my hostile, bossy, violent father. I thought surely that man was going to kill one of us, sooner or later, and I did not want to be there to watch.
The places I went, when I would disappear from the house all day, were places I've long since forgotten, but one of the things I do remember was that I would get together with another kid that I had met in my travels, wandering around that town on foot, where we lived. He would steal a pack of his mother's cigarettes, steal a pack of matches, and we'd get together and make ourselves very dizzy smoking an entire pack of cigarettes behind the old movie theater all day long, day after day.
One would wonder how we ever got away with such a stunt at such a tender age, but I can assure you that neither my mother nor my father ever suspected such a thing when I was so small, and were honestly surprised when I finally told them my secret as a young adult.
My dad was a preacher when I was a kid, believe it or not, and he was reassigned to another parish each year or so, probably because he was never popular with his congregations.
As one might imagine, it was quite a challenge to develop new connections for cigarettes in each of the towns we moved to in my childhood. I never did have a regular supply of smokes after we moved away from that first town up on the mountain, where that one little thief and I used to go to the enclosed fire escape behind the town movie theater to smoke ourselves dizzy.
My avoidance of my father, since I was being late or altogether absent from meals as a child, had me in a lot of hot water with my parents when I was growing up. But I would have rather-ed be circumspect about my comings and goings at the time, and do as I pleased, than be obedient or punctual about attending meals and let my folks know my whereabouts like an ordinary kid.
I never did leave town altogether when I ran away from home as a child. I would always come back home for some sort of food and a place to sleep each evening, but my absence was a great vexation to my father, particularly, and I never did tell him that I was running away to avoid him, personally. I never did trust the man with such candor.
My father was a brilliant man, and earned a PhD in educational research by the time I was 13, but he had a chemical imbalance in his brain, which is a hereditary problem requiring medication and therapy. His major failing in life, besides his tendency for violence, was that there did not exist the options for effective medications for that illness at the time, and he was completely uncooperative with the doctors, not submitting to any type of medical help for his illness, and died a lonely, defeated old man, unable to keep reasonable relationships with his estranged wife and alienated children.
He was fired from the ministry when I was about 11 or12 years old. It was a terrible blow to him, and my oldest brother believes he never did recover from that one professional insult. He finished his PhD the next year or so, and deserted his family after an inexcusable bout of violence, and to move to Florida alone. He left his family of a wife, wounded by his own violence, and four teenagers, without any visible means of support. We were forced to call on Mother's family to take us in.

Dad's mother was an incurable chain smoker. I can remember her taking just a few drags on each of her cigarettes, one after the other, putting each one out while it was still quite long, with plenty of it left for more smoking, but putting it out irrationally, then almost immediately lighting up another, taking three or four drags off that one, putting it out in the same irrational way, and so on, as if she was totally unconscious and not in control of the absurdity of what she was doing.
I can remember that she needed Dad's help to get out of bed to shuffle the few feet from her bed to the bathroom. She would shuffle along in her nightclothes, taking forever to walk to the adjacent room, only a few short feet away, and she could hardly get enough breath to use for the walking. Dad or whomever, would normally help her walk that little distance, since it was a time when there was no availability for a portable oxygen supply, or if there were, she was not eligible to utilize it, because she was such a compulsive chain smoker. She would have blown herself sky high.
I'm told she smoked that way till the day she died.

I did not smoke in high school at all, since my few close friends never did smoke, but I did pick the cigarettes up at the onset of my own chemical imbalance in my own brain, when I had my first major nervous breakdown in university as a young adult. Mother seemed to be more upset by the idea that I had picked up cigarettes during my hospitalization, back in the day when one could smoke in hospitals and cigarettes were cheap. She seemed oddly unperturbed that I had been smoking pot and dropping acid, that I had been a flower child with long hair and a drug habit, wasting the money she had been paying for my tuition at university.
The only thing that seemed to really upset her was that I had started smoking cigarettes.
She even agreed to support my return to campus the following year, for more attempt at studies, but the attempt to finish a bachelor's degree with a teaching certificate was an impossibility for me by that time, if it had ever been within the realm of my personal capacities in the first place.
I broke up with my girl, whom I was and still am, thoroughly in love with. I had had enough background with my parents' marriage fiasco, to take any chances with the young lady I was so smitten with after I had a nervous breakdown. I wasn't going to drag the girl I loved through the same ordeal my parents had gone through when I was a child, just because I'd stolen her heart so successfully, and suspected I'd never meet another girl I would feel as much like marrying as I did that young lady at that time.
In fact, I never did marry.
I'd seen too much trouble in my father's household, and in fact, when a doctor finally confirmed that a chemical imbalance in the brain is a hereditary illness, I had myself into the operating room to avoid ever fathering a child of my own. I hated everything my father ever put me through, and knew well enough, at the age of 20, in an instinctive sense, that I had the same malady that my father had.
The only real differences between Dad's illness and my own, were that I was determined to be nonviolent, and take enough responsibility for my treatment to struggle to recover. He was too smart to be sick.

As I've said, I began smoking in earnest in the hospital when I was being treated for my first breakdown, at the age of twenty, and I was a hopelessly addicted chain smoker all my adult life thereafter, until I finally got into a hospital situation, forty years later, which would only allow the use of the patch or the gum, and offered no alternative for me to smoke at all. I simply surrendered to the idea that I could simply stop wearing the patch and go on living without trying to smoke at all. And that's just what I did. I just stopped, after approximately forty years of chain smoking.
One thing I noticed about my smoking, whether I smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipes, or pot; all of it seemed to have an overall calming effect on my nervous system, except that the pot and PCP seemed to confuse the prescribing doctors too much, not to mention the confusion of the patient. Their prescriptions were not as accurate, dealing with my illness, when I was smoking drugs and drinking, as they were when I was finally drug free and sober.
Nonetheless, smoking any form of tobacco had a calming influence on me, generally, until the laws destroyed the overall environment for all of us smokers. I think the tobacco companies used more and more additives as the years went by, also.
I talked to my psychotherapist about this hypothesis at some length, and he agreed, citing his observation that institutions who had large numbers of patients with similar diagnoses to my own, had a lot of addicted tobacco smokers, who always seemed to be smoking as, not only a habit, but as a ritual, in a similar way to the way I smoked. A close friend of mine used to say that I made love to my cigarettes; I did not simply smoke them.
In that forty year interim, my mother and aunt, whom I loved and respected dearly, always pleaded with me to keep trying to quit, but I was not successful until they had both passed away at a ripe old age of ninety, each. They were sisters, born two years apart. Mother passed away a month after her ninetieth birthday, and my aunt passed away two years later, two months after her own ninetieth birthday.
My aunt, in particular, was very spiritually inclined, in a more vocal sense than mother ever was, although mother was a devout Christian woman, and long after my higher power had delivered me from the alcoholism and drug addiction, auntie continued to encourage me to seek God's help to quit smoking.
I eventually did exactly as she suggested, and succeeded in going smoke free at the age of fifty nine, after being an habitual chain smoker since the age of twenty, having quit at least twice a year for all those years, and probably quit more often than that.

By this writing, which is about six months without a cigarette, I have no craving for a cigarette, even when I sit outside in the smoking area here, talking with people who are smoking at the time. I simply enjoy the springtime weather and the company, if I choose to do it.
I am positively free of nicotine addiction, as I am free of all other addictions by the relatively young age of sixty.
I do have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, COPD, which is chronic emphysema, chronic bronchitis and chronic asthma, but those maladies have little effect on my mobility, over all. I'm very susceptible to pneumonia and pleurisy, especially in cold weather, and I was diagnosed with tuberculosis in my youth, but that's long been in remission, and it's not contagious as it stands.
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