No. 190 - Coffee and Cigarettes, in a Cemetery

It must have been the winter of ’99 – my sophomore year of college – but I had three sophomore years, so maybe it was ’98; I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Point is, it was New Year’s Eve, and I had quit smoking a year ago, and here I was, an hour away from twelve months without a Marlboro.

I was sitting at a bar with my brother and a couple of girls. The joint was loud, packed to the gills with drunkards of every shape and size: middle-aged women looking for young men, service industry folks so high they couldn’t keep their eyes open, and obnoxious college kids. The only thing noticeably absent was a cigarette between my fingers.

So, as the clock rang in the new year, I made a New Year’s resolution to start smoking. Looking back, it was the best resolution I ever made. Never regretted it – not for a second.

If you’ve ever smoked cigarettes, you know of the love affair that ensues once nicotine has you by the balls. That first drag, taken deep into your lungs, is damn near indescribable. Tobacco is proof that there is a God, and that He loves us.

But a year later, I gave them up again. I had woken up in the basement of the Pike house at the University of Georgia on a Sunday morning. It was freezing cold, and if memory serves me right, I actually woke up inside my sweatshirt. Lord knows there wasn’t a stack of blankets down there – just beat-to-hell couches, ashtrays with… oh, I don’t know… several thousand butts, and too many empty beer cans and shattered bottles to count. And no heat.

Everyone had a big night, no different than any other gameday weekend, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, I gave up cigarettes that morning. I was coughing up a weekend’s worth of partying and somehow, in the midst of tar being expelled from my ribs, I mustered up a willpower known only to mountaineers en route to an 8,000-meter summit. Pardon my self-aggrandizing, but it was heroic.

But tobacco has a way of finding its way back into your life. Enter my post-college years as a broker with Smith Barney. After passing the 7 and 66 – which means everyone finally treats you like an employee, regardless of whether they lost money betting against your passing the 7 – I soon found half the office dipped Copenhagen or smoked. High-stress environments tend to invite vice, and during the day, when drinking was frowned upon, tobacco was your only option.

So I started smoking again, but only during happy hours. Not to get off topic, but I cannot imagine being stuck in smoke-free bars these days. When I was in my 20s, every bar had a cloud of smoke on the ceiling. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the way it should be. Anyway, happy hours turned into weekends, and weekends turned into weekdays – a pattern as predictable as the turning of the seasons.

I guess I finally gave cigarettes up for good around the time my daughter was born. I can’t recall the day, but I threw away my pack and that was it. I did the same with booze several years ago – unceremoniously – just had enough.

So I’ve gone almost twenty years without a cigarette. Mind you, I have smoked enough cigars and packed enough pipes to create a hole of my own in the ozone, but no Marlboros or Camels.

All of this leads to a film by Jim Jarmusch called Coffee and Cigarettes. Consisting of eleven black-and-white vignettes, with a host of celebrities playing themselves, it’s just people drinking coffee, talking, and smoking cigarettes. It’s brilliant. I’m a BIG fan of Jarmusch.

If you’re interested in learning about arthouse/independent film, Jarmusch is a great entry point. Here are five films worth checking out, in the order in which I’d suggest someone who’s new to this style of film:

1. Dead Man

2. Coffee and Cigarettes

3. Night on Earth

4. Down by Law

5. Stranger Than Paradise

Jarmusch is an artist who makes films (and music). He is not a filmmaker trying to be an artist – huge difference.

Anyway, I watched Coffee and Cigarettes this afternoon, and damned if it didn’t wake up something that had been asleep in the subconscious – the cigarette smoker.

All of a sudden I’m lost in a fantasy where I’m sitting at a Waffle House counter with a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a newspaper. But even our friends at the WaHo no longer allow smoking, so I left that fantasy and jumped into one where I’m at a bar with a bottle of Coors, but, again, that ain’t so easy either.

So I did what I had to do. I drove to a gas station and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, a BIC lighter, and a coffee. I proceeded to drive to a cemetery, parked, and enjoyed a coffee and cigarette.

*Composed, Edited, and Published in Atlanta, GA