Confessions of a Conflicted Smoker

The state's smoking rate has dropped to an all-time low, and the list of places where it's banned continues to grow. My cigarette habit has left me demonized, ostracized, and marginalized. What would it take for me to quit?

These days, he who smokes often smokes alone. (Joel Benjamin)

Twelve of us sit in a waiting room overlooking Beacon Street in Brookline. I can't say what is going through their heads, but as I look at them, I get the feeling that many are like me: Each face has the look of someone who has been chased into a corner.

After a few minutes in which my fellow soon-to-be ex-smokers are variously pacing, pretending to leaf through fashion magazines, or simply closing their eyes and trying to take deep breaths, the woman who had checked everyone in and accepted their $65 emerges from behind her desk and makes the announcement: Cigarettes, lighters, matches, pipes, all of it, in the trash can. Right now. I watch a middle-aged woman reach into her bag and pull out one of those snap-close purses that holds her 100s and her lighter; from the haggard look of her purse and her skin, I surmise that she has been at this a long time. As her fingers touch the pack of cigarettes, she glances at her husband, who is sitting next to her digging for his own pack, and gives him that look that says: "I guess this is it."

A moment later, Yefim Shubentsov, the man better known as the Mad Russian, barrels into the room and urges us to come quickly into his office. Shubentsov claims to have cured 137,000 smokers with his special "biological energy," and many swear by his approach as the only way to quit. For the next 90 minutes, Shubentsov barks at us with his almost incomprehensible accent, brags incessantly about himself, "cures" threepeople in our group of their hearing problems by waving his hands in front of their ears as if he were trying to waft a fart to his nostrils -- he does this "at no extra charge" -- and performs other magic hand wavings to rid people of circulation problems, back pain, and anxiety, also at no additional charge. It goes on too long, and the expressions of the faces of my fellow soon-to-be ex-smokers moves from interested -- or at least concentrating with all their might to understand what he is saying -- to one that matches my own. By the end of the session, I would describe the general dynamic as "What the hell is this?"

When the group session is over, he sends us back into the waiting room and then sees us one by one in his office. When it is my turn, he tells me to sit down, close my eyes, and envision myself smoking. After a few moments during which I picture a cigarette hitting my lips, Shubentsov's mouth lets go some sort of "whoosh," and I feel a puff of warm breath across my face. When I open my eyes, he looks into them and tells me that if this is going to work, I have to want it to work.

Well, I knew that.

What makes me conflicted as a trying-to-quit smoker is the wimpiness of my rationale for trying to quit. The health risks from smoking are real and documented and horrific. They are the only reason anyone should need to quit smoking. They are not, I am embarrassed to say, the reason I want to quit smoking. The reason I want to quit smoking is that our society has made it so damn shameful to be a smoker that I don't want to suffer that indignity anymore.

In late July, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced that the adult smoking rate in the Commonwealth had dropped to 16.4 percent in 2007, an all-time low, below the national average of 19.8 percent of adults, and the fourth lowest in the country. Four years ago, the state banned smoking in virtually every restaurant, bar, and workplace, and just last month, health officials reported that that move had led to nearly 600 fewer deaths from heart attack every year since then. Now, the Boston Public Health Commission wants to further its attack and ban smoking in the city's cigar and hookah bars (a ruling, expected this month, was not made at press time).

The ban is just one part of the war on smokers. There are also massive national and local anti-smoking campaigns, ceaseless litigation against the big tobacco companies, a health-conscious populace that is increasingly aware of what they put into their bodies, and an endlessly rising cigarette tax that has priced many people out of the game. (The state's $2.51 cigarette tax helps drive up the cost of my American Spirit pack to eight bucks.) These are the things that get studied, that get statistics thrown behind them, that get announced in press releases.

Then there is the other side, the temperature of the nonsmoking population that has forced the smoker -- those who still dare smoke -- into what has become the most reviled and marginalized legal subculture in American society.

The war has been brewing for some time. In 1993, the comedian Denis Leary, who grew up in Worcester and made his name in Boston comedy clubs, became a star when he released the stand-up album No Cure for Cancer. Much of it dealt with how a regular guy -- and a regular smoker -- had to battle with a society that seemed always to be coming after him. "What's the law now? You can only smoke in your apartment, under a blanket, with all the lights out? Is that the rule now, huh?!"

Fast-forward 15 years, and it's an all-too-prescient joke. In Massachusetts, smokers have been chased out of the bar and the office and, often, their own house. They spend lots of time at the loading-dock end of society, back with the dumpsters and the rats. They get dirty looks on the street. They get lectured by their friends and family. If they are married to my wife, they get threatened with everything you can threaten someone with.

It is all, all of it, part of the effort to "de-normalize" smoking, and if you ask me, I think we deserve it. But I am a conflicted smoker, a secret smoker, who has wanted to quit almost from the day I started. I am weak for being unable to quit, but I am meek for letting others tell me what I choose to do is not something I'm supposed to do.

Steve Helfer looks an awful lot like the actor Sam Elliott (known for his role as the narrator in The Big Lebowski), though his mustache is not as bushy and his voice is, interestingly, not as Marlboro-deep. The 61-year-old is a lifelong smoker who describes his mission as attempting to frustrate what he calls "public-health fascism." He hosts a weekly program on Cambridge Community Television called The Smoking Section, which is dedicated to that ideal. Immediately after walking out of the Mad Russian's office, I go to Central Square to watch Helfer do a live broadcast.

That morning, I'd read a story in the Globe about how the Boston Public Health Commission was hoping to expand its 2003 ordinance that banned smoking in bars to include outdoor restaurant patios and the city's four cigar bars, which had been exempted from the initial ordinance, and to prohibit the sale of tobacco in pharmacies and on college campuses. Helfer had attended a hearing on the matter the previous day to testify against the ban, and when I meet him in the lobby of the studio, he is still fuming about the proposals. In particular, he is angry about the ban on the cigar bars, which many see as the smoker's last haven.

"It's not enough to warn people," Helfer says as his face goes into a practiced look of disgust. "It's not enough to discourage people. As Barbara Ferrer [the executive director of the health commission] said at the hearing, she expects nobody will be smoking in 2025. My question to her is: What about those who refuse? How are you going to treat those people? It opens the door to potential abuse, a lot of which has already occurred."

Helfer, who lives in Cambridge, says he is not a libertarian. His war is against the indignities he must suffer as a smoker as part of the effort to protect everyone else. Smokers who demand rights are not hard to find -- there were others at the hearing -- but Helfer goes further than most. He espouses what he sees as the benefits of smoking and links it to everything from peaceful conviviality to the reason we have had such great jazz and literature in this country. Like his nemeses, the anti-smoking forces, Helfer is able to fire off selective statistics in an attempt to support almost everything he says, but his chief issue is one of control.

The Smoking Section is very public-access. Helfer's set consists of a framed black-and-white poster of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra -- all having a smoke and a laugh -- and his logo is a crudely drawn image of a cigarette burning in an ashtray. During the half-hour show I see, he rails against the Boston proposals, unintentionally hangs up twice on his only caller before finally getting him on the air, speaks lovingly of his "Smoker of the Week" -- a 107-year-old guy from Denver whose obituary he had read recently -- and works off a theme that plays on the line between leadership and dictatorship. When it is over, Helfer, who is an assistant at the Harvard Law School Library, goes into the lobby and rolls a cigarette. To smoke it, he has to move outside.

Most people start smoking when they're in high school or college. I despised cigarettes all through that, never touched one, and really, really hated the fact that my father smoked. A year after college, in 1999, I moved to Dublin for the summer. On my first day there, I saw a guy rolling a cigarette in a bar and asked if I could have it. I cannot tell you why I did this, other than that I was caught up in the idea of trying new experiences in a new country. The cigarette made me feel terrible, and I went outside, dizzy and half drunk, and decided I needed to go home immediately, though I had no idea how to get back to my flat. I walked aimlessly for an hour, feeling quite sick, until some kind Irishman told me I was going in the wrong direction and put me in a cab. After that, I saw smoking as some sort of challenge, something to understand and get used to. I didn't intend to become a smoker; I just wanted to get to the point where I could enjoy smoking the way a smoker seemed to. Before I knew it, I was on an Aer Lingus flight home, carrying my luggage and a half-a-pack-a-day habit.

The day after the Mad Russian tried to talk me out of smoking and Steve Helfer tried to talk me into it, I sit on my porch, smoking what I vow will be my last cigarette -- I have not had one since leaving Shubentsov's office, but I do not feel cured -- and take stock of my situation.

My first thought is how much I hate myself for taking on this story assignment. When I signed on, I had been smoke-free for four months -- a period, I might add for my own validation, in which I took not one but two trips to smoking-crazy Europe and survived -- but then I started reporting on smoking and hanging with smokers, and when I got stressed trying to write a very long article about something else, I caved. Not all the way, just a little (if there is such a thing), one or two here and there. But the craving was not gone. And as I sit on the porch, I do the math. I have been making attempts to quit almost from the moment I got hooked and realize that I am at the tail end of nine years of nicotine patches and nicotine gum; and buying whole packs "to just smoke one" and throwing the rest away; and using an herbal remedy that promises to clean the nicotine out my system and comes with a really strong jar of some kind of aromatherapy that is supposed to snap my brain out of a craving; and reading a very good book on The Easy Way to Stop Smoking -- not "quit" smoking, because quitting sounds as if you're giving up on something good; and visiting a Russian healer. And it is 11 a.m. on a beautiful Friday, and there is still one cigarette left in the pack, so I figure I'd better smoke that one, too -- be done with it for real -- and then take my dog for a walk and try not to think about anything. Then the phone rings.

"How are you doing?" a voice barks in a Russian accent. It is Shubentsov.

"I'm good," I lie.

He senses my fib and immediately launches into a pep talk, repeating the close-your-eyes-and-I'll-whoosh-it-away thing. He moves fast and seems ready to hang up, but he asks me quickly if I have any questions.

"Why do people smoke?" I say.

"Let's be reasonable," he says. "First cigarette doesn't give anybody pleasure. They begin to smoke because their friends are smoking. They want to feel like adults when they are kids. Men begin to smoke because they want to feel like men. And they quit smoking because they want to feel like men. Same thing."

There are a lot of things that come out of Shubentsov's mouth that sound ludicrous to me. But this is not one of them. What I want is to run with the crowd again.

The cigar is classically manly, even phallic, and Cigar Masters, on Boylston Street, looks as if it were designed for the Hemingway-esque man's man: dark wood and leather coated in a layer of testosterone. Cigar Masters is technically a cigar bar for cigar smokers, but you can smoke cigarettes in there as well (they sell high-end cigarettes, but if you bring your own, they charge you a $5 "lighting fee," because city ordinance requires that they derive at least 60 percent of their revenue from tobacco, so that it's a smoking bar and not a bar where you can smoke). On a Tuesday night, I stop in, hoping to find cigarette smokers who can speak to what I am going through -- this feeling that we are ostracized by society. None of the cigarette smokers wants to talk on the record, but the cigar smokers do, if only to make the case that they are irate that they, the elite of the tobacco-smoking world, are being pursued by the city as if they were base cigarette smokers.

As far as smokers go, the clientele in Cigar Masters is an anomaly. These people are high-flying MBA types who play golf and pay to have their shoes shined (there's a shine booth inside) and think nothing of a $30 cigar. The typical cigarette smoker is quite the opposite: blue-collar, less educated, lower income. In the city of Boston, according to figures from a 2006 survey headed up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 23 percent of those with less than a high school education and 23 percent of high school graduates reported smoking in the last 30 days, compared with just 11 percent of college graduates. In terms of income, the numbers were similar: 24 percent of those with a household income of less than $25,000 were smokers, while just 12 percent of those with a household income of $50,000 or more were. Asians were the least likely to smoke -- just 6 percent -- while whites, blacks, and Latinos were all fairly even, at 16, 18, and 19 percent, respectively. If you break it down by neighborhood, north Dorchester (24 percent) and East Boston (23 percent) had the highest concentration of smokers, while West Roxbury had the lowest, at just under 10 percent.

In the cigar bar, I am lectured by a couple of cigar smokers, even though I repeatedly acknowledge that I can see their point: that the smoking ban was initially designed to protect bar and restaurant employees from having to work in an environment with secondhand smoke, while everyone who comes to a cigar bar, including the employees, accepts this willingly (all of the employees confirm this). I am ready to leave when I spot a guy leaning against a wall, alone, watching a Red Sox game on television. He looks much younger than everyone else in the bar and more blue-collarish, so I go over to talk to him. His name is Anthony Tusa, he is 25 (and looks younger), and he says he works in IT and lives at home with his family in Medford. He says his father is a cigar smoker, too, but they don't smoke in the house. Anthony Tusa has been coming to Cigar Masters for the last couple of years so that he won't bother all the people that get so bothered about smoking. The problem with the whole thing -- the stigma, the societal war, the government regulations -- is that they are taking away something he holds dear: choice. "You kicked it out of bars, so you gave people an option, because there were no options for nonsmokers," he says as he rolls a $20 Bolivar in his fingers. "Now there will be no options for smokers."

A few days after my session with the Mad Russian, I call five people from my group to see how they are doing. Three don't return my calls. But I manage to speak to two of them. Both of the women -- a 27-year-old realtor who's been smoking since she was 18 and a middle-aged woman from Michigan who has been smoking for 40 years and flew in for the day just to see Shubentsov -- say they want to quit smoking because they are tired of everything it comes with. And both say they smoked immediately after the session.

I had, at least, held out until the morning after the session, and then again for nearly a week after Shubentsov whooshed me over the phone. I don't think it matters, because if I had let it work, if I had quit smoking forever, I would have been doing it for the wrong reason: because some outside source made me.

Last year, my father, who is 60 and had been smoking his entire life, had to have one of his carotid arteries cleaned out. It was 90 percent blocked. The other one was entirely blocked. He finally quit. I think about this -- the classic medical wake-up call -- when I go to Binney Street to talk to people in the smoking hut behind a building between Children's Hospital and Beth Israel. The benches inside the smoking hut are literally looking at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and I think it will be a fitting place to ask people how they can still smoke when faced with that and everything else. But when I get there, I peek inside and see a 30-something woman nervously smoking. She is wearing a security badge that identifies her as a parent of a patient. I can't bring myself to talk to her, can't bring myself to go inside. Talking to another smoker isn't going to change anything, and asking this anxious mother about her choice seems cheap.

I bought a pack of cigarettes when I started writing this story. It took me two days to get here, and every time I felt that old craving, I gave into it. I have never enjoyed smoking less. I just smoked another cigarette while writing this, and I'm ready to make a choice. But it has to be my choice, and the fact is that my heart isn't in it anymore.

When I was reporting, I really wanted to find that super-anomaly, the smoker who definitely shouldn't be smoking -- the marathoner, the cardiologist, the pregnant woman -- and ask why he or she stuck with the choice. I know they're out there, but I just couldn't find them. Or, I should say, I hit a point where I didn't need to. Because as far as anomalies go, I am in the lowest statistical category I could find on the CDC website. Only 7 percent of people with graduate degrees still smoke. I have a graduate degree.

It's past time I smartened up. And I don't need anyone else to tell me that.

Billy Baker lives in Cambridge and is working on a book about jugglers and the subculture. His last article for the Globe Magazine was about the future of crossing the street. E-mail him at billybaker@gmail.com.