The Addict Kid
My brother and I shared a bedroom in the basement of our house in Virginia. The room itself was partially finished, but I could get behind the panels from the ceiling and there were little rafters from an unfinished ceiling. Along one wall, cheap wood paneling, the kind that’s not really attached to anything structural, just sort of leaned up against the studs and nailed in place because somebody’s dad figured that was close enough to a wall.
I would lay on our carpet, a cool two-tone red and black carpet my parents probably let us get because it was on sale it was so ugly. I used to lay down and listen to the alternative rock station on a giant AM/FM receiver I had etched my favorite stations into the plexiglass with a knife so I knew exactly where to stop to get my fill of Chris Cornell belting out Black Hole Sun.
Behind that paneling, in the gap between the fake wall and the real wall, I kept cartons of cigarettes. Full cartons. Not single packs tucked into a jacket pocket like some kind of amateur. Cartons. Ten packs of twenty, two hundred cigarettes at a time, slid into the dark space behind the wood like I was running a distribution operation out of my parents’ basement.
Which, in a way, I was. The distribution operation was: from the carton, to my lungs, around the clock, while looking my parents dead in the face and saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I would even sometimes smoke in the bathroom and my parents would be pounding on the door and I would deny deny deny. My parents are not stupid.
And I was eleven years old.
The thing about hiding cartons in an unfinished basement is that it’s actually pretty easy. The paneling had gaps. There were a hundred little pockets and crevices in that room where you could stash contraband, and I found every single one of them with the thoroughness of a DEA agent working in reverse.
The hard part wasn’t hiding the cigarettes. The hard part was everything else.
Nobody tells you this about being a kid smoker: the smell follows you like a ghost. It’s in your hair. It’s on your fingers. It’s in the fabric of every piece of clothing you own. You can wash your hands. You can chew gum. You can spray yourself with Bod Man until you smell like a department store had a seizure. It doesn’t matter. The smoke gets into everything, and parents, despite what kids think, are not stupid.
My parents caught me all the time.
The confrontations became a routine. Like a sitcom that had been running too many seasons and kept recycling the same plot.
Episode 47: Dad Finds the Pack in the Jacket.
“What’s this?” “That’s not mine.” “It was in your jacket.” “Someone must have put it there.” “Someone put a pack of Camel Filters in your jacket pocket?” “Yeah.” “Who?” “I don’t know. Some kid at school.”
Cue laugh track. Roll credits.
Episode 63: Mom Smells Smoke in the Basement.
“Have you been smoking down here?” “No.” “I can smell it.” “That’s… the dryer.” “The dryer smells like cigarettes?” “I don’t know what cigarettes smell like, Mom.”
We both know I know exactly what cigarettes smell like. I have two packs behind the paneling six feet from where she’s standing.
The lies were so transparent they were almost insulting. Not to my parents, to the concept of lying itself. I was terrible at it. I just didn’t care. Getting caught was an inconvenience, not a deterrent. They’d find a pack, throw it away, give me a lecture, and I’d nod solemnly and wait for them to go upstairs so I could pull another pack from behind the ceiling tile.
It was like whack-a-mole, except the mole had a nicotine addiction and a complete lack of respect for authority.
Something took me about twenty years to understand.
I didn’t respect my parents. But I loved them. Big difference.
Respect means you listen. Respect means you take their authority seriously. Respect means that when your father, a pastor, a man of God, a guy who is genuinely trying to raise you right, tells you to stop smoking, you at least consider the possibility that he might have a point.
I didn’t consider that possibility. Not for one second. Not once in my entire adolescence did I think, maybe Dad knows something I don’t. The idea was laughable to me. I was eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, and I already had the unshakeable conviction that I knew better than every adult in my life. That’s not respect.
Love was different. Love was sitting at the dinner table and genuinely enjoying being around my family even as I plotted my next smoke break. Love was feeling guilty when my mom cried about it, but not guilty enough to stop. Love was understanding, on some level I couldn’t have articulated, that these people wanted the best for me and were terrified of what I was doing to myself.
I just didn’t let any of that change my behavior. Because at that point, cigarettes were making the decisions for me.
At some point my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents for a week or two.
I flew there on an airplane with nearly a full carton of cigarettes in my luggage.
I was twelve years old, and I had packed cigarettes the way other kids packed their Game Boy. Essential travel supplies. Non-negotiable. The thought of being somewhere without cigarettes wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was unthinkable. So I brought them. Nearly a full carton, distributed strategically throughout my bags and my person like I was smuggling them across a border. I don’t think I was addicted yet, but mentally I wanted to be. I was excited about cigarettes.
The second I got to my grandparents’ house, before I even unpacked my clothes, I found hiding spots. Under the bed. Behind the dresser. In the closet, wedged between shoeboxes. In the garage behind some paint cans. I stashed packs the way a squirrel buries acorns, compulsively, strategically, in enough locations that losing one stash wouldn’t be catastrophic.
My grandfather found them almost immediately.
The man was no fool. He’d probably been briefed by my parents: Watch him. He smokes. He hides them. So he went looking, and he found a pack, and he threw it away. Didn’t yell. Didn’t lecture. Just found it, tossed it, and went about his day.
I had another pack out of hiding within the hour.
Like a magician, I’d pull another one out of nowhere. He’d throw away the pack in the nightstand, and I’d have one from behind the water heater. He’d find the one behind the water heater, and I’d produce one from inside a boot in the closet. He’d check the boots, and I’d have one taped to the underside of the dresser drawer.
He was going crazy. Absolutely losing his mind. Every day the same ritual. Find the cigarettes. Throw them away. Watch his twelve-year-old grandson somehow, impossibly, be smoking again by sundown.
I think about that now, and it breaks my heart a little. This man, my grandfather, who loved me, who was trying to help, was watching a child display textbook addiction behavior, and neither of us had the framework to understand what we were looking at. He thought I was being stubborn. I thought I was being clever. We were both wrong. I was an addict. A twelve-year-old addict playing keep-away with a substance that had already rewired his brain.
The cigarettes weren’t the only thing I collected. I had lighters. A lot of lighters. Disposable Bics in every color, but also Zippos, the real ones, the metal ones with the satisfying click. I loved Zippos the way some kids loved baseball cards. The weight of them. The sound. The way the flame danced differently than a Bic’s static little tongue. I’d flip them open and closed, open and closed, that distinctive clink-clink that every smoker knows.
Those lighters were part of the identity. Part of the kit. You couldn’t be a smoker without a lighter, and you couldn’t be a cool smoker without a Zippo. So I had a collection. They lived alongside the cartons, behind the paneling, in the ceiling, in the pockets of every jacket I owned. I would go to Spencer’s in the mall and steal at least one a week. I wish I still had those lighters, but that’s another story.
My parents found those too. Finding a Zippo lighter in your twelve-year-old son’s room isn’t exactly subtle.
I pushed back on everything. Every conversation about smoking became a battle. Not because I had good arguments, my arguments were terrible, the arguments of a child defending an indefensible position, but because surrender wasn’t in my vocabulary. My parents could take my cigarettes. They could take my lighters. They could ground me, lecture me, pray over me, cry in front of me. None of it was going to work, because none of it addressed the actual problem.
The actual problem was that I was addicted to nicotine, and I was eleven years old, and nobody, including me, understood what that really meant.
Eventually, my parents made a decision. And it was a big one.
They sent me to Idaho. To a boarding school. One of those places that you have seen in the documentaries lately. The kind of place that makes the news now, decades later, when people start talking about what actually went on there.
I was there for three years.
That’s when my parents gave up. Not on me, they never gave up on me. But on the idea that they could fix this at home. They had tried talks. They had tried punishment. They had tried my grandparents. They had tried everything in their toolkit, and nothing worked, because their toolkit was designed for a rebellious kid and what they had was an addict.
And smoking was probably a big piece of what got me sent. It wasn’t the only thing, I was a handful in every conceivable way, and the cigarettes were more symptom than cause, but the smoking represented something. It represented a kid who was completely, utterly beyond their ability to control. A kid who would look his pastor father in the eye and lie about the smoke still curling off his fingers. A kid who couldn’t be trusted, couldn’t be reasoned with, and couldn’t be left unsupervised for thirty minutes without finding a way to poison himself.
So they sent me away.
What matters about that school for this story: there was zero access to cigarettes. Zero. This wasn’t a place where you could sneak out to the 7-Eleven. This wasn’t a place where you could bum one from an older kid behind the gym. This was the middle of nowhere Idaho, structured down to the minute, supervised around the clock.
And you know what? I didn’t miss it.
I had been smoking close to a pack every few days before I went. That’s not light use for a kid. That’s real, consistent, daily nicotine intake. By any medical definition, I was physically dependent. And yet, when I got to that school and cigarettes simply weren’t an option, I… adjusted. It wasn’t on my mind. There were so many other things to deal with, the culture shock, the rules, the intensity of the place… that smoking just fell off the radar.
This taught me something I wouldn’t fully understand for another fifteen years: I didn’t have a problem quitting. I had a problem staying quit when cigarettes were available.
When the option was removed entirely, when it wasn’t willpower versus temptation but simply the absence of the substance, my brain moved on. Found other things to fixate on. Other ways to get its dopamine. The addiction wasn’t some unbreakable chain. It was more like a current in a river, powerful as hell when you were in the water, but step out onto the bank and it couldn’t touch you. You’re going to realize this exists in yourself, but it’s harder.
The problem, of course, is that the real world isn’t a boarding school in Idaho. The real world has gas stations on every corner. And eventually, I had to go back to it.
Here’s what I believe, and I’m not going to dress it up.
You decided to start smoking. Whenever, for whatever reason. Maybe you were nine like me, maybe you were twenty-five and bummed one at a bar. It sucks that you did, but you did and it is what it is.
It’s hard to quit smoking. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But it’s not as hard as drowning in your own lungs in front of your family.
There’s still time. Your body can recover, and it recovers faster than you think. But the longer you smoke, the harder it gets. Every day you wait is a day you’re making the climb steeper.
I want to be clear about something because this is where I’m different from every other quit-smoking book you’ve ever picked up. I have never, at any point in my life, disliked smoking. Not once. I LOVED cigarettes. I loved everything about them. The ritual, the taste, the way they made me feel, the identity I built around them. Smoking controlled my life, and looking back that seems annoying, but I was willing to sacrifice all of it because I loved cigarettes that much. Every restaurant, every flight, every job, every relationship filtered through whether I could smoke there. I gave all of that up gladly because I LOVED smoking.
But I did not love the idea of dying for them. And I drew that line. Now I’ve got my life back.
I don’t care if you take my advice. I really don’t. I just want to share it because I know there are people out there who actually want to take control of their life. They don’t think it’s a sickness. They don’t sit around complaining about how hard it is. They also don’t act tough about it. They just take action.
And yeah, smoking is a physical addiction. Your body is hooked. But you are stronger than it. Everyone is. I encourage everyone to do what works for them. Check all the attempts off your list.
If this is your first round, you probably want a crutch. Get it out of the way. Grab some patches or gum, or both, and don’t use both at the same time, by the way, no bueno, you will get sick. This stuff is not to replace the amount of nicotine you had. This stuff is meant to ease the edges. You’re still gonna be uncomfortable. But it’s less uncomfortable. You will probably fail the first time you try to quit, but you should try. Every fucking day you do not smoke is a day your body is stoked.
I just want to say this. I HATED anti-smokers. I LOVED cigarettes. It was until I realized what they were doing to me, like until it FIRST DAWNED ON ME that this is what I’m running (or walking while wheezing) towards, and that scared the shit out of me. I don’t want to die.
Even if you do want to die, THAT’S how you want to do it? I can think of about 800 better vices and most of them involve cake of some kind.
Picture your worst way to die. Whatever you just thought of, if you keep inhaling this shit, you will die worse than that. You will literally not be able to breathe. Not like oops I’m choking on a meatball and someone does the Heimlich. Like someone is standing on your chest poking holes in your lungs slowly, for weeks or months or years, and they are pouring slime into your mouth and lungs from the inside and all you can do is fight off choking until you can’t anymore.
I do not want that for anyone who wants to quit. But I am also fully aware that until you accept that’s your future, you will not quit.
Your call.