As close as I can chart it, I started about August 5th, 1954. It was my parent's honeymoon.
I had my first dose of nicotine about 90 seconds after I was conceived. I'm sure that my mom & dad both lit up a Kent (with the patented Micronite Filter!) right after sex. And I probably got about twenty to thirty doses a day, intravenously, for the following nine months.
The oral doses started immediately thereafter (my mother has informed me) as about the first thing the ladies did when they regained their senses after childbirth was have a smoke in the maternity ward. Between the hopped up mother's milk, and the general smokey Catholic atmosphere at St. Mark's Hospital, I was well supplied. Soon after, we went home.
Since my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, landlord, and everyone else in my local atmosphere smoked, I survived on a regular diet of second-hand fumes (and the very rare...like three in 17 years...cigarettes swiped from my mom) until it was legal to buy my own. Stealing was wrong, and I didn't need to steal them anyway. All
I had to do was breathe.
At the wise old age of 17, I went down to the local PX and picked up some Borkum Riff, and a Medico briar pipe; as College Guys were too cool and philosophical to smoke cigarettes.
That was 1972, and you see, not once did the idea of
not smoking ever enter my mind. I was a "legal" adult. Adults smoke.
And yet it wasn't smoking itself that was the passage rite of adulthood. It was getting a job, and going down to the store to buy your very own. Ahhhhh......
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