Quitting

When I started smoking I was sixteen, and my life was very complicated. Large portions of each day were spent trying to disguise the fact that I had an erection. “You always get them just when you have to stand up,” people would complain, because the people I knew were also teenage boys. On weekends we would get together to make a big stink and talk about women. Once, we cycled forty minutes up a hill to buy beer. On the way down the extra momentum meant we didn’t even have to pedal. We laughed about our beer motorcycles the whole way home, and that night I had my first cigarette.