One thing that wasn't sad about that job was that you could smoke inside the office building. The man that owned it smoked three packs a day and had decreed that it would be so. I dug on that because I was born decades too late to be able to smoke inside ANY building. So I got a huge charge out of it. But this isn't a story about the building. This is a story about Jerry.
Jerry disapproved of my smoking. Jerry had once been a smoker, and in the grand hypocritical tradition of the reformed, he was constantly explaining how bad smoking was for me. Gee, really? But one day, he told me this:
Jerry smoked two packs a day for 25 years. *25 years*! That's longer than I've even been alive. But on a brisk spring day in 1970, Jerry decided that he wasn't going to smoke anymore.
So he quit.
Cold turkey.
Just like that.
After he got done telling the story, I stared at him in wonder. In one quick moment in 1970, Jerry had amputated a major part of his existence. He had banished his best friend. He took something warm and comfortable and pushed it right out of his life. Medically, that was probably the best decision to make. Emotionally, it was probably really rough.
A few days after he told me this story I asked him how long it was before he actually stopped craving cigarettes. He looked at me for a few seconds and then closed his eyes. He steepled his fingers, pushed them up to the bridge of his nose and said, "20 years."
The man had spent 20 years trying to rid himself of the memory of his addiction! He had 20 long years of remembering what he was missing.
He later confessed that he still had one cigar a month, but you don't inhale cigars. The oral fixation of the thing was still there, but the comforting sensation of deeply inhaling and slowly exhaling was gone.
To this day, I don't know how he did it. I don't think that I could withstand 20 years of forbidden fruit. Cigarettes are strong and I am weak. I accept this.
And so ends the saga of Jerry: The man who said no.