now.
I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own. I can’t count on the universe to sate my many holes: physical, emotional, spiritual. So I take matters into my own hands. I give myself little “doggy treats” for being alive. Each time I unwrap a new piece of nicotine gum and put it in my mouth (roughly every thirty minutes), I generate a sense of synthetic hope and potentiality. I am self-soothing. I am “being my own mommy.” I am saying, Here you go, my darling. I know life hurts. I know reality is itchy. But open your mouth. A fresh chance at happiness has arrived!
I’ve been chewing nicotine gum for twelve years. I haven’t had a cigarette in ten years. So you might say the gum works, except now I have a gum problem. I am so addicted to the gum that I have to order it from special “dealers” in bulk on eBay. I get gum on all the bedding. There are many reasons why I don’t think I will have children, but the necessity of getting off the gum during pregnancy is one of them. When it comes down to anything vs. the gum, I always choose the gum.
Now let me just say, before we go any further, that if you’re thinking of using nicotine gum to quit smoking you should not let my experience scare you. I am the addict’s addict. Everything I touch turns to dopamine. I can even turn people into dopamine (ask me how!).
My first cigarette was a Marlboro Red that I stole from my dad and smoked alone in front of my bedroom mirror. I felt a sudden coldness in my lungs, exhaled sexily, and then the room spun around. The vertigo scared me, as do all abrupt shifts in consciousness (I prefer a steady high). I was fourteen.
My next cigarettes, at sixteen, were Marlboro Lights that I shared with a boyfriend under the stars. They were make-out cigarettes—cigarettes of romance, possibility, and freedom. I noticed that when I smoked I became less hungry, which I loved, because I really wanted to be skinny.
Cigarettes soon became meal postponers, or—when paired with Diet Coke and Trident cinnamon gum—meal replacements. I quickly became a pack-a-day smoker, often two, and required a cigarette smoked out my bedroom window just to leave the house in the morning. I smoked outside the gym. I smoked on Rollerblades. I smoked Marlboro Lights and Parliaments, vanilla bidis and cloves. During a Jim Morrison phase I smoked American Spirits.
My mom didn’t smell my cigarettes because of my dad’s smoking. She believed that my dad had quit, even though the car was full of ash, the garage was full of butts, and she saw him smoking through the window every night. My mom would watch my dad smoke and say, No, he doesn’t smoke. So the smell of cigarettes somehow equated a nonsmoker. So I was left alone.
I then went to college and the logistics of my smoking became an issue. I had a roommate who claimed to be a smoker, but she was a “social smoker” and I was a “never-not-smoking smoker.” When she saw and smelled the level of my compulsion she issued a moratorium on smoking in our room. The room then became an unsafe place for me, as was any place where I couldn’t smoke.
Thus commenced a cycle of smoking regulations by other roommates and friends. I preferred to chain-smoke in isolation rather than not smoke among others. I only felt comfortable around people who smoked like me (every moment, back-to-back, like breathing). Cigarettes had become a problem, and the problem was: How could I consume enough of them while living in society?
I bought my first box of Nicorette at age twenty before a flight to London. I knew that I couldn’t get through the seven hours without some hits of nicotine, and I don’t like suffering. On the flight, a glorious new chapter in the annals of my addictions was revealed to me. I discovered that I wasn’t fiending. The gum even gave me a secret buzz. The best part was, nobody knew I was “smoking” except me. I had arrived.
For the next few years I both smoked and chewed the gum. Sometimes I alternated between the two and sometimes I did a simultaneous smoke ’n chew. Then, over time, the gum’s anytime-anywhere qualities won my heart. Nothing enhances addiction like access and secrecy, and the gum trumps