Like every other Gen Xer, I learned to smoke because a neighborhood girl named Tammy had a grandmother who was dying of cancer and therefore didn’t have time to notice that Tammy was stealing her Benson & Hedges 100s.

It was a heavenly time. In the mid-to-late-’80s, non-chain liquor stores would sell to my baby face. Evanston Township High School even had a luxurious smoking courtyard for us teenagers. So easy to be goth all winter!

After school we could sit for hours in the brick-walled rooms of Cafe Express, smoking indoors like an infestation. Suburban summer nighttime was Night Train time, for drinking 40s of Olde E on your bike, smoking into the wind, followed by vomiting into anything.

When I see teenagers like the one I was, I want to make a senior citizen’s arrest.

I strode through the end of my high school years in a smoke bubble, insulated from the horrors of emotion and exertion. Smoking is one of the perfect solutions to being a teenager, right up there with Manic Panic hair dye and murder. Teachers and counselors must have felt like the Hubble telescope, peering across a vast gulf at a gaseous planet. My exterior was an opaque blue-gray swirl of carbon monoxide. No one could even glimpse the human trash can within.