The final cigarette

NEW YEAR'SDAY was five months ago. The date was July 25. On that cold, windy Sunday in winter, I made a New Year's resolution to stop smoking. I stopped smoking. Just like that, straight away, from 50 a day to none, no sweat, no worries, not a problem, apart from suffering the agonies of hell and wishing I was dead.

But I was used to feeling that way. I felt that way when I woke up on July 25. I had a hangover. The best way I knew to cure it was to smoke a lot of cigarettes. One of the great things about smoking is that it's a misery stronger than any other misery; its pain dulls all other pains. The hangover gave up its fight as smoking delivered unto me its sweet wispy sickness.

Cigarettes always made me feel lousy. I felt lousy 50 times a day. Credit where credit's due; cigarettes earned my respect for their potent brand of lousiness.

It was all very well to lounge about on the back porch that Sunday morning smoking and wishing I was dead, but I had an appointment. My fiancee had helped to set it up. She'd never seemed to mind my smoking all that much until we became parents, and now she worried that our daughter would lose her father.

The two of them had some sort of heart-to-heart about it at bedtime one night. I responded from the heart: "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just get off my god-damned back," etc. Smokers loathe being lovingly encouraged to cut down or quit. When I finished raving, I was given an email address for a woman from stop-smoking programme Allen Carr's Easyway.

All smokers have heard of Easyway, and every other quack cure. I'd heard of it from smokers who talked about reading Allen Carr's book of instructions on how to stop smoking. A lot of them said it'd worked, but not for long. I'd also heard of the Easyway one-day seminar from a smoker who said it'd worked and continued to work.

I booked online. I had nothing to lose except the $495 cost of the seminar. But that was chickenfeed. My weekly smoking bill was about $210, or $10,000 a year. I routinely tortured myself with how much money I spent on cigarettes. It inspired more terror than any of the lame health warnings on packets of smokes, with their silly little pictures of lungs and gums gone bad.