Until Death Do Us Part

I still have a certain nostalgia for the days when I smoked. In England, it was the ritual of rolling up Golden Virginia in English pubs with ceilings glowing yellow with the accumulated deposits of nicotine and tar. It was beautiful, atmospheric and, strangely enough, did not smell smoky. In Indonesia, the attraction was the sweet clouds of clove-flavored kreteks. Gudang Garams were my favorite, best taken with dark coffee and a volcano in the background. And if there wasn’t a volcano, well the traffic jams of downtown Jakarta were a pretty good substitute. Head to the States and smoking made you feel like a man. Cowboys smoked and so did the characters in Robert Frank’s The Americans or William Klein’s New York. And if you weren’t a man, cigarettes were torches of freedom. You’ve come a long way baby, who could say no.