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My mother, The Fabulous Betty, was a dancer in the Hollywood musicals of the 1950s, dancing with Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Cyd Charisse. I tell our story in my forthcoming memoir, Love and Cigarettes Coming fall 2025 from Punk Hostage Press.

When I was seven and my sister was nine, we stole our mother, Betty’s, cigarettes and smoked them in the garage while she was at work. It was easy to get away with smoking because our grandmother, Joy, who was supposed to be watching us, was drunk and sitting in the red reclining chair in the living room watching television. No one knew my sister and I were pilfering  our mother’s Viceroys until we accidentally lit a curtain in the garage on fire. Joy called 911 and then she called Betty who came running down the street from her office on the ABC-Television lot, conveniently located a half-block away. Fortunately, the firemen came and put out the fire before any major damage was done. All that burned were the curtains hanging from the shelf where my Easy Bake Oven was stored. 

When I was in my forties I was trying to remember who I was when I was a kid, before I was sexually abused. I was reading a book that suggested remembering a time before the abuse occurred as a way to remember the person who was lost to the molestation. I remember thinking I was eight when it started. Who was I before? Who was I when I was seven? How much of a person was I? If cigarettes and Easy Bake Ovens were the key to my figuring that out I’d have to say I played with my Easy Bake Oven and wanted to smoke like my mother. I wanted to bake like my grandmother and smoke like my mother. My identity had not yet separated from them. Who was I before my stepbrother started attacking me? No one really.

Cigarettes are armor. They offer protection. They numb. They smell. If you blow the smoke in someone’s face, they’ll back away. When you start smoking at 13, the year I started smoking again, and 14, like my mother, you feel grown up. Smoking makes you feel like you can take care of yourself. Every inhalation makes you feel you can handle everything coming your way. Holding the smoke in makes you feel warm. The warmth replaces the nurture you aren’t receiving. I related nurturing to being babied. If I needed something growing up Betty would say, don’t be a baby. She must have learned that from Joy.

 Joy liked sitting in the isolation the cigarette smoke provided. That gray cloud, the hug, the distance. I can see her now lounging on her daybed, three pillows behind her back and one supporting her neck. I remember her staring straight ahead and puffing on a Benson and Hedges. The white tipped filter between her lips. Or touching her cheek depending on how much she’d had to drink. Her cold beauty.

Smoking. That long skinny stick held between to fingers or hanging off the bottom lip. The constant companion, the eliminator of self-doubt, the emotional support stick, the diet. Ten cigarettes with morning coffee starts the day. Deep breaths are overrated. Better for confidence to inhale as much smoke as possible before the mind wakes up.

 When your mind wakes up and the cigarettes aren’t enough to hold you together you go for the drink you go for the drugs and you stay anesthetized for the rest of your life. When you wake up in the afternoon and the sun is coming through the window and you close the blinds and look at the bruises on your legs and you wonder how many times you fell down in the pit or fell down the stairs going from backstage to the concert floor and you can’t remember the name of the man you were kissing outside the men’s room or why you ended up in a van with the bass player of the band and you look at your body and you wish it would go away.

 Your roommates wake you because you are dreaming and screaming in your sleep and they ask what you were dreaming but you can’t remember all your life is in a haze and your stomach hurts because you are hungry but food has always been your enemy so you light another cigarette and drink straight from the bottle of Thunderbird wine that’s on the floor next to the foot of the bed it doesn’t matter there’s a cigarette floating in the liquid that could very well be gasoline. Doesn’t matter. Nothing does. And that’s just where I want to be. Not mattering. Just smoking and drinking and forgetting whatever it was I was thinking.