Smokeout, Freakout, Takeout

Because he was a friend of mine, and a smoker, I was quite surprised when his reaction to my offering him a free pack of cigarettes was to lunge across the table and wrap his hands around my throat. Thankfully, he was only playfully pretending to choke me, so I’m still alive to share this story.

When I was in college, I spent a lot of time in the design studio of the architecture school. My Walkman was an essential survival tool. Music kept my creative juices flowing during those long hours and kept me awake late into the nights. Making mix tapes from one another’s music collections was an important part of friendships.

One afternoon, walking to Studio with a long session in front of me, I stopped to fuel up at Uni-Mart, buying a hot cup of tea for me and batteries for my Walkman. When I put the batteries on the counter, the cashier said “You should get these instead.” and showed me a combo pack containing AA batteries and a pack of cigarettes. I turned him down since I don’t smoke, but he rebutted with “It really doesn’t matter. This is on special and so cheap that if you open it and throw the cigarettes away, the batteries will still cost less than if you just buy these stand-alone batteries at the regular price.”

Well, he didn’t have to convince me any further. The cheap option was always the right choice when I was a college student, and they were exactly the same brand of batteries. I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw the cigarettes away though, and my thoughts turned to my classmate, Chris. He was in many of my classes, and we’d become friends when we’d been roommates during our semester in London. Since he was a smoker, it seemed natural to offer him the cigarettes, although I did feel a little hypocritical since I’d urged him to quit several times in the past.

I walked into Studio, went to Chris’s desk and handed him the cigarettes, thinking what a great friend I was. That’s when he came for me. Well how was I supposed to know it was the Great American Smokeout Day? And that he was participating and hadn’t smoked all day? And that he was therefore extremely cranky, possibly murderously so? He actually thought I was taunting him, so once I was able to clarify it was just innocent bad timing, he stopped trying to kill me and we started brainstorming who else I could give the cigarettes to.

Another classmate of ours who had been enjoying watching all that transpire, informed me that Subway was running a special that day in support of the smokeout. Anyone who turned in a packet of cigarettes would receive – wait for it - a free cold turkey sandwich.

Only partially believing something so genius could be true, when dinnertime rolled around, I went to Subway. Sure enough, people in line in front of me were taking advantage of the offer. When my turn came, I handed them my cigarettes, declared my intention to never smoke in the future, which was technically true, and enjoyed my free meal.