Where there's smoke

When we started out in San Diego, my family didn’t have much: We lived in a rented house in the College Area, within walking distance of my parents’ hole-in-the-wall restaurant, into which they’d poured everything they had. They’d both quit smoking to save money and raise my sister and me right.

The rich kids at my high school drove fancy muscle cars like tricked-out Camaros, but I considered myself lucky to have inherited my dad’s 1974 AMC Hornet Sportabout, a slightly rusty little tan station wagon with imitation wood veneer side paneling. I saved money from working in the restaurant to put a loud stereo in it, joined a punk band and started smoking to look cool.

I didn’t mind being perceived as inferior to the kids who ruled the school—in fact, I invited their scorn. It was validating. Let them be hotshots in the limited and artificial world of football games and proms. These were people who didn’t care that the world was about to end in a fiery nuclear apocalypse. I pitied them for their delusions.

I lit up a smoke and buzzed away from campus in the Hornet, speeding to get to a band rehearsal with my like-minded bandmates, who all went to different schools and met up and mattered to each other in the very small and self-sufficient grimy underground San Diego music scene. There might have been 100 people who ever went to any given punk show in San Diego by 1980, but it was my entire universe.

I was just doing my time in the educational institution to make my parents happy until I could get the hell out for good.

But there was one corner of the school where I almost belonged: the smoking section. It might be hard for kids today to imagine a time when you could blow smoke right into the face of the vice principal as he walked by and get away with it, but it wasn’t that long ago.

At Patrick Henry, and nearly every other public high school in San Diego at the time, a section of the quad was thoughtfully set aside by the adults for adolescent smokers to indulge in a between-class nicotine fix. Ours was a small corner rectangle of benches next to the cafeteria, surrounding an area the size of a volleyball court, with a few sand-filled cement ashtrays spread around. It was adjacent to a row of lockers, so if you were a kid with a locker near there, you were a smoker, too, whether you liked it or not.

The smoking area was as divided as the rest of the school: the stoners, the blacks, the Mexicans, the Laotians, the small punk-rock contingent. But the smoking section was different from any other part of campus because other than inside the supervised, constructed rhetorical setting of the classroom, the smoking section was the only place on campus where kids from different groups would ever talk to each other. If you had any interest at all in transgressing the boundaries of high-school group identity in 1980, you really had to become a smoker.

The reason was simple: Everyone there had smoking in common. Cigarettes were cheap back then, about $1.25 a pack, so bumming them was no big deal. The need for a light also transcended the need to stay in your group. And once you’re smoking together, you might as well be friends, sort of, or at least not enemies, until the bell rings.

Sometimes I would ditch my cute punk girlfriend and our punk friends to share smokes with the blacks or stoners, but those groups were co-ed smokers with elaborate courting rituals that had nothing to do with me.

I mostly liked to hang out with the Laotian guys (commonly referred to as “the boat people”), because they smoked the same cigarettes as me: Marlboros in the red box. I also liked how their reputation as martial-arts wizards kept people from messing with them. I tried to absorb some of their mystique by standing next to them, exhaling, and saying, “Fuck this school, man.” The Laotian girls never hung out in the smoking section with the Laotian boys.

I also liked hanging out with the Mexican guys. They were cool. They wore cheap, dark plastic sunglasses; white T-shirts under plaid, long-sleeve or plain white button-down dress shirts; flat-front khakis; and gumbies (cheap black canvas shoes with tan gum soles).

I even took to dressing like them and listening to their music, which was known as “oldies,” even though some of it was only six or seven years old. It was 1950s-’70s slow-jam rhythm and blues. There was a radio station called XPRS out of L.A. that you could pick up in San Diego. After school, I would put on my dark sunglasses, crank Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg’s dedication show on the loud stereo in my Hornet and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot; the Mexican kids who knew me from the smoking section would nod as they cruised by in their lowriders.

At home, I lied to my parents about smoking. I hid the cigarettes inside my clock radio and blamed the smoke odor that clung to me on my friends.

One day my dad caught me smoking in his restaurant, sharing a clandestine smoke with the cooks.

“I knew it!” he said angrily, picking up the pack and tossing it in the trash.

I had to tell him the cigarettes belonged to Ali, the Iranian cook. My dad calmed down and dug the cigarettes out of the trash and gave them back to Ali.

I quit smoking about 10 years after that and never went back, but to this day I still miss the way the cigarette ritual makes strangers into instant co-conspirators, and I guess I always will.   

Write to dak@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.