The Happiest I've Been in Years

6 min read

Vaping: gagging on the Devil’s chemical cock. No more. No way.

It is no longer always there.

It is not on my pillow - leaking jizz - in case I wake up in the middle of the night (day) and need an immediate mummy-loves-me adjacent distraction. It is no longer there on the toilet with me, complicating the act of wiping my own arse, my other hand, of course, still devoted to my iPhone. It’s no longer not there - just minutes from the restaurant - as the taxi turns around to take the Mrs and me back home to get it, because she knows that my not having it brings with it a level of urgency usually reserved for people who’ve left their baby on a bus or their heroin up a friend’s arse. I’m shoving squid fried rice down her throat, throwing a fistful of cash at the waitress so I don’t have to wait for the bill, then bribing the taxi driver to put his foot down so I can get home and suck on its sweet plastic love. Then we can return to the restaurant - pretend none of that happened - and enjoy a romantic evening together. Some fine food, some overpriced, but ‘what the heck, darling, I love you’ red wine. The view, the enchanting sounds of the Mekong River at night, and me ducking under the table every twenty seconds to take a hit.

After sixteen years of a steamy love affair, I’m ready to admit the damage it’s doing to me - not just my health but also the fact that I’m pissing sweat from every pore at airport security as my bag goes through the X-ray, full of vapes, coil-building kits, half a litre of eJuice (say that word out loud, ‘eJuice’, for fuck’s sake, what happened to me?) in a country where they lock people up for vapes. It feels like the sort of thing that ought to prompt a rethink.

You can get up to ten years for importing a single vape into Thailand. Imagine…

“What are you in for?”

“Murder. You?”

“A plastic cigarette”

And once I’ve changed into dry clothes in the airport toilets, a quick vape sets off the cubicle alarm, and I’m pissing sweat again, my Mrs thrown over my shoulder like a really sexy sack of potatoes as I sprint through the airport, a year in the Bangkok Hilton suddenly seeming a very real possibility - the penalty for possessing a vape.

I started smoking as a teenager. I hated cigarettes, and I hated smoking. I hated our house and every house on our street always being a solid cloud of Lambert & Butler smoke, Hai Karate, Impulse, and Shake ‘n’ Vac. As a toddler, I used to roll my dad’s roll-ups for him, but as I got a few years older, I really learned to hate them. Being a telly-based family, I saw more than my fair share of toasted lungs, people wired up to all manner of tubes and heart monitors, people with tubes going up their nostrils, death weeping from their eyes, and some dragging an oxygen tank around just so they could manage the simple act of breathing.

“Man is a creature who can get accustomed to anything.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I remember a kid at school called Benny Igor (yeah, it wasn’t a ‘special’ school, but it may just as well have been) saying to me once - totally out of the blue:

“Does your mum smoke?”

“Yes”

“She’ll probably be dead next year,” he said, walking off as he was still speaking, a bit of swagger about him as if he’d just dropped a devastating truth bomb. Because he had. Which is quite a lot for a ten-year-old to take on.

But when my friends and I started smoking hashish, it was the start of the end for my previously healthy relationship with smoking. At first I’d use a little shot pipe. No tobacco. I’d just heat and fluff the hash onto the gauze and turn my throat inside out breathing in that beautiful Leb while the cheap disposable lighter held over it fed me carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate carbon, and partially burned hydrocarbons. Yep, that’s the healthy way to do it.

I’d sometimes forget my pipe, and all my mates would be smoking joints. As if I was going to sit there and not get stoned. It can’t hurt. It’s the hashish I’m after, not tobacco. If I just allowed myself to cross the Golden Virginia Rubicon.

So I did. Without a second thought. Without a first one. And I was chain-smoking roll-ups about a week later. Actually, I was chain-smoking roll-ups immediately, but they were full of hashish, so it didn’t count. But it was only a few days later when we couldn’t score that I realised I was hanging out for something. Something to put in my mouth, light, and suck on. Something like a joint. Something very much like a joint. I knew that a jointless joint, a roll-up cigarette, would do the trick. I was a smoker. For twenty long and stinking years.

And stink they did. People who smoke become nose-blind to the stink of being a smoker. They’re immune to it. To non-smokers, it's like you've brought a damp 1970s boozer carpet with you when you come back into the restaurant, having 'just popped out' for your fifth cigarette before the food has even been ordered. Your breath stinks, you cough all the time, and it gets into your clothes like cancer gets into your lungs. I never thought I'd have the same yellow stains on my fingers that my forty-a-day grandad had, which used to scare me as a child because my brother said his fingers were dying, and soon we’d be able to see the bones poking through his fingertips.

Then I quit. I was so happy. I was using heroin, which probably helped, but I gave up smoking. For a few years, too. But when crack sniffed me out, it was curtains. You need loads of cigarette ash to smoke crack, usually collected by bending the four tines of a fork, lighting up four superking cigarettes, then impaling the filters onto the tines, like the most unlikely smoking robot, and usually some soot-covered square of silver foil shoved underneath to collect the ash. Meaning when a room full of crackheads is doing that, there’s about two packs of cigarettes burning continually.

When that crack hits you, the first thing you do is light a cigarette, even though you don’t smoke it because you’re too busy speaking incomprehensibly high-speed bullshit to anyone who’ll listen, which is no one, as they’re also speaking incomprehensibly high-speed bullshit. The only people doing anything vaguely resembling listening are people smoking crack at that precise moment, their eyes crossed - the four-inch stare - as they’re glued to their flame and melting rock of crack, all other senses turned to zero as they wait for their mind to explode.

You can avoid all the ash nonsense by using flat, ribbon-like wire wool. But occasionally it catches fire, which causes it to shrink slightly, meaning you suck a white-hot ball of wire wool down your throat. I’ve seen many a crackhead fail to find a beer or a tap to extinguish the ball of molten steel stripping their windpipe of, well, windpipe. No one laughs. No one helps. Everyone is busy smoking crack.

The psychiatrist’s book of lies, the DSM-5, includes ‘Opioid Use Disorder’. You can imagine a mother at her wits’ end saying to the young sister of the junkie brother who nicked her iPhone, ‘He can’t help himself, Jenny. He’s got Opioid Use Disorder, just like Uncle Jack had cancer.’ Yeah. No.

The NHS says that one in four people will have a so-called mental illness in any given year. At this rate, we’ll soon reach a point where everyone is taking some form of medication for some form of mental illness. Psychiatry has turned normal life problems into psychiatric anomalies. And here’s the kicker: In 2025, the first NHS clinic dedicated to treating people addicted to vapes opened at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool. Kick my fucking teeth out.

I’m not surprised the world is turning against vaping. Even the vapers have had enough. At least a cigarette gives you what you actually want, a dizzy head, the feeling you're getting weaker, the feeling that you are choosing to poison yourself. It's a reminder of your mortality. A chance to stick two fingers up to the world of ambition, achievement, aspiration, and drinking Satan's own piss - juiced wheat grass. Cigarettes are a little bit of truth in a post-truth world, death itself reaching inside you, squeezing your heart and clawing at your lungs. In the postmodern-o-sphere, cigarettes remind you that you’re alive.

Vaping, on the other hand, barely touches the sides. Once the novelty has worn off, the vape stops feeling like a substitute for smoking and starts feeling like a humiliating monument to its absence. They’re a little reminder to look after yourself and die healthy. Get that wheat grass down your neck, son!

In the 90s, a British outfit called the Enlightened Tobacco Company decided to stop flirting with the subtext and put it front and centre by launching ‘Death’ cigarettes. A black box featuring a human skull and crossbones, they marketed themselves as ‘The Honest Smoke.’ The premise was beautifully nihilistic: a responsible way to sell a legal product that kills you when used exactly as intended. Fair play.

Compare Death Cigarettes to the vape: a gutless neon pacifier that never actually delivers the grim, finite closure of a real smoke, and instead remains perpetually glued to your lips - a reminder not of your mortality, but that you’re trapped in purgatory, gagging for the real thing.

If I were sitting at my desk reading or watching a video, the tip of my vape, its glans, would hover in front of my lips, so all I had to do was lean forward slightly and suck. And again. And again. A cigarette is an event. Vaping is a condition. Because it lacks the chemical intensity of smoking, vaping compensates through sheer frequency. A cigarette arrives, does its thing, and leaves. You stop smoking cigarettes and end up in an even more dependent relationship with nicotine. We’ve been fooled - conned even - mainly by ourselves. And that’s not acceptable. So we keep sucking at mother’s steamy teat.

“Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realises he has just one.”

- attr. Confucius

Once upon a time, the first thing I reached for was my phone, that other glowing box of distraction and low-level anxiety. Now it’s a butterscotch-and-mint steam dispenser, sitting on my pillow like some faithful electronic pet.

I’ve sat hunched over my desk, wearing illuminated magnifying headwear, winding wire around specially made tools, my Mrs occasionally glancing at me with the expression of someone reassessing the quality of her partner choice.

Apparently, someone decided the greatest inconvenience facing steamed nicotine twats was having to occasionally locate their vape, or the labour-intensive act of having to reach out to get it, so to further make a fool of you, started shipping the bloody things with a lanyard. Pathetic. Obviously, I threw the poxy lanyard, its DayGlo-blue branded strap, and its slightly sensual rubber ring through which you’d insert your vape, straight into the bin, with absolutely no recurring thoughts of rescuing it and strapping up. Vaping is for twats, but there’s no need to advertise it, to put it front and centre as it bounces off your belly while you walk to the mart to look at all the hyper-sexualised girls sitting outside the girly bars get some milk.

I write for a non-negotiable six hours a day, vape in hand, knocking out words like a best-in-class, eloquent-o-matic storytelling savant. My tests demonstrate it takes three fingers and a thumb to hold a vape with enough certainty that I won’t drop it and, god forbid, break the celestial damn thing. I’ve done the maths for you. By occupying three fingers and a thumb, holding my vape costs me around thirty words a minute, nearly two thousand words an hour, or - and this hurts - roughly one novel every couple of months - and that’s without taking into account using it every ten words occasionally. Quitting vaping isn't just a health and anti-humiliation decision. It’s an efficiency measure. And since the only real money I have coming in is from writing, that’s simply unacceptable.

“We are our choices.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

Then the bin started talking to me, beckoning me over, telling me not to be afraid, and that I could always take it off if it didn’t feel right, and that plenty of successful writers wore vape lanyards. Who’d have thought, just me and that repurposed catering-size lychee tin full of shit in the corner, spitting facts. Have I ever cared what people think of me? Yes. It’s practically the essence of being human. But sacrificing a novelsworth of words every couple of months? I pondered it for a full ten seconds before almost falling out of my chair, scrambling over to the bin, half falling, half stumbling. By the time I got there I was on all fours, praying the Mrs hadn’t emptied it or poured chilli sauce all over that beautiful baby-blue lanyard and rubber ring. Oh, thank the Lord. There it was, the strap curled in such a way that it was smiling at me, the rubber ring like the single eye of my new cycloptic friend. ‘I knew you’d come back. They always do.’

I stretched the rubber ring and slid it down the full length of the greasy shaft, straightening it out so the ring was flush with the ribbing below the mouthpiece, then, raising it aloft, the sun streaming through the window behind. Like some kind of investiture, there was a dark solemnity to the movement as I lifted the branded strap with all the reverence of a disgraced and insane king crowning himself. The ribbon landed flat against my shoulders, bearing the weight of my dignity’s final collapse.

I even started casually swinging the vape over my shoulder if I was eating or something. It was ‘special’, but at least it didn’t dip in my cornflakes, the sink, my Mrs’ mouth.

The shoulder trick, alas, wasn't foolproof. Night of the Blood Red Soup. Off my shoulder, it crept, before diving straight into my Tom Yum, with a splatter circle of about half a metre, meaning the backs of the diners sitting in front of us unknowingly got a new pattern stained into their clothes. I had other things to worry about, though, electronics-based things that could render my vape more pointless than it already was. Using my crisp, white, starched, and pressed bespoke shirt to mop the oily red soup from the unit as quickly as possible, I shook it up and down, up and down, up and down, to make sure I’d got every last drop of spunk soup out of its internals. After doing everything I could to ensure there wasn’t any Tom Yum shorting my circuits, I gave it a far too sensual suck - bliss - the lemon meringue steam and a host of other chemicals filled my delicate lungs and made breathing reassuringly terrifying for half a minute.

“Common sense is not so common.” - Voltaire

Spending large portions of my day placing a cylindrical object into my mouth and sucking on it for comfort, pleasure, reassurance, but mainly distraction, is not the behaviour of the person I thought I would be. It used to be my phone, that other unit of unholy distractions, but then it became my butterscotch-and-mint steam dispenser. Or whatever infantilising flavour and pretty colours on the packaging drew me to make a choice in the over-excited manner of a four-year-old girl buying her first tiara.

Vaping obviously has a desexualising effect. I know this not because my Mrs has told me, but because it turns me off myself. Imagine watching your sexual partner strolling towards you with a brightly coloured spunky-steam-producing dildo hanging from his neck. I’m sure that somewhere, there’s a woman who would love nothing more than their man vaping. It’s her thing. But he also probably goes to sleep with his dick in a tub of margarine.

Like many a good yarn, we return to the beginning: I’m the happiest I’ve been in years. The probably poisonous, ketamine-laden, lord knows what else, vagina-drying, life-threatening, lanyard-hanging steam-dildo is no more. Freedom is a wonderful thing.

Once I’ve got through my last half-litre of eJuice, I’ll definitely be quitting.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

If you enjoyed this, please leave a comment and a like, it’s really appreciated, but not as much as you reading it, because that means the world to me. Be lucky.

BUY ME A COFFEE

✅►BUY MY NOVEL HERE:
UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1919313796
USA - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1919313796
UK Kindle: https://amzn.eu/d/04sgLn5I
USA Kindle: https://a.co/d/0jm5We2V

#1 Hot New Release in British & Irish Literary Fiction

#1 Hot New Release in the USA

#52 in Biographical & Autofiction

#61 in Biographical Literary Fiction