My adventure with cheap wine and Russian cigarettes...and how I lived to tell the tale

Nothing good can come from drinking four bottles of wine and smoking Russian cigarettes

Not me…though I wouldn’t admit it even if I were doing it….

I grew up violently opposed to cigarettes. Having grown up with a father who smoked- indoors, outdoors, in the car, it didn’t matter- I’d learned early on to hate the smell. I despised the way cigarette smoke permeated everything I wore, suffused every room in the house, and even infiltrated the books I read- it seemed every aspect of my life was redolent of stale cigarette smoke.

Growing up in northern Minnesota, I couldn’t roll down a window in the family car when Dad lit up a Marlboro. Not when it was -25 degrees outside. I often found myself imprisoned in the worst sort of hotbox imaginable, inhaling my father’s secondhand smoke. There were days when I must have vicariously inhaled close to a pack of Marlboros, but that was what happened in those days. No one thought much about exposing their kids to secondhand smoke. Their addiction took precedence over the health of their children.

As much as I hated being forcibly exposed to cigarette smoke, it seemed it was with me in almost everything I did, and everywhere I went. Smoking was finally banned on flights of less than two hours duration in 1988 and less than six hours in 1990, but it wasn’t banned on all domestic and international flights until 2000. It seemed that every time I flew anywhere, especially overseas, I was trapped in a flying hotbox. When I deplaned, my clothes reeked of cigarette smoke. It was a curse I couldn’t escape.

Bars, restaurants, malls, airplanes…there was almost no place to escape to find clean air. By way of comparison, though, America was a virtual Paradise next to Eastern Europe.

In 1994, I spent several months living and working in Croatia and Kosovo as the war in various parts of the former Yugoslavia mercifully wound down. In Kosovo, smoking seemed to be the national sport, as was true in pretty much anywhere in Eastern Europe at that time.

Any time I had business to conduct in government offices, it invariably meant spending time in Communist-era office buildings that had been built with sealed windows. Of course, almost everyone chain-smoked for the duration of their eight-hour days, which meant dealing with dull, unmotivated bureaucrats in offices in which the air was a dank shade of bluish-grey. If I spent more than an hour or so in one of those buildings, I’d invariably leave nauseated and with a miserable headache.

Imagine standing directly behind the exhaust pipe of an ‘84 Yugo badly in need of an oil change and inhaling deeply. In that case, you’d have an idea of the indoor air quality of most Serbian government office buildings, which varied from barely tolerable to something so far beyond awful there’s no English word for it.

Everywhere I went, everyone smoked. In the five months I was there, I was offered more cigarettes than I’d been offered in my lifetime. And people were sometimes genuinely offended when I didn’t accept their generosity. Then again, I was probably one of the few non-smokers they’d met. Everyone else in their world had been smoking since about the age of 12.

One day I traveled from Priština into the countryside to a meeting of elders in a village near the Albanian border. I arrived a couple of minutes late, so when I entered the meeting space, I found myself in a large room with close to 60 elderly men, all packed tightly together, and all chain-smoking. It was early March in the foothills of the Bjeshkët e Nemuna, so all of the room’s windows were shut and latched, making the air in the room an unhealthy shade of bluish-grey.

As soon as I sat down, one of the men tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a cigarette. I politely declined in what few words of Albanian I knew, while thinking I didn’t need a cigarette. I knew that all I needed was to inhale and I’d achieve the equivalent. There was so much smoke in the air that, in the hour or so I was there, I probably inhaled the equivalent of a half-pack of awful, oily Russian cigarettes just in secondhand smoke.

While I lived in Priština, I rented a room from an Albanian family- Nezir Sefaj, Florina Duli, and their three children, whom I grew to adore. For the three months I was in Pristina I became a member of their family. So, when Nezir, a renowned local poet, won a poetry competition, he bought a few bottles of wine with his honorarium and invited some friends over to celebrate, I was all in. It had been a long and not particularly enjoyable week for me, and, being a very long way from home, I was more than happy to share a celebration of any sort.

The local wine was drinkable and relatively inexpensive; we could get a pretty good drunk on for about $5 US. On this particular night, as Nezir and I sat on his front porch consuming what turned out to be a pretty fair quantity of some of Kosovo’s best wine, we’d toss each empty bottle at a 55-gallon drum in the front yard. With each successive bottle, our aim became progressively worse, even as our mood increasingly improved.

After I consumed somewhere between two and three bottles of wine, I was pretty well toasted and had long since become one with my chair on the front porch. Neighbors had come and gone, and even the Serb (not so) secret police officer who lived across the street stopped by. That might have been because we were by that time a wee bit raucous. I’d lost all of my inhibitions and couldn’t tell if I was screaming or whispering, nor was I making any distinction.

Then something clicked. I looked at Nezir in my drunken haze and said with all the appropriate seriousness the moment called for, “I NEED A CIGARETTE!!” It wasn’t my voice, but the words somehow escaped my lips like a scalded dog. The caution center in my brain had been anesthetized by all the cheap wine I’d consumed, my give-a-fuck was broken…and, yeah, for some unknown reason I really needed a cigarette.

To this day, I can’t account for where that need came from.

Of course, Nezir’s friends were only too happy and ready to accommodate me. I could’ve screamed “I NEED A BLOWJOB!!” in a gay bathhouse and not gotten a faster reaction. Suddenly, I had my choice of cigarettes, so being the noob I was at that moment, I naturally chose the filterless Russian cigarette. Yeah, the one with the heavy, oily tobacco- the absolute worst choice for a beginner. I had NO clue as to what I was in for.

Having lit more than a few joints in my time, lighting a cigarette presented no challenge, though, in my drunken state, I may or may not have burned a hole in my pants. I might have also burned the tip of my nose, though I have no recollection of that.

Inhaling, however, proved an altogether different adventure. The Russian tobacco tasted like oily seaweed, but I’d had enough experience in college with Minnesota ditchweed to know how to get through it:

Act as if everything’s normal and what you’re experiencing is the most natural thing in the world, even if you’re feeling like you’re going to die.

By the time I was halfway through the cigarette, I was drinking directly from my third bottle of wine like it was mother’s milk, which helped wash the sour Russian tobacco taste from my mouth. I was drunk…well, no, that ship had long since sailed; I had passed through drunk hours before and left it in my rearview mirror, but now I was also dizzy from the cigarette. Not only that, but I also hadn’t stood up in several hours…and I REALLY had to pee.

Nezir and Florina helped me to my feet as my world spun around me. Somehow, I managed to make it to the bathroom and offload the two-and-a-half bottles of wine I’d made my way through. I made it back to my chair without breaking myself or anything in the house. I sat down, grabbed my wine bottle…and immediately realized I needed another cigarette.

There was enough alcohol in my system for my rational thought center to convince my inhibitions to depart the scene for a long weekend in Belgrade. “No” had been erased from my vocabulary, having fled the scene for safer surroundings. I knew that whenever tomorrow came, it would be ugly, but tomorrow by definition would be…well, tomorrow. And who knew when that would be?

I had no idea what had come over me, but I desperately needed another cigarette at that moment. Once again, I was presented with several choices. My few remaining functional brain cells screamed at me to avoid the Russian cigarettes, so I went for something that felt safe. I think it was a Marlboro. My eyes weren’t focusing well enough to read the package.

By the time I finished that one, I was working on my fourth bottle of wine- a personal record by at least a factor of two, and not one I’m proud of. By this time, I had to have been flirting with something close to alcohol poisoning. Unfortunately, common sense had left the building, intelligence had fled the scene, and self-preservation was nowhere to be found.

I stopped drinking, possibly because someone took the bottle from me. I have no recollection of how I did it, but I somehow found my way upstairs, where I collapsed onto my bed. I woke up 12 hours later, on top of my bedding in the same clothes I’d been wearing for the past 36 hours. But the worst part was that I couldn’t move. I was so hungover and still buzzing from the nicotine that, even though I couldn’t move, I felt like someone had stuck one of my fingers into an electrical socket.

My mouth felt like parchment, as if every last bit of moisture had been painstakingly stripped from it. My tongue felt like the cheap paneling you find in almost every Minnesota ice fishing hut- cheap, dry, and overly shellacked.

Everything- my hair, clothes, fingers- smelled like rancid Russian tobacco smoke. It might have been good the night before, but 12 hours later, it made me want to lose my dinner…and then I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat since noon the day before. Ugh…no wonder my head felt like someone was scraping the inside of my skull with a plastic spoon.

It took about three hours, but I eventually managed to coerce my feet onto the floor and the rest of my body to follow suit. By the time I made it downstairs, it was 5 pm. While I was trying to determine how much longer I had to live, Nezir, Florina, and the kids had already put in a full day.

Thus ended my one and only experience with cigarettes. Never before or since had I ever had cause or reason to smoke tobacco, and if hadn’t been so thoroughly wasted the night before, I wouldn’t have done it then, either. Chalk it up to youthful indiscretion (I was 34), temporary insanity, simply being a dumbass, or some combination of all of the above.

It took me every bit of three days to fully recover from that evening. These days, it would probably take me the better part of a week or more.

Take it from me, kids…stay away from Russian cigarettes and cheap wine. Nothing good will come from it. Ever.

You’re welcome.

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