David and Wendi; Winfield Red; How to Smoke.

I knew, instinctively, how it works.
Years of observing my parents smoke stamps itself indelibly into my
memory.
To my eternal regret and shame I taught my little brother and friends
how to smoke the right way.
First, David did stuff to sneak a cigarette out of the Winfield Red
pack without leaving a sign that any cigarette was missing.
He would go on errands to buy the smokes for his parents, most
particularly his Uncle Max who's a retired fellow who's loud and farts a
lot, laughing loudly, and drinks glass stubbies of beers that you can
smell ten feet away. As Uncle Max was missing a leg, he favours
sitting in his chair yelling out his stories or whatever crap that I don't
know what it was about. Well, he'd recruits David to do his errands and
David, of course, would profits by it, Uncle Max would give him gifts,
favours for doing errands for him.
When I was there, with David and his sister, Wendi and my little
brother, a regular gang of four kids, I'd walks with them to the shops
and get lollies and such, and he'd buy the cigarette packet, Winfield
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Red, and when we'd get home, we'd stopped just down the road, under
a thick towering tall pine tree and we'd sit on our haunches, talking and
fiddling with the packet of smokes.
David would take out the cigarette, never more than one, and he
would shakes the pack, to make the rest of the cylinders shifts so the
missing cylinder disappeared.
It looked like nothing was missing.
When he went to drop off the errands, he would pretend to open the
pack for his uncle, crackling the wrapper and making sure to take out
the silver foil, and a cigarette, as a favour, all to cover the crime of a
missing cigarette! It was a clever way for kids to sneak a smoke.
It always worked, every time.
When I saw all this, with doubts in my heart and worries that we'd
be caught and perhaps gets a belting, I was incredulous that it all
worked so well. Then I accepted it. What else can you do?
We then drifts down the street, hunkers down and smoked that
single cigarette. David lights up, drew in the smoke, held it in his
mouth, and without inhaling it blew it out.
I wanted to try it, I reached out, but my little brother took it, and
mimics David's method.
It's a method that I come to realised was called, "Bumsuck",
whatever that means. I had misunderstood "bumsuck" to mean
"bumstuck", meaning I imagined it to be not inhaling the smoke. But
that's the way it sounded in my head.
"You're doing it wrong," I says, reaching out to take the cigarette.
"Look, this is how they do it."
I took the cigarette in my mouth, like I visualised how it would
work. I inhaled the smoke carefully, slowly, gently inhaling it down my
throat, testing how it feels, and keeping going, into my lungs.
Within seconds I felt a buzzing high, and felt the buzzing in my head
spreads from inside my head out into my eyes and face and I felt
strange, the buzzing spreads into my skin, into my body, and it felt
amazing.
I took another drag, and I sat there on my haunches, feeling the rush,
the buzz.
I took another, but already, the buzz's fading, and thereafter the buzz
never came back, not for a long time. (I found out later, experimentally,
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the buzz will comes back if you only smoke once a week or once a few
weeks. But that was too much to look forward to.)
They watched me inhales and exhales the smoke, and they took the
cigarette and copies my method of smoking for real. That was it. I
showed them how and it was easy, real easy.
Our first smoke, right there on the footpath in a suburb near
Fremantle, (I won't say where exactly), in the shade of giant pine trees.
That was the first and last smoke until high school, which is a
muddle for me.
I do not know if David and Wendi still smokes. I hopes not. I hoped
they have found the courage to quit smoking sooner than me, but that is
unrealistic to expect. We lost contact in the high school years.
As for my little brother, well, he still smokes, which grieves me still,
though I urged him to quit, with encouragements, time after time, ever
since I quit smoking all those years ago.
I still tell him, again and again, how easy it is, to quit. Real easy.
He would say he will try again. Then we'd lose contact for awhile,
then we'd meet and he's still smoking, and I would go into my spiel of
how easy, real easy, it is to quit smoking. And I would give him details
of how I did it, the clues I put together, the timing, the fortitude to do it,
to go the distance