W

that it didn’t translate over drinks. Next time happy hour rolled around, I left him
at the office.

hen I was a kid, my parents smoked. They lit cigarettes in the evenings as
they sat in the kitchen, talking through their workdays. They smoked while they
cleaned the dinner dishes later at night, sometimes opening a window to let in
some fresh air. They weren’t heavy smokers, but they were habitual smokers, and
defiant ones, too. They smoked long after the research made clear that it was bad
for you.

The whole thing drove me crazy, and Craig as well. We made an elaborate
show of coughing when they lit up. We ran sabotage missions on their supplies.
When Craig and I were very young, we pulled a brand-new carton of Newports
from a shelf and set about destroying them, snapping them like beans over the
kitchen sink. Another time, we dipped the ends of their cigarettes in hot sauce
and returned them to the pack. We lectured our parents about lung cancer,
explaining the horrors that had been shown to us on filmstrips during health class
at school—images of smokers’ lungs, desiccated and black as charcoal, death in
the making, death right inside your chest. For contrast, we’d been shown pictures
of florid pink lungs that were healthy, uncontaminated by smoke. The paradigm
was simple enough to make their behavior confounding: Good/Bad.
Healthy/Sick. You choose your own future. It was everything our parents had
ever taught us. And yet it would be years before they finally quit.

Barack smoked the way my parents did—after meals, walking down a city
block, or when he was feeling anxious and needed to do something with his
hands. In 1989, smoking was more prevalent than it is now, more embedded in
everyday life. Research on the effects of secondhand smoke was relatively new.
People smoked in restaurants, offices, and airports. But still, I’d seen the filmstrips.
To me, and to every sensible person I knew, smoking was pure self-destruction.

Barack knew exactly how I felt about it. Our friendship was built on a
plainspoken candor that I think we both enjoyed.

“Why would someone as smart as you do something as dumb as that?” I’d
blurted on the very first day we met, watching him cap off our lunch with a
smoke. It was an honest question.

As  I   recall, he  just    shrugged,   acknowledging   that    I   was right.  There   was no