Lung Story, Short

I’m not the Marlboro’ Man, but we do share the same cough. I imagine that Jake, Blue, Ted, Crudd, or whatever his name is, has - like me - long suffered from Obstructive Pulmonary Disease on account of all those softly-glowing, aromatic death sticks he looked so dependable and rugged gazing into the sunset with. 

There are other similarities. Like me, he has lungs that sound like a bag of granite cobbles in a tombola barrel. And he no longer reeks of ashtrays, but the kind of sweet scent that forms about 45% of a teenage girl’s aura of scowling pink bitchiness. Like a chimera of Willy Wonka’s chocolate slipstream grafted onto a fudge bar made from cheap bath bombs and dollar store perfume.

There are differences, of course. He was obviously leaner and fitter to begin with, plus he never got out of breath because he went everywhere on a horse. These days, the horse vapes as well.

So, being in trough-perfection is how I started to vape. It was a good move seven years ago; I stopped inhaling those 3,000 tasty carcinogens and traded the smoke for flavoured steam. Smoking is now not only bad for me and inadvisable, it also strikes me as deeply unpleasant. To this day, however, I remain committed to nicotine itself because, by and large, it isn’t what kills you. Not that you’d know that in our local vape shop.

A vape shop is a temple of nicotine. Its sole function is to supply you with nicotine-by-vape, because it recognises, after a fashion, that nicotine-by-vape makes everything better. For the retired asthmatic, it’s even better than that, because sucking on the plastic nipple of chemical reassurance, is almost the same as the relaxing and life-affirming delivery of Ventolin via nebuliser. 

As a side note, they say that laughter is the best medicine, but if you’re asthmatic it’s definitely Ventolin. (I don’t know what you call salbutamol - the generic name of Ventolin - in the US. It’s probably something like Breathe ’n’ Beam, but you get the idea.) In an asthmatic spasm, where your entire unathletic upper body tenses like a shot-putter strangling a brown bear, the application of a gentle cloud of nebulised Breathe ’n’ Beam dilating your lungs is not unpleasant. 

In fact, it’s nice - there I’ve said it. So much so, that in my mid 20s when I had frequent flare-ups of asthma that would send me to the A&E, after-hours doctor or walk-in clinic, I would often fantasise about how I might get one of these machines and take it home. The other side effect of a nebulised dose of Breathe ’n’ Beam is that it makes your legs wobble as if you’'d just had extraordinarily good sex.

Back to the vape shop.

I have entered the Temple of Nicotine in search of my favourite flavour vape pods. As a vaper of seven years or so, I have finally landed on a favourite taste. It’s better than that; it’s essentially nebulised chocolate - and I am terribly, terribly hooked. Ah, the irony. All those years worrying about addiction to face bonfires and now they’ve made chocolate steam to inhale and that’s what's got me. I’m not going to tell you the brand and exact flavour because *looks at notes* you’re not allowed any.

I confessed to the shopkeeper, a clean-looking fellow with a well-edited beard, that I was a big fan of the chocolate pods. He smiled, in the way that only those young enough to not remember a time when TV chefs didn’t insist on ‘adding a new twist to sausages’ can. When hedonism was entertainingly filthy and nobody had access to frappé Mochaccino saucisson, no-one would interfere with a gentleman’s peccadilloes. 

“Oh, and that’s a silly fucking beard” added my fearless inner voice.

As a Temple, the vape shop should be a safe space, free of judgment, full-fat and rich in hedonists. It’s always disappointing in the company of voluptuaries, sybarites, libertines and bon vivants to suddenly discover one of them has access to the EU Tobacco Products Directive and hasn’t thought of rolling it up into a massive, ironic spliff. Crudd the Marlboro’ Man would not have stood for such tepid, conditional hedonism.

I was thinking of withdrawing my support for the vape shop, but nobody else stocks my favourite brand and this is the power of extreme chocolate steam addiction. As I stand here inhaling the crackling volatile oils from the Mochaccino saucisson on the hob where - dear reader - do I go now?