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I hate the hiccups, and I have them now. And I got really annoyed when I first got them, and then, after a couple of minutes, I realized that I have not had the hiccups since I smoked my last cigarette, almost two years ago. I used to get them at least three times per week. So my annoyance has abated, and I am sort of relishing each hiccup, the first diaphragm spasms I have had in over a decade that have nothing to do with Phillip Morris. :-) Sorry if this is an over-share.

7. I get indignant when I have had too much to drink.

Character flaw or just sensitive? Potato, potahto.

(By the way, S has requested that I come up with a better name for him in this blog, so I am going to try out a few new ones in the next couple of weeks. To keep things clear until I find that new name, S henceforth will be identified by a few asterisks around whichever tester name I may be using.)

**Krull** and I came to Charlotte to see our dear friend, Taylor, this weekend, and last night I had a lot of beer and some vodka (and, I hate to admit, some shots of Jagrmeister. Ick). And everyone was smoking cigarettes, and I got mad because I felt left out. So I got very indignant and stole a cigarette from a pack in the kitchen and grabbed a lighter, and in a fit of pagentry emerged on the porch and lit it.

Some people would say that in that instant I may have thrown away more than three months of working really hard not to smoke. Krull and Taylor tried very hard to stop me, but I did it anyway. I took a drag. And it was gross. Super gross. I wasn’t satisfied at all. I put out the cigarette instantly, even though I was still pretty indignant. I definitely learned that I don’t want to smoke anymore. It just took a drag to remind me of that after three months.

Krull also says that I get exponentially more indignant if gin or tequila are involved. Sorry, Krull. You are a great boyfriend.

(And I also get really emotional when I am hung-over. Seriously, I can’t hear Pucini without busting into tears sometimes. It’s that bad. But that is another post.)

6. The first time I went to a gay party, I stepped on John Cameron Mitchell’s foot.

You might know him as Hedwig from the seminal transsexual punk rock film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but I didn’t know him from Adam.

A filmmaker, a fantastic documentarian (check him out), was throwing his annual birthday party in SoHo, which he calls the Virgo Delight Party. I had been invited by my boss at the Whitney Museum, and as I was FRESH out of the closet, this was my very first gay function. And wouldn’t you know it? A giant zit appeared directly between my eyebrows the day of the party.

That just was not going to do for my début on the New York gay scene!

So 20 minutes before the party, I phoned for reinforcements, and a girl whom I had met in the elevator of my building (who became one of my closest friends) came up with a make-up kit.

I sat on a stool in front of an overly ornate mirror in my crazily decorated apartment, and my new friend “did my make-up.” When she was done, we decided I should wear my reading glasses, just in case.

I was in my tightest jeans and a brand-new shirt, with my new Prada sneakers on…you know, the ones that had the ridiculously long toe? Don’t judge me…so the combination was sort of ripe for disaster: too-tight pants, zit making me even more self-conscious, reading glasses skewing my perspective a little, and shoes making me just a little more clumsy than usual.

The party itself was dizzying. The small SoHo loft was filled with the gay Who’s Who of New York, each wearing a thin veneer of propriety, but my tush was getting far more pats than I would have expected. I would strike up conversations with people, and…Wait a minute…Did he just wink at me? What does he mean ‘if I ever need a lawyer?’ It is so HOT in here. And someone should tell that lawyer guy that he sweats too much to be handing 22-year-olds his business card. Whoa, these glasses make me feel drunker than I am. I am getting dizzy. I need to get out of here! PANIC! Must get air. MUST get air. Thank GOD I smoke! Great excuse!

So I burst outside to see my boss’s boyfriend smoking a cigarette, too, and talking to a perfectly nice looking young man.

“Jonathan! Thank GOD! Can I get a light?”

I think it might have been that lawyer’s residual sweat on my hands, but I dropped the lighter. When I bent down to pick it up, my super-long toe caught the tree grate, and I teetered precariously forward, about to take a dinger into the gutter. But I grabbed onto the tree, thinking madly how I was going to make this debacle seem graceful in front of an entire street filled with fabulous men. I righted myself, popping up with a smile, but had over compensated and continued backward. With frantic stutter steps, I finally came to rest upon the foot of an extremely annoyed, small man. But he graciously told me not to worry about it, and I sort of half apologized, too embarrassed to acknowledge what had just happened to me. Maybe I was in shock.

And Jonathan made it soooo much better by saying, “You know who you just stepped on, right?”

And the rest is history.

Unh-Unh. Not O.K.

So I started taking Chantix exactly four weeks ago today to kick the smoking habit, and that means that I have been smoke-free for three weeks.

Chantix is nothing if not well packaged, foregoing the ugly brown pill vial for a very sleek set of cardboard contraptions that organizes your dosages by week, day, and meal. I thought that the idea was borne of great wisdom, Pfizer recognizing that quitting smoking shakes up a routine and, therefore, sought to replace it with an easy and temporary regime of pill popping. Now that is something worth paying for, and when I went to fill the first month’s “starter kit,” I paid the hefty price for the meds, thinking, Well, I probably spend about that per month on cigarettes anyway, so it’s a wash.

I even got over the fact that my UnitedHealthcare plan doesn’t cover the medication, which is no easy accomplishment for a Jew working in the arts. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely complained plenty about UHC, for under my plan, Viagra costs $10 per month, but they don’t cover smoking-cessation products. It makes no sense for very obvious reasons, the most ironic of which is that smoking can cause impotence, but I will leave it at that and say that I found an inner peace in paying for the long-term benefits that Chantix would help me to attain.



So I regularly swilled down the pellets in the most elegant and satisfying ways I could—be they with a good cabernet at Peter Luger’s, or with orange juice after a poached egg on toast, or with a tequila shot at a friend’s dinner party—all the while collecting the “Good for you!” comments that have sustained me from supporting friends. I am pretty pleased with myself, I must admit, and patting myself on the back all the way to the pharmacy this morning, I braced myself for another hit to the bank account as I got my first refill of the medication.

Well, I learned this morning that Pfizer is at once wise, crafty, and opportunistic, as I swallowed my pride, did some quick computing in my head, made several Duane Reade staffers triple-check the price, and felt my face turning red. In her sweet sub-continental accent, the pharmacist told me, “Sure, the starter month is expensive, but the regular kit costs this,” indicating the label staring me down from the countertop. This=DOUBLE THE FIRST MONTH.

So what argument am I supposed to come up with now? Shucks, no big deal. I didn’t want to have dinner at per se this month anyway?

What is really disturbing is that Pfizer is profiting from my addiction, weaning me from cigarettes and increasing my dependence on their drug, just to boost the price after one month. Isn’t that sort of like what the tobacco companies did: created or increased addiction to turn a greater profit? Talk about something that could drive one to smoke again!

“Does this come with some company stock?” I asked the pharmacist, as I swiped my credit card.