Smokers: Gird your stash. Cigarette bumming by complete strangers is reportedly at an all-time high, plus it achieves peak frequency during the holidays with increased imbibing at parties and get-togethers. A note to bummers: Just because you’re a terrible, fraudulent mooch doesn’t mean you can’t also show a little class.
Everyone who smokes knows how this goes. You spend your own money securing an ample supply of cigarettes for the night, making sure said supply never dwindles to a precarious low. Then you hit the town only to find that everywhere you go, some sonofabitch expects you to generously cover their indulgence.
For the record, I don’t smoke—at least, not anymore, not really. I used to, all the time. Camel Lights, then Parliaments. Then I quit, and now, when I go out for drinks I will sometimes still crave the pleasurable rush of a cigarette or three. This means I’ve now been on both sides of the secondhand smoke, and it has given me the perspective of both the real smoker and the fake one—the person who bore the full burden of smoking and got mooched on constantly, and the person who hopes a real smoker will now throw me a calcium-depleted bone on occasion, just because I seem nice enough.
For a while, I dodged real bumming altogether by mostly hitting the town with real smoker friends, from whom you can usually bum with impunity, and repay in drinks. But that wasn’t always a good option, and soon I found myself bumming off others. Right away, I hated it. I didn’t want to talk to these randos, much less do the dance of asking for a cigarette. I didn’t want to be a mooch. And I felt the need to show my bonafides, to prove I too had once blown a ludicrous amount of money on smokes and had bummed cigarettes out to others for decades. I had earned this! I was one of them! But they don’t give you an ID card for having smoked a bunch.
What other option was there? Well, I could always actually buy cigarettes. Yikes. This is why bumming exists. Some bummers don’t really ever smoke except when they are bumming from you. And every reformed smoker knows that there are certain symbolic returns to the habit that must be avoided. Hanging around other people smoking (even if you suck the secondhand smoke into your lungs with glee) is not the same as being a smoker. Having a cigarette on occasion which you did not purchase nor seek out—it was just handed to you—is also not actually smoking again. And vaping? Vaping is playing house. Buying an entire pack of cigarettes that you intend to mete out for smoking-when-you-drink only? That is one slippery, carcinogenic slope.
But I could not bear the guilt of mooching. So I got over my fear, bought a pack of cigarettes, and smoked from it only when I went out—which was sometimes once a week, sometimes every few weeks, and sometimes every few months. It was heavenly. I’d found the best of both worlds. A way to smoke on occasion without having to be a total asshole.
Then I noticed something. Every time I went outside of a bar to smoke, someone approached me for a cigarette. Once, it happened three times in one night. The approach was usually the same, too: A kind of nervous approach, and then a faux jokey cutesy niceness from women, Hahaha mind if I bum a smoke sorry hahaha oh thanks. From men, more direct: Hey, mind if a bum a smoke? Thanks. ::wanders off::.
Matthew Kassel, in a piece at the New York Observer on the bumming culture in New York City these days, calls them “puff predators,” and “mercenaries,” and I was heartened to learn that this bumming thing really is at peak annoyance on both coasts. Kassel writes:
It is a scenario familiar to most habitual smokers in New York. Step outside, light up and wait, with no small amount of trepidation, for the swarm of cigarette scroungers to come circling in, attempting to cadge a smoke. They may be brandishing a dollar bill to pay you for your troubles, as though you are a human vending machine, or they may simply expect you to dish out a loosie for free.
Whatever the case may be, it seems you can’t light up anywhere in the city these days without one stranger or another bothering you for a cigarette.
What follows are anecdotal laments from other New York writer types on the misery of the bum. The Awl‘s Choire Sicha, pack-a-day smoker of Winstons, tells Kassel he has never once bummed cigarettes, but distributes them to strangers several times a week.
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