A Mexican-American Mechanic Quits Cold Turkey After 21 Years
A Mexican-American Mechanic Quits Cold Turkey After 21 Years
My father, Roberto Valdez, died of lung cancer on a Tuesday in October 2021. He was sixty-two years old. He had smoked Marlboro Reds since he was sixteen, which meant he smoked for forty-six years before the cancer took him. At his funeral, standing at the graveside in my good shirt in the Tucson heat, I was sneaking cigarettes between the prayers. I lit one on the walk back to the parking lot.
I was smoking at my own fatherâs funeral. His death had not been quick and it had not been clean. I had watched what cigarettes did to him over a two-year decline, and I stood at his grave and I smoked. That tells you something about what addiction is and what it does to people who think they understand what theyâre dealing with.
My name is Ricky Valdez. Iâm forty-four years old. Iâm a mechanic. I live and work in Tucson, Arizona, and I have been smoke-free for nineteen months.
Twenty-One Years in the Shop
I grew up around cars. My father was a mechanic before me, and I started hanging around his shop when I was eight years old, handing tools and watching him work. When I was twenty-three I picked up my first cigarette in that same shop, bummed from a guy named Cesar who had been with my father for fifteen years. It felt like an initiation. Like putting on the uniform.
In an auto shop, cigarettes are part of the rhythm. You finish a job, you wipe your hands, you step out back and you smoke. A difficult diagnostic thatâs driving you crazy, you step out back and you smoke. Slow Tuesday afternoon, you smoke. Customer giving you a hard time, you smoke. It is not a habit in the casual sense. It is the punctuation of your entire working day.
I smoked a pack a day for most of my twenties and thirties. Newport 100s. At my worst, toward the end, I was doing a pack and a quarter, sometimes a pack and a half. I smoked in my truck, on the back step outside the shop, at home in the driveway after dinner. I smoked before I got in the shower. I know how that sounds. I know.
After my father died, I told myself I would quit eventually. That word, eventually, is where intentions go to die. I said eventually for two years.
What Finally Made It Real
In February 2024, I went to my doctor for a routine physical. My doctor, Dr. Cisneros, is a direct man who does not dress things up. He told me my lung function test was showing the early markers of COPD. Not a diagnosis yet. A warning. A curve in the road that told you what was coming if you kept going the same direction.
He said, âRicky, you watched your father. You know what this road looks like.â
I drove home from that appointment and I sat in my truck in the driveway for twenty minutes. I did not smoke while I sat there. I was thinking about my father in his last months. The oxygen tank. The way walking from the bedroom to the bathroom had become an event. The coughing that came in waves. My father had been a strong man his whole life, and at sixty he had become someone who needed help getting dressed.
I have a son. His name is Marco, he is sixteen, and he plays baseball at his high school. I coach the youth league team on weekends. I thought about what it would look like for Marco to watch me go the way my father went. I thought about not being able to make it to the end of the bleachers without stopping.
I set a quit date for March 1st, 2024. I told my wife, Claudia. I did not tell anyone at the shop.
Cold Turkey in a Smoke Shop
I went cold turkey. I want to explain why, because people always ask. I have always been the kind of person who, if Iâm going to do something hard, I need to make the break clean. Iâd tried the patch once, years earlier, and what happened was that the patch took the edge off enough that I never truly confronted the addiction. I would wear the patch and still find myself smoking out of habit even when the nicotine craving wasnât there. It blurred what I was trying to understand about myself.
Cold turkey is brutal and it is honest. You know exactly where you stand at every moment.
The first three days were physical. Headaches. Hands that felt wrong without something in them. A general low-level rage that I had to consciously manage so I did not take it out on my wife or my son. I told Claudia what was happening and she handled me with patience I did not deserve. I ate a lot of sunflower seeds and drank a lot of water and went to bed early those first few days because sleep was the only time I got relief from the cravings.
Day four I went back to work.
The Ribbing
I want to talk about this because nobody tells you itâs coming, or if they do you donât really believe how relentless it can be.
There are five mechanics in our shop. Everyone smokes. When I came back on day four and didnât smoke at break, I figured maybe it wouldnât be a big deal. Maybe theyâd notice and not say anything.
They noticed and they said plenty.
The first day it was mostly jokes. Hey Ricky, you forget your pack? What happened, Claudia cut you off? By the second day it had an edge to it. You think youâre better than us now? What, you too soft to smoke anymore? By the end of the first week, it was a daily thing. Some of it was playful in the way guys at a shop are playful, but some of it was pointed. Men can sense when someone near them is trying to change, and sometimes that registers as a judgment of their own choices even when it isnât meant that way.
Iâm not going to name names because these are men I respect and work with and some of them are my friends. But there was real pressure. There were moments when the easiest thing in the world would have been to reach for a cigarette and shut the whole thing down. Youâre right, guys, Iâm back, letâs smoke. Thatâs all it would have taken.
What kept me going through that, honestly, was my father. Not in a dramatic, ghostly way. Just the memory of what I had promised myself at his grave and then broken by lighting up thirty minutes later. I was not going to be that person anymore. Whatever anyone at the shop thought of me, I was not going to break a promise I had made to a dead man.
I also thought about Marco watching me. I didnât want him to see me caved to peer pressure at forty-four years old.
What Happened After
I hit thirty days and the cravings changed. They didnât disappear, but they went from waves I had to fight through to occasional thoughts I could observe and let pass. By sixty days I was mostly just living my life.
My breathing improved faster than I expected. By month three, I wasnât getting winded going up the stairs at the shop. By month five, I ran for the first time in about eight years. Just a slow mile on the road by my house, but I ran it.
Here is the part that surprised me the most: by month six, two of my coworkers had quit. Not because I lectured them, not because I said a word after the first couple of weeks. Just because they watched me do it and decided they could too. One of them, a guy named Pete who has smoked since before I knew him, told me heâd been thinking about quitting for years but hadnât believed he could do it. Watching me made him believe it was possible.
That hit me differently than I expected.
My son Marco came to me about eight months in and said something I have thought about almost every day since. He said, âDad, youâre the strongest person I know.â He wasnât talking about lifting or working. He knew what I had done and what it had cost me to do it. He had watched the whole thing from the inside.
Roberto Valdez died at sixty-two. I am forty-four now with nineteen months clean. I do not know what the future holds, but I know I am not following the same road anymore.
To You, If Youâre Still Smoking
Maybe youâre in a world like mine where smoking is what everyone does and quitting makes you stand out in ways that are uncomfortable. Maybe youâve watched someone you loved pay the price and youâre still smoking anyway, because that is what addiction does. It does not yield to logic.
You are not weak because you havenât quit yet. But you are not alone in fighting this, either. There are mechanics and construction workers and warehouse guys and a hundred other men who work hard physical jobs and spent years thinking that quitting was for other people, softer people, people with different lives. And then they quit.
Cold turkey will make you miserable for two weeks. Then it gets better. Then it gets a lot better. And one day your kid is going to call you strong.
That day is coming for you too.
Ricky Valdez Tucson, Arizona