When I was growing up, at a certain point there was to be no more smoking in our house.  My mother didn’t smoke anymore, and of course neither my brother nor I was supposed to be smoking to begin with.  Of course, we all still did.  I’ll guess that I was 15 at the time, and I thought that I was the most clever person in the world.  I found that if you open the door to the furnace that you could easily access a direct route to the chimney.  You could stand there and smoke all day long and not have the slightest amount escape into the house.  The air from the house, since it was cooler outside and warmer inside, would constantly stream upwards and out of the chimney.

So I’d go and grab a piece of aluminum foil to use as an ashtray, stand by the furnace smoking, and then just wad up the foil around the cigarette butt and throw it away.  You may think that I’m going to tell you that I started a fire in the trash, but that’s not what happened.  What happened is that I must have gotten careless and started leaving ashes on the ledge inside the door.  I’d never remember doing it, but I’d come back later and find ashes on the door ledge.

One day my brother came up to me and said, “I know that you’re smoking by the furnace.  I do it, too.  So stop leaving fucking ashes in there or we’re going to get busted!”  I agreed with him, and I said that I’d be more careful and that I didn’t realize that I was even doing it.  So maybe a day or two had passed, and he came up to me with an angry look on his face.  “Come here.  NOW!”  He led me to the furnace, opened the door, and pointed to a pile of ashes in the door.  I told him that I was starting to think that he was doing it.  I asked him to describe his method of smoking by the furnace, I told him how I had been doing it, and we decided that it must not have been cigarette ashes.  It must have been debris falling down from the chimney or something.

A couple of weeks later, my mother was in the laundry room near the furnace folding laundry.  I was just in the other room and I called out to her to ask a question about something.  I don’t remember what the question was, but she said, “I can’t really hear what you’re saying.  I’ll be out there in a minute.”  So I asked her more loudly, and she said, “I said just wait a minute.”  So I walked into the laundry room and got a big surprise.  There she was, arm sticking into the furnace, trying to sneak a cigarette.  She said, “God dammit!  Can’t I even smoke a fucking cigarette around here without you kids being up my ass every minute of the day?!”

SHE was the one who got busted.  We had no idea that it could have been her leaving ashes all over the damn place.  I think it’s so funny how our minds all worked alike to figure out the furnace thing independently, and how strong the addiction to nicotine is that we all obsessed about it so much to even find a way to smoke inside the house.