My Cigarette Butt Collection

Some kids collect seashells, cars, rocks, marbles, trophies, baseball cards, coins. Most kids collect things they’re proud of. Things they can display on a shelf. Collections that are not just a toy to share with other people but conversation pieces. They can bring them to school for show-and-tell, spread them out for other people to pick over, admire and wish they were the lucky ones who found all those neat things.

Not me. My collection was top secret. I definitely wouldn’t have left it sitting out. My sisters would see it and tell my mom and I'd wind up in a meeting in my parent’s room to get to the bottom of it. "Why!! Why do you have cigarette butts in your closet!! Are you smoking!?? You’re only ten years old, for Christ’s sake!!!"

I kept my butts hidden in the pockets of the plastic shoe caddy that was nailed to the inside of my closet door. I put shoes in over top of them so no one would find them. I’d find myself sometimes pulling out the cigarette butts, examining them, holding them between my two fingers pretending to be the person who absentmindedly smoked this cigarette all the way down to the filter or this person who only smoked half of it because they were in a hurry. I had all the mannerisms worked out. Their voice. Their vocabulary. What they thought about when they were smoking the cigarette. Where they were going and why they dropped their cigarette right there in the parking lot of the A&P.

My collection started out of the blue one day when I was waiting for my mom to finish her grocery shopping at the A&P. I got tired of waiting in the car so I started walking from the car to the sidewalk in front of the laundromat. On the way I noticed the cigarette butts on the asphault. There were quite a few. People tended to throw their cigarettes out in the parking lot before entering the store. The cigarette butts worth keeping were found closest to the storefronts because they were less likely to have been run over by a car. I didn’t want the flat ones. The stories were squashed out of them. I wanted the ones I could hold between two fingers. The ones that still had life in them.

I bent over and picked them up, as if I was picking up a penny, and I slipped them into my pocket quickly before anyone saw me. I was, after all, breaking several societal rules. 1) I was underage; 2) My parents would kill me; 3) I was picking up garbage off the street that was in someone else's mouth. There would be questions to answer and I didn’t have any answers. I didn’t stop to ask myself why I collected them. I just collected them. Did the kids with the baseball cards have to have a reason why they collected baseball cards? Did marble collectors have to defend their marbles? "That marble was in someone else’s hand! Yuck!" No. That never happened to them. But I knew with my collection, it could happen and I knew I could avoid all questions and thus never have to preplan my lie in case I got caught because I had a really good hiding place for my collection.

When I hit the jackpot was the time I found a cigarette that had a beige plastic filter attached. Someone who really likes to smoke makes the effort to buy all the accoutrements. When I found a cigarette lighter in the parking lot, that was a lucky day, too. Especially if it hadn’t been run over by a car yet and it still had a little juice left. It encouraged me to find cigarette butts that had a little more than an inch of tobacco in them so I could have something to light and hold and really pretend I was the lady with the red lipstick who smoked Pall Malls.

She probably lived in a brick house with plastic ornaments like ladybugs and bumblebees in her garden. And faded plastic flowers and a front porch about four feet wide, covered in that thin green indoor/outdoor carpet that you find at the miniature golf course. She probably talked to her neighbors over coffee and said things like "Mitsy, what ever do you use to get coffee stains out of carpet?" She'd use her cigarette hand to gesticulate, and when she listened to Mitsy's advice she'd hold her cigarette between her lips and say "mm-hmmm" then she'd blow the smoke away from Mitsy's face and put her cigarette out in the ashtray with several gentle taps on the end, smothering the hot tip into the remaining butt until the smoke ceased curling up and around her fingers.

I categorized the cigarette butts the same way any child would categorize their marbles or their seashells. In order of popularity, there were non-menthols. They were usually generic brands such as Kent, Parliament, Viceroy, Barclay. There were menthols. Kool and Newport, usually. Cigarette butts with lipstick and cigarette butts with the plastic handle. There were brown cigarettes. The brown cigarette butts and the plastic filter cigarette butts were the rarest finds. The most common cigarette butts were flattened, stepped on and twisted apart sometimes, but usually flattened with tire marks. They were so common that they weren’t of any value. Cigarette butts with no filter at all or sucked on so hard that the filter was a dirty amber were of no value either.

It was the sort of collection that got me thinking about things larger than just my world but the lives of strangers. It got me to think about the weather. If it hadn’t rained in a four or five days then it would be a good day to collect. It took a few days for fresh, unrained upon cigarette butts to appear. The number one rule was to never pick up a wet cigarette butt. They stunk to high heavens. You couldn’t get that smell off your fingers or your jeans pocket until you washed them. You definitely don’t want wet butts in your closet. Only pick the best ones. As your collection grows, you develop a trained eye for detail and can weed out the substandard butts. That’s what makes a good collection.