When I was young, we lived in an apartment complex near Raleigh, N.C.

I was your typical boy, ten years old, almost eleven, and naïve as a new baby, though I thought I knew everything.

Linda - that was her beautiful, beautiful name - our neighbor, had probably lived there since the day I was born, but I never noticed her until that summer of 1977. Never noticed her, I mean, any more than the other neighbors around our apartment complex - some nice, some weird, some just dull.

And I know this is an account about smoking, and I’ll get to that, but it wasn’t smoking that first lit my fire with Linda.

I was just a boy, ya gotta remember. Boys notice the weirdest things.

I was sitting on the steps with some buddy of mine, when she sauntered by. My buddy’s head turned to follow her. He was about two years older than me, so you might expect that.

She wore cut-off denim shorts and a thin t-shirt - the sight of her that moment is stamped like a brand on my memory. For the first time in my life, I was noticing, and appreciating, a woman.

She was enjoying a Snickers bar - licking the last of the chocolate off her fingers with her tongue. My buddy was about to fall off the step, leaning over ogling. I myself was feeling strange - had never had a feeling like this before.

Linda must have seen us but she just kept walking. She paused only long enough to throw the Snicker’s wrapper onto the ground. Then she vanished around the corner.

Watching her litter - so rude, so careless, so lovely - it zapped me like an electric bolt, it singed my senses, it set me up for a lifetime of pursuit of that very sort of girl, the kind who stick their pretty fingers in the eye of society for their own amusement. I wanted to run out and grab that tossed-away wrapper and, I don’t know, eat it or something.

But that was just a foretaste of what was to come.

We had a pool in the complex, not much of a pool. Only the kids ever swam in it, but some of the other people liked to sun themselves there and maybe pretend they were someplace tropical and hip.

I was just minding my own business a few days later, sitting on one of the creaky plastic chairs debating whether I should get in the pool or go home and tackle my neglected homework, when SHE walked into my view.

Not only did she wear some skimpy, tight, little bikini that barely covered anything on her beautiful body, but she sat down on the chair next to mine, even though every other seat in the place was vacant.

I could smell her fragrance, warm in the sunshine. I liked it, intensely liked it.

“Hello, Peter,” she said to me and smiled, laying her hand ever so briefly across mine.

“Hello,” I squeaked back, wondering if I was going to pass out or wet all over myself or both.

She pulled a tube of suntan lotion out of her bag and began to massage it into her skin. I looked away, not wanting to stare and be rude. I pretended to be interested in a sparrow that was pecking the cement.

Fate would not let me off, so easily.

“Peter, can you get the spot in the middle of my back?” she asked, as casually as if she was inquiring about the time of day.

I turned back to her. I’m sure my face was flushing red as if it were scalded. I took the tube of lotion with shaking hands, squirted the surprisingly cold drop onto my palm and then reached towards her and laid my palm onto her warm skin. I began to rub and she shivered, actually shivered beneath my touch. I thought it was the cold of the lotion. But she smiled and said, “That feels good.”

I dropped the tube. I picked it up, still trembling.

You see, a child’s world is all about how he feels, himself. It’s a revelation, when he begins to think about the sensual pleasure of others, beyond the innocent basics of a hug or something. I realized that my simple touch pleased her deeply, powerfully, and I wanted to keep rubbing but she cut me off.

“That’s enough, Peter, thanks.”

Maybe people were watching or something and tongues might wag - she was at least 20 and I was just a kid. Or maybe she just felt lotioned enough -- for now.

“Would you get my cigarettes for me? I forgot them in the apartment,” she asked, after we had spent a few silent, but not awkward, moments watching that sparrow on the cement.

Again, my mind reeled. I’m sure I had seen her smoking before. Maybe I hadn’t. Smoking was not part of my life. It was a bad thing that some people did. That was all I knew. And I couldn’t picture her doing that very bad thing or understand why.

She was holding out her key. “Apartment 47-A.”

She trusted me to go in her house?

I took the keys from her and scrambled to my feet. The cement was burning hot but I barely felt it. I dashed to her apartment, turned the key and opened the door into heaven.

Now, my mom, she tried, but she was a single mom and I wasn’t much help, so our place was always a mess, smelling of the cat and stale pizza and maybe the trash that I didn’t take out every night.

But Linda’s pad was clean, and sweetly fragrant, with flowery curtains on the windows and a brass lamp glowing in one corner. On her living room table lay the cigarettes, next to a pink phone and a pink lighter and an ashtray with one half-smoked cigarette crushed out, tinged with pink lipstick, resting in a dusting of soft, gray ash.

They were Virginia Slims Lights 100s, in a slender, pretty box. It felt light, surprisingly light, as I picked it up.

Something felt deliciously naughty about that moment - I had never held cigarettes before in my life. I started to try to pull one out but then thought better of it.

I was wondering why she would smoke, why anyone would.

I can still see it in my mind, that beautiful place, the bedroom door ajar with something lacy draped across the bed; an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and a handful of bills on the glossy kitchen counter; and none of the ghastly pseudo-décor that plagued other homes in that day and age.

I took a deep, deep breath of that sweet-scented paradise and reluctantly left, cradling her cigarettes and lighter in my sweaty hand.

“Thanks, Peter,” she said, as I handed her the cigarettes, back at the pool. “You’re a doll.”

Then she tipped the pack up and captured a cigarette with her lips as it slid out. I couldn’t help watching. I was absolutely enthralled.

With a snap of her fingers, she sparked up her lighter and held the flame to the tip of the cigarette. I could see her lips, gripping the cigarette tightly, wrinkling slightly to hold it firmly in place.

The flame sank into the tobacco and it glowed like a tiny Halloween pumpkin as she inhaled. She set down the lighter and half-closed her eyes as she finished the drag. Silvery-white smoke leaked out around her lips until she sucked it back in and swallowed it down. The sight of it, creamy and misty around her lips and teeth and tongue, was doing unfamiliar things to my body.

Then she exhaled. And I’m telling you, nothing in my life since then, nothing that I have ever seen - and I’ve been everywhere and done everything -- was as lovely as that stream of smoke rising from the lips of that woman in a Carolina apartment complex on a drowsy Saturday morning in 1977.

It spun like a dancer in the slight breeze. It diffused above us in the air, ascending to the angels, no doubt.

And then Linda made the exact same sound that she had made when I rubbed the lotion on her back. And I had a revelation, an epiphany, a three-word explanation for one of life’s mysteries:

Smoking is pleasure.

That’s why people did it. That’s why Linda did it. Bad or not, it felt good, incredibly good, in ways almost naughty to think about.

She had licked her chocolately fingers in pleasure that first time that I noticed her. She had just felt pleasure in the touch of a man - well, a boy, my touch, puny as it was. And something about smoking was as deeply, as intensely pleasurable, or even more.

I lay back on my chair, my mind abuzz with new knowledge. She took another deep, deep drag. The breeze had shifted slightly and suddenly I was engulfed in her sweet, rich exhalation.

This was 1977. “Mind if I smoke?” still had: “Of course not,” as the default. People didn’t worry about second-hand smoke back then. If it bothered you, you just stepped away.

It didn’t bother me, not like that. What it did do was make me all trembly and feel like something in me was on a wild, roller-coaster ride. What it did do was make me long for her to let another breath of it smother me - for this one refused to linger and seemed gone in a heart-breaking instant.

She was so incredibly beautiful! For the first time in my life, I was noticing and appreciating how a woman’s hair framed her face, what a beautiful thing were her eyes and lips and nose and delicate chin and even her neck, how a woman’s breasts curved in perfect symmetry, how in a skimpy bathing suit like this her hips swelled out in sweet ripeness, just begging to have an appreciative hand rub them gently and lovingly from curve to curve, from rounded peak to narrow valley and up the other side.

And somewhere at the end of her smooth, long legs, her polished toenails wiggled in what must have passed for stylish sandals back then and I wanted to throw myself at her and kiss all ten of them and lick the dust from them and nibble them like grapes.

I was dying, I was surely dying, of the intoxicating torment that tore me bodily from boyhood that day.

Her lips closed around the cigarette again - what a lucky %$^# it was to be crushed like that in her mouth, to feel the squeezing pressure bear down like that, to feel the suction of her indrawn breath, to rush in smoky haste to satisfy her summons!

Somewhere above, the gods must have answered my prayers. For as I was begging within the sanctuary of my soul for just one more sweet blast of smoke from her mouth, she turned to me as she tugged the cigarette from her lips, a full drag of smoke now pleasuring her deep within, and evoking that delicious, almost indescribable sound from her again - not a moan, not a purr but some alluring combination of both.

Then: “What school do you go to, Peter?”

Her blue eyes fixed sincerely upon me.

I was amazed she could talk with her lungs still full of smoke.

She was looking right at me awaiting the answer, the polite thing to do, of course. You look at someone who is talking to you.

“Carver,” I said, “Carver. Ms. Sims is my homeroom teacher and …”

Here it came, in a full, rich, blissful stream, pouring forth from her lips -Virginia Slims tobacco smoke twice filtered - in her cigarette and in her womanly lungs - sweet and fragrant as the scent of a fresh cinnamon bun from the mall, hot as the Southern summer sunshine that ripens the best tobacco. She didn’t seem to be at all concerned or to even notice what she was doing. She was close enough, leaning in to listen to my response, that I could see a tiny bead of perspiration on her upper lip, see the moisture glistening on her white teeth, see the very pattern of her lips, see those lips shifting gently to help propel the smoke from her mouth.

I’m sure the end of my sentence was some ridiculous squeak, because my faculties were now entirely occupied with pretending as if beautiful women exhaled their cigarette smoke directly in my face every day and I didn’t mind it.

James Bond, ma’am, age ten, at your service. Yeah, right.

How could it possibly have been accidental? How could she not have noticed? I can’t blame 1977 for everything.

She talked to me all that afternoon, like a real person, not a little boy. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, and exhaled puff after puff in my face, as if we were comfortable friends. I learned to hold my breath and inhale sharply as her exhale hit my face, so that I could breathe her smoke in, heady and strong. A half-dozen times or more, she ejected twin jets of smoke from her nostrils and I tasted and swallowed those, too, as they drifted my way. Or she would talk right through her exhale, shattering the smoky stream and scattering it across my face.

That she was dosing me, a little boy she hardly knew, with tar, nicotine and whatever else smolders in a cigarette, she probably didn’t think about. Maybe she didn’t care.

That delirious day, she also allowed me the exquisite thrill of renewing her suntan lotion from head to toe - the heck with any nosy neighbors - and my fingers had their baptism into the church of a woman’s softness, of flesh warm, supple and delightful, of the sensuous difference between caressing shoulders and toes and the smooth skin of a bare back.

Down the line of her spine, my fingers trailed, pausing chastely at the edge of the thin fabric that covered her firm bottom. Something in me wanted to tear that ^%$ cloth off, and to smother that succulent, forbidden flesh in kisses and caresses, every sweetly yielding inch of it.

I firmly believe that if we had been in a more private locale, or if we had had more time, my education would have continued further, into the tactile delights of what little was left off limits that day. Wrong or not, she would have led and I would have followed rejoicing. And I know that I would never have breathed a word about it, so long as I lived, not even under all the tortures of the Viet Cong and Brezhnev’s commies put together.

The surgeon general has determined that cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.

That’s what the warning on the pack said, that paper box of Virginia Slims whose remaining long-stemmed occupants she lit up, one by one, that day, before she finally, casually tossed it, emptied, into the grass outside the pool enclosure, as the sun was setting and the blissful day was ending and my neglected skin was beginning to tingle with burn.

That pretty box found its way to my room and I keep it to this day, reminding myself that it all did happen, just like that.

The old general was right: hazardous, indeed, if not to health, to sanity.

My mom got a new job and we moved away less than a month later. I was a wreck.

I’ve spent the rest of my life trying and failing to recreate that singular experience. But 1977 will never come again, manhood never melts back to boyhood and I know it’s futile.

I could curse that place, that time, maybe even Philip Morris himself --

… but never her, never, ever her, that sweet, wicked goddess who blew away my innocence like the seeds of a dandelion - no, like the smoke of her cigarette -- and who still smiles at me in my elusive dreams, her body forever fine and firm, young and brash and beautiful, wild and womanly ...

... luring me with a smile that would tempt a man to tear the devil himself limb from limb to please her.