The cigarette machine stood in the hallway of every bar and every diner and every bowling alley in New York. A metal box with a row of knobs and a slot for your coins. You put in thirty-five cents and you pulled the knob and a pack of cigarettes dropped into the tray. No conversation. No ID. No judgment. The machine did not care how old you were or how much you smoked or whether your mother would approve. It was the most libertarian appliance ever invented.

I was twelve years old the first time I bought cigarettes from a machine. A diner on Houston Street. Thirty-five cents. I pulled the knob for Marlboro because that is what cowboys smoked and I was a kid on the Lower East Side who thought he was a cowboy. The pack dropped and I put it in my pocket and I walked out and nobody said anything because nobody was watching. That was the beauty of the machine. No witness. No lecture. No transaction between two people where one of them might say no. Just a knob and a pack and a pocket.

The cigarette machine had a glass front so you could see the packs lined up like soldiers. Lucky Strike. Pall Mall. Camel. Winston. Kool. Newport. Every brand had its own color and its own design and the machine was a gallery of graphic design that nobody appreciated because they were just trying to buy cigarettes. But those packs were beautiful. Red and white and gold and green. Somebody designed those. Somebody spent weeks deciding that the camel should face left. The machine was a museum of commercial art that cost thirty-five cents to visit.

The price went up. Fifty cents. Then seventy-five. Then a dollar. Then two dollars. Every time the price went up somebody had to open the machine and change the mechanism and the machine got more complicated and the knob got harder to pull. By the time cigarettes were five dollars a pack the machine was an antique trying to keep up with inflation. The machine was built for a world where things cost coins. The world moved to a place where things cost bills and the machine could not follow.

They took the cigarette machines out. Health regulations. You have to ask a person now. You have to show your face and your ID and make eye contact with somebody who sells you something that will kill you. The machine never judged you. The machine never told you to quit. The machine never put a picture of a diseased lung on the package. The machine just took your coins and gave you what you asked for. That was the deal. The last honest vending machine in America. Gone. Replaced by a human being who is required by law to look at you while you do something everybody agrees you should not do. The machine let you be anonymous. The city does not let you be anonymous anymore. Not even when you are killing yourself.