Some guys look tough with cigarettes hanging from their lips: James Dean, for example, or the Marlboro Man. Not me, though. The few times I've ever inhaled I've always come off looking like a bewildered puffer fish — which is why, I guess, the habit never really stuck. But my friend Evgeny has been a smoker for more than two decades, ever since he took his first fateful drag. Lighting up was easy to do, especially for a 16-year-old kid in Communist Bulgaria, and his years of practice make him look as cool as anyone. Recently, I watched in admiration as Evgeny played a string of soulful chords on his Fender Stratocaster, with a cigarette burning — Ronnie Wood style — between fingers three and four.
Evgeny is not a professional musician. He's an architect, now living in New York City. But even as he sat there, strumming in a halo of smoke, he copped to having the nicotine blues. "Where I grew up, everyone smoked," he said. "Now it's just a bad habit." His doctors, unsurprisingly, concur: "They've all told me to quit before I turn 40," he sighed. Like so many smokers, Evgeny badly wanted to stop, but couldn't bring himself to give it up. Then he heard about the Mad Russian, and everything changed.
Yefim Shubentsov promises to erase cravings with a wave of his hand. For 27 years, from his office in Brookline, Massachusetts, he has treated more than 130,000 people who wanted to stop smoking, drinking, overeating, or being phobic. He boasts a nearly perfect success rate, and the likes of novelist Amy Tan and rocker Billy Joel have blurbed him as a revelation, claiming he cured them in one session.
Neither Evgeny nor I really believed that a little hand-waving would put an end to his 20-year habit. But for a $65 fee, it was worth a try. In fact, it would be a bargain in a world where, according to GlaxoSmithKline, the global smoking-cessation market garnered almost $2 billion in 2006, and where desperate smokers seek relief from their cravings in the form of acupuncture needles, endorphin-generating lasers, or the truth serum sodium pentothal.
The Russian sees his patients in groups of a dozen or more, and when we arrived in the waiting room, the latest cohort fidgeted in nervous silence. I watched as a tattooed trucker plunked down next to a well-coiffed woman in the corner. And then Shubentsov's assistant, Rita, stood in the middle of the room and announced in a formidable Russian accent: "Tragic moment for everyone. All cigarettes and lighters into garbage can." Like kids being busted by the teacher, everyone emptied their pockets. Freshly opened packs of Camels, Marlboros, and Lucky Strikes tumbled into the receptacle — thunk, thunk, thunk — before, finally, we were ushered in to see Shubentsov.
