My lifetime tobacco consumption consists of one cigarette. Actually, half of one cigarette. I believe it was a Lucky Strike. Or perhaps an Old Gold. It was certainly one of these:
It was 1952. My older brother came home from a summer job in the Poconos with a cigarette tucked into the sleeve, like this. So cool, so macho:
That's not my brother, but it might have been (although he drove a Dodge). A pack of Luckies in the shoulder was just about the most glamorous thing I had ever seen.
So I tried one. I stole one of my brother's coffin nails, hid in the cellar, and lit up.
It was hideous and I was bilious.
I confessed as much to friends who were already secret smokers. The word of advice -- "After you do it for a while, you get over feeling sick." Not a persuasive argument, at least to me. It seemed stupid.
There were some years there when I faulted myself for not being as adventurous as my peers. Just another example of my conservatism and caution. But now I think that not finishing that cigarette may have been the single wisest act of my otherwise brainless adolescence. If I had smoked that cigarette to the nub, I'd still be fighting the addiction.
I was, in those days, surrounded by smokers. My father smoked an occasional cigar but mostly a pipe, filled with Prince Albert tobacco. It came in a can something like this one:
He was forever fussing with his pipe -- knocking it, grinding out the remnants of the previous pipeful, refilling, lighting up. It was quite a ritual. But stinky nevertheless.
My mother smoked cigarettes, lots of them, until she came down with the ulcers. I was often sent around the corner to the candy store to buy her a pack of Chesterfields (no problem selling cancer sticks to children in those benighted days). Our house always stunk, especially when friends of my folks would visit. Everyone in their crowd smoked. Mostly chain-smoked.
No air in our home, just smog.
It's hard to know how tall I would have been, or how intelligent, if I hadn't been raised in a blue haze.
In college, my roommates all smoked. It didn't like it, but I didn't have the courage to complain. In those days, the deck was stacked in favor of the smokers, who had the rightaway. To object was to be fussy, or finicky, or unmasculine. Some of the professors smoked while teaching -- an act which gave the students permission to light up as well. It was nasty. Abstainers had no purchase.
Then things began to change. We went from this
and this
to this (in 1964):
And then throughout the '70s and '80s, there were the constant revelations about the fakery and lying of the big tobacco companies, who chose profits and destroying lives over honesty and public health.
Nowadays, no smoking in anyone's home, no smoking in buses or planes, no smoking in restaurants, no smoking in government buildings, and no smoking (as of next month) on the mall.
But I'll tell you what still makes me sick. It's a bunch of teen-agers, hanging out in front of the coffee shop, puffing theatrically and addicting themselves -- and subtracting an average of ten years from lives. In the old days, when doctors smoked Camels, or were reputed to do so, there may have been some excuse for smoking; but now, when the evidence is all in, a kid who starts to smoke is a complete raging fool.
I'm sorry but I have no nostalgia for the great age of cigarettes, though they were, as a Lorillard executive once said, "the perfect product; make it for a penny, sell it for a dollar, and it's addictive as hell."
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