by Marc Colten
begging the younger generation not to follow the example they set in hundreds of movies and television shows. These spots were spoofed on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as “Hi, I'm dead. Don't smoke.”. They lived in a time when people were never seen without cigarettes. Cigarettes were sexy. Lovers looked at each other through erotic clouds of blue smoke. (You didn't have to draw the audience a picture when Paul Heinreid lit two cigarettes and handed one to Bette Davis.) Tough private dicks lit a cigarette and stared us down. Soldiers lit up in foxholes to bolster their courage before dying for democracy. Too late they begged us not to pay attention to all of that.
Bill Hicks is gone now but Leary is still going strong. Will we someday be graced with his public service announcement, rasping out a plea to ignore the comedy routine where he said he would “never, never, never, never, never, never” give up smoking, or that you could keep the sickly older years that smokers were giving up?
In my old neighborhood, fires were the equivalent of block parties, with everyone pouring out to watch the action. I remember the firemen, in the days before face masks and SCOTS packs, staggering out of the burning building and coughing out a lungful of smoke before they took a break on the running board of a fire truck and lit up a smoke. The cigarettes looked so small and inadequate compared to the smoky inferno they had just escaped. It was hard to believe they needed a cigarette after nearly perishing inside what had started out as a residence before becoming a huge coffin nail.
So after all that, it's time to admit to my own smoking past. Marijuana came first. Weed, reefer, grass, “pot”. Yes, yes, yes, I “experimented” with marijuana in college. The smoking part was fun, although the electrodes were uncomfortable. It was more social than chemical, I think. I can't adequately describe what it was like to sit in circle on a campus lawn just after sunset on a perfect New Hampshire evening in the fall of 1969 and accept an expertly rolled joint from the multi-ringed hand of the long haired woman to your left. Putting it to your lips after it had touched hers was like the kiss you always dreamed of getting from her, but never would. The tip glowed as you inhaled the smoke and then (Don't Bogart that joint, my friend) passed it along to the person beside you. You belonged. You were welcome. To this day I don't know how much of what I smoked was really marijuana and how much was pure rip-off. I got high, it's true, but I was nineteen years old and it was high tide and to be honest I could get lightheaded watching the coeds shoot hoops.
Sometime in my Junior year I took up small cigars. Working class cigars. Unlike the cigars I'd seen prosperous uncles and professional men smoke, they came five to a cardboard box, each wrapped in individual plastic cocoons. For a while every star in Hollywood was portrayed with a cigar stuck in their mouths or (especially in the case of Demi Moore) delicately held between three fingers. Considering that we all get the symbolism, why are they so shy about showing Demi with the stogie jammed in her mouth?
The sudden resurgence in cigars, clubs and paraphernalia had very little to do with the pleasures of cigar smoking, and even less with the more dubious pleasure of trying to eat while your neighbor's smoke drifts over you. It is about power and money and privilege. If you doubt that, try to imagine Cigar Aficionado magazine profiling Arnold or Bruce or Demi picking up a $1.50 five pack of El Jefe's under the TE-AMO sign on McDonald Avenue in Brooklyn. This is about fat cigars hand rolled (as elders used to tell me) against the dusky thighs of Latin women and carefully stored in humidors lined with wood from the last tree in the rain forest. It's about removing $20 cigars from their individual glass tubes (which made great “test tubes” when I was a kid) and not even bothering to recycle them. This is about slowly using up your grandfather's secret stash of contraband Havanas stored in a climate controlled vault on 5th Avenue.
It was about that time I bought my Zippo. God, I loved my Zippo. I can't think of any machine that I have loved so much before or since, including my first car. It had the aura fostered by a lifetime of magazine ads showing a dented lighter with the caption “My Zippo saved me from a Jap bullet on Tarawa!”. Somehow it made it so right to light my cheap cigars with a lighter that saved American lives. They were American lighters, with their steel cases and lifetime guarantees. I practiced lighting up the way someone had shown me by snapping the lighter backwards against my thigh to open the lid and then bringing it forward to roll the steel wheel against the flint and throw a spark into the wick. If you didn't set your pants on fire you were all set.
When I graduated from college I bought my first pipe. I had many over the years, and found myself a slave to smoking whims. I had briar pipes, clay pipes, even a corncob pipe which I abandoned when I realized I didn't want to resemble either Douglas MacArthur or Mammy Yokum. I had pipes with disposable filters. I had straight pipes and curved pipes. I put aside my beloved Zippo and began using a pipe lighter that looked like a big nut on a big bolt. You snapped it open and put the round hole over the pipe and inhaled. I went through too many pipes and too much tobacco before I quit in 1980. My decision to quit was fairly abrupt. I had been unlucky in love, again, and found my apartment too small to contain my anguish. I went outside, taking only a pipe, a pouch, and my lighter. I walked for three hours, pausing only to tap out the ashes and refill the bowl. When I had inhaled enough flame to set the new tobacco burning, I continued my death march. I never smoked again. For several days I could barely talk and was convinced I had jumpstarted throat cancer. When I felt better I had learned my lesson. Tobacco was a comforting friend but the cost of friendship suddenly seemed too high. If I had sought that friendship in moderation, maybe I would still be smoking today. If I had accepted the friendship of cigarettes, well, who knows? Maybe someone will point out that tobacco isn't addictive because I just stopped using it, but can he explain the way I felt when I opened an old shoe box full of junk and found a pipe that has been cold for almost twenty years? The wistful feeling as you remember the first puff of a new bowl and the gentle crisping sound as the tobacco ignited. It's been a long time, but I still remember
My mother died seven years after I stopped smoking and my father five years after that. They smoked nearly to the end. Neither my advice nor my example made a difference. The monkey was too strong.
The End
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