YOU CAN SMOKE, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE

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"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics."
--- Fletcher Knebel (1911-1993), U.S. author

Lately I happened across a recent picture of me flanked by my two sons, and it looked like a picture of two strapping young men who were posing with a troll they had bagged from under a bridge somewhere. I was forced to come to a couple of conclusions: a) it doesn’t matter how much I retain a child-like sense of wonder, or how young I claim to feel… I’m a geezer; and b) I really should finally sit down and have a serious talk with my sons about something before I die.

     Never being one to avoid or postpone an awkward situation, I immediately emailed both Ben and Sam with a link to this site. So boys, what follows is a heart-to-heart from your dad…

     Before you run for the nearest cover, let me put your mind at ease: I'm not talking about sitting you down to inform you of the Facts Of Life.  I've never really gotten those facts down straight myself, and some of them are really just rumors anyway, so in that regard it's probably best that I leave your education in the capable hands of Hollywood.

     It’s never too late, though, to try to steer you away from some bad habits. And since you’re now both in your 20’s, you’ve probably considered trying cigarettes… in fact, given my general state of cluelessness, you could both be smoking like chimneys while reading this.  That would be a mistake, according to the Surgeon General, everybody who doesn’t smoke, and those people who make those anti-smoking public service commercials funded by the taxes paid by all the smokers. I’ve been told that the entire tobacco industry is concentrating its persuasive skills on your demographic, so I suppose I better do my part to discourage you from adopting this filthy habit.  Granted, I could talk to you directly, but I've noticed that whenever I shift into Ward Cleaver mode, your eyes seem to glaze over, drool forms at the corners of your mouth, and your mother laughs hysterically from the next room.  Besides, I’ve been told that your generation assigns more credibility to the internet than to old guys like me.

     As I just mentioned, everyone seems to be concerned that the vast bulk of tobacco advertising appears to be aimed at young folks like yourself.  Personally, I don't get it.  None of the ads I've seen seem particularly youth-oriented.  I recall that Joe Camel was the culprit most used as an example; the assumption being, I suppose, that a stylized, cartoon mascot must be aimed at a younger audience.

     Could be, I guess... although when I was your age, Hamm's beer used to have a cartoon bear selling its brew, and I was never under the impression that those commercials were aimed at my generation.  In fact, my main reaction was to worry about what to do during a camping trip if I ran into a likkered-up bear.  I guess the Joe Camel approach is too subtle for a guy who grew up during a time when Fred Flintstone was hawking Winstons during commercial breaks.

     But for the life of me, I can't understand how cigarette ads could persuade anyone, kids or grownups, to light up.  They don't seem to make much sense. For instance, I remember a series of billboards from Benson & Hedges showing their cigarettes posed in little slices of life.  "Sun and Fun" the ad would say, and there would be a picture of two cigarettes sitting in lounge chairs under an umbrella at the beach; or "Rest and Relaxation" with a couple of coffin nails sitting together on a porch swing, sharing a summer evening.  Why would Benson & Hedges think that by anthropomorphizing their cigarettes, you’d be encouraged to pluck one of the little critters off their porch swing, stick it in your mouth, and set its little head on fire?

     I find the Marlboro ads even more mystifying.  Their billboards consist of nothing but the word "Marlboro" accompanying a picture of a cowboy engaging in some particularly cowboy-like activity.  That's it.  No promotional message or slogan like "The taste of the Old West", or "The Surgeon General is a sissy", or even "If you like this picture, smoke our cigarettes". Just "Marlboro" and a picture of some ruggedly handsome guy tightening his spurs, or cinching his saddle, or punching a cow.  Heck, in half these ads, he's not even smoking a cigarette. It's as if just seeing a cowboy is supposed to make us want to smoke... and that's just silly.  When I was a kid, I didn't make believe I was a cowboy because I wanted to roll my own; I just thought it would be fun to ride horses, skip baths, and shoot people.

     So I'm not going to caution you to ignore tobacco advertising, since I doubt it's exerting much influence on your impressionable little skulls anyway.  Peer pressure is probably a more likely concern... I'm sure you see folks your age who smoke and they seem pretty "cool" (to use your crazy beatnik lingo).  You might be tempted to smoke yourself in order that you, too, could be one of these "cool" people.

     But who am I kidding? I'm not worried too much about that. Since you've emerged from the same gene pool as your dad, you've probably already discovered that our family has no "cool" instinct... we are simply incapable of achieving coolness. At the entrance doors to some of the trendier clubs, you can still see a picture of me in a circle with a line drawn through it.

     No, if you decide to light up, it won't be because of insidious advertising or peer pressure. It will be for the same reason young people pierce and tattoo and otherwise abuse their bodies: because they're stupid.

     No offense, but you're younger than me.  Young people, almost by definition, do stupid things. It's part of the job description.  Ask any older guy, and he'll have a half-dozen stories of the dumb things he did in his younger years; and some lingering residual stupidity will make him eager and proud to share these appalling accounts of brain dysfunction.

     On one of those inevitable days where you find yourself desperately looking for something stupid to do, you may be tempted to suck into your lungs the same stuff that people in burning buildings crawl on the floor to avoid.  When that time comes, I hope some tiny part of your brain will still be clinging to enough sanity to remember the story I'm about to share: the story of My First Cigarette.

     Keep in mind that because I grew up with my dad (your late grandpa), a two-pack-a-day man, I had been smoking vicariously for years. Maybe that's why I never felt the need to try cigarettes during my stupid teenage years.  It wasn't until the early years of my marriage that I decided to try smoking.

     At the time, I was an assistant manager at a retail drug store that was part of a large chain. As was customary with managers, I was a salaried employee (a salary, if you don't know, is a lot like an allowance... it stays the same week after week, no matter how often you think it should be increased). I remember it was a particularly busy time of the year, near one of those holidays that are designed to keep retailers happy.  It may even have been in July, when we were putting out Christmas decorations and reminding shoppers to mail those cards early. At any rate, it was at this time that someone high in the corporate structure, in a blast of Einsteinian insight, realized that the more hours a salaried employee worked in a given week, the less you were paying him per hour.  This meant that the company could save substantially on payroll costs by cutting back on the hourly-wage help and having the managers pick up the slack.  No sooner was this discovered then it became policy, and it also prompted the Legal Department to check into possible loopholes in the Emancipation Proclamation.

     At the practical level, this meant I was working about 90 hours a week, and I was very, very tired. I was working all day and well into the night, going home long enough to shower and sleep for two to four hours, then shambling back into work. Every five hours or so, I would go out to the parking lot and sit in my car, trying to get a little rest and interrupted only occasionally by the well-meaning passers-by that thought I needed CPR.

     At the very nadir of this cycle, when my brain had ceased to register any electrical activity, I spotted an open pack of cigarettes that a customer had carelessly left behind on one of the many ashtrays placed strategically throughout the store. (No, this is not a fairy-tale; there was a time when people were allowed to smoke in retail establishments without the mandatory lynching). I reflexively picked them up and stuffed them in my pocket to dispose of them later, but I immediately forgot about them until I was taking one of my aforementioned parking lot breaks.  I reached into my pocket to grab my car keys, pulled out this pack of cigarettes, and had the classic What Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

     My thought processes were working something like this:  I was so tired as to be barely functional.  Local newspapers had already called the store, trying to confirm the reports that our company had managed to animate a corpse and was using it to answer customer service calls. I needed something to keep me going, something to rev me up enough to get me back out of the car seat to face the balance of the day.

     For some reason, my feeble mind thought that a cigarette might be the answer.  At best, it would increase my heart rate while occupying my mind with something other than how tired I was.  At worst, it would be so distasteful as to accomplish the same diverting effect.  I realize that this reasoning doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, but keep in mind that at the time, if someone had convinced me of its revitalizing effects, I would have probably scrubbed my face with a Brillo pad.

     So I lit up.  I took a couple of deep drags. I started to feel green around the gills, which, while unpleasant, was having the desired outcome of making me want to get up and get moving, if for no other reason than to see if this awful stuff had taken away the use of my limbs.  I forced myself to take one last drag, turned my head and exhaled a noxious cloud out the car window....

     .... and directly into the face of your mother, who had decided to drop by the store and see how I was doing.

     Now, stop and think about this and maybe you'll appreciate just how cosmic the moment was.  For the first time in my twenty-odd years of existence, I had decided to suck on a cigarette.  And at that exact moment, my wife.. your mom... who would sooner serve us D-Con than see anyone in her family smoking, shows up at my side, to share the moment with me. What are the odds?

     Let me tell you: If you think you had trouble explaining why an occasional "C" popped up on your report card, you have no idea how much talking I had to do to convince her that this cigarette break was not an everyday occurrence, my lungs were not the equivalent of two charcoal briquettes, and I wasn't on the verge of taking the final, unspeakable step to chewing tobacco. The only positive result of the entire episode was the immediate infusion of three quarts of adrenaline into my system as soon as I saw your mom.

     It is now over two decades since I tried that cigarette, and I still have not lived it down.

   Your mom has shared it with friends, who, for some reason, enjoy sharing it with me on numerous occasions, as if  a) I weren't the one who pulled the bone-headed stunt, or b) I find my own bone-headed stunts as terribly amusing as they do.

     But that's all beside the point.  There's one reason I've decided to share this humiliating incident with you.  If you've ever believed anything I've told you, then believe this now: whenever you even consider doing something stupid to or with your body…

     Your mom will be there. Either in the back of your brain, or right outside your car window.

     Think about it and just say no.