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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 being
interrupted 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.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton