It lay abandoned, on the department store floor, toy aisle if memory serves. I pretty much lived The Childhood Unsupervised and was in third grade. Someone had dropped a perfectly good unfiltered cigarette, unbroken, unbent, untouched (fingers still crossed) by human lips.
Born with the criminal mind, I made several innocent walk-bys, pretending to be interested in a stainless steel army guy robot half my size. It was 1958. Back then, the country was patriotic and not even the most seasoned mental institution inmate wouldn’t swallow their tongue at the thought of little boys playing with avocado-green military totems.
The aisle emptied. In one fluid motion, not too fast, not too slow, I pirouetted, picked up the lonesome cigarette as effortlessly as Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese fielding a routine grounder and exited the store with the fresh vice in my little kid plaid shirt pocket. Cigarettes then cost about the same as candy, a pack of 20 for a quarter. There must have been something in the lease because I don’t recall parents being around the house in my younger days. Dad was always at work. Mom? Ports unknown. For a short while, I lived in a rented basement in the almost all-Black neighborhood of Palo Alto. It was actually cozy. Alone with my solitary loot of adulthood, I examined it. Sniffed it. Made a face as the outer paper wrapper stuck to my lower lip.
I knew every spider web in the abode and there wasn’t a single match in our subterranean burrow, which was strange because we did have a gas stove. I turned on a burner. Like blowing a spitwad out a straw, I exhaled. That didn’t work. Then, I remembered seeing grown-ups — inhaling. There was no big coughing jag. I just had a mouthful of smoke and this reprehensible sensation that I had just licked the entire Sunday paper, after a chimpanzee with diarrhea had visited.
It’s funny how clearly I remember my response, which, decades later, is my career.
“What the hell is wrong with adults?”
Cripes it tasted awful. Worse? Smoke was filling our tiny abode beneath street level. Except for long-ago Nazi tank ordnance fumes, Dad was a non-smoker. I quickly doused the cigarette under the faucet, taking it outside to dispose of the evidence in a gutter a block away. Still. The place reeked. The whole time, I couldn’t shake the thought of not just grown-ups, but how nuts they’d have to be to be lighting up these wretched portable campfires dozens of times a day.
Funny that bumping into a chance headline got me reminiscing. I just ran across a story about how another major American food chain, Stop & Shop, quit selling the little bad habits in their northeastern United States 360 outlets. Target, Walmart and other retailers haven’t carried them for years. Seeing that I had my last cigarette during the Eisenhower Administration, I don’t really notice them, except for the fact they’re rarer than a Democrat in Heaven. Growing up? Everybody smoked. Outdoors. Indoors. Doctors. Lawyers. People of Pregnancy (just in case some woke Donkey Girl Scout is reading).
In the 1970s, Monday nights were my holy eves of obligation. I played poker for years with the zaniest, most inappropriate and stinkiest bunch of reprobates ever assembled. We played in a bunkhouse just big enough to accommodate a whiskey-stained poker table, light bulb and eight tiny ashtrays. No windows. We’d play sometimes until sunrise Tuesday mornings. When I came home to one of my dear brides whose name presently escapes me, I had to completely stark raving nude undress before entering my own home because of the chemical warfare/forest fire odor emanating from my wardrobe. Not kidding here. Had to hang my clothes on an oak tree limb outside the house. Neither science nor religion had invented the soap, shampoo, cream rinse or holy water that could cleanse that smoke stench from hair or skin follicles.
My World Corporate Headquarters, Downtown Newhall’s fabled cowboy coffee shop, The Way Station? Everyone smoked. Bite of hash. Drag of a cigarette. Cough. Swallow coffee. Spoonful of cold eggs over-easy. Repeat. My dear, deal pal, Tom, ran some giant local land development company the name of which eludes me. He’d actually get dressed twice for work because after breakfast, well. Like all of us, he emitted a fragrance like a sloth on fire at the La Brea tarpits. Shirt with wide collar. Fat tie. He’d change — somewhere — before hitting the office. I asked Tom why he didn’t just go to breakfast in his pajamas and save a few thousand on dry cleaning. Tommy noted that he never knew if he might bump into a business associate at the little Western eatery. I pointed out that with him being the valley’s premiere mucky-muck, everyone in the restaurant should be in pajamas in proper deference to him.
Not that I’m an innocent. From 18 to my early 30s, I smoked cigars or a pipe. Ah, sweet immortality of youth. Then, one day, I’m at my second mom’s house in Happy Valley. Funny. JoAnn Peters smoked. Six kids, and, more importantly, me, hanging around the house. Poor Mrs. Peters whom I love so. One time she got the flu so darn bad and never had another cigarette again.
One evening, I stepped onto JoAnn’s spotless porch to have a stogie. Lit the thing up. It just tasted HORRIBLE. Tried another, a few days later. Same thing. At the time, thought it might be the brand. Used to buy Budd’s Factory Smokers, at Thrifty Drugs on Lyons.
Box of 50 cigars? A buck-and-a-half.
Funny. Maybe it was JoAnn’s house, visited by saintly spirits because it was as if an angel had cured me of smoking almost 50 years ago.
Which is a good thing.
At 10 bucks a pack, I couldn’t afford it.
Santa Clarita’s John Boston is the most prolific satirist in world history. Summer’s here. So’s summer reading. Visit johnbostonbooks.com and buy stuff …
