Cigarettes are probably the epitome of peer pressure and passage. Smoking had all the elements you needed as a kid; looking for danger, adventure and that cool, older look. Smoking had it all, it was the ticket to acceptance with the rebels who hung out on the campus perimeter who showed up for school but didn’t go in. They just sat on the corner and smoked until some authority figure noticed them. Then they blew smoke in their face. How can you beat that?
My first experience with cigarettes came in junior high. Bruce and Joey and I would meet on Brea Blvd. in the morning and walk to school. Brea was a small town then, around fifteen thousand people who had for the most part grown up together. A couple generations of small town folk who went to the same schools and worked in the local businesses and had kids who went to the same schools and played in the fields until the streetlights came on.
On our way to school we passed through the downtown, a small strip of shops that was typical of any small town, with a bakery, bowling alley, a retread shop and movie house. In front of the drug store there was a stack of newspapers. As the store wasn’t open at this wee hour, trusting people would slide their dime under the door and take a paper. We would then slide the dimes out from under the door and walk to the end of the block to Canning’s hardware store. Along with the nails and wheelbarrows, they sold candy and cigarettes. There we would pass a specially prepared note to Earl the proprietor, which would read something like, “I’m sick today. Please sell cigarettes to my son so he can bring them home to me.” Or “Please sell Bruce a pack of cigarettes for a science experiment at school” Every time we came up with a different ruse, and Mr. Canning would patiently take the note and read it carefully, apparently pondering whether or not it was credible. Of course it was written with twelve-year-old penmanship on torn notebook paper, but he’d play the part, “Sorry boys, you have to be 18 to buy cigarettes.” And we’d leave to think up a plan for the next note.
One day Joey meets us on the Blvd. and has three or four menthol cigarettes that he took from his mother. We huddled in the alley behind the hardware store to divvie them up. Bruce didn’t take one. Joey would shake the crushed green and white pack at him, “Here” he’d offer again. “I don’t want one.” he’d repeat. While being distracted by how we were going to get matches, I asked him the logical question “We’ve been trying to get cigarettes all year, and we finally get some, and you don’t want one?” I still remember his sincere matter-of-fact response as he shrugged them off, “I think it’s fun trying to get them, but I don’t want to smoke one.” It just never occurred to me that someone who was so obviously cool would not want to smoke of these babies. But I fell for the pressure and smoked. Later, whenever possible, I’d smoke on the way to high-school to get the stink of being hip on me.
Being illegal to buy cigarettes added to its charm. The best guarantee of getting a pack of cigarettes was to go to Thrifty gas station when Mike Rude was working. He was a little older and had anchored prestigious employment at the gas station behind the Tastee-Freeze. The Freeze was the hang and had tables on either side of its orange roofed a-frame construction; one side was reserved for juicers, the other side for dopers. Often times the over-amped juicers would come over and wail on the laid-back dopers. No matter what side of the Freeze you were on, cigarettes were a common bond. This is where I learned to smoke in earnest. A very wise person in her thirties was asked if it was hard for her to quit smoking. “Not as hard as it was to start” she said. The things you put yourself through under the guise of peer pressure, gasping gagging dizzying smoking. It was great.
It didn’t take long to figure out that buying cigarettes was for chumps. The really cool guys just bummed them from the guys that paid for them. Somehow it occurred to me to buy cigarettes nobody wanted, so I tried Lucky Strikes. No one wanted the unfiltered smoke, even for free. Not knowing how to smoke properly (after all, I was self taught), tobacco often got in my mouth. So I switched to Old Gold filters; another cigarette no one wanted to bum from me. Plus there were coupons.
This continued for about ten years. Then I actually quit for a time. I was working at my brother’s auto repair shop and was rolling a tire across the lot when I found myself winded from the effort. I stopped for a spell. Then Scotty offered me a Mexican cigarette, Ovalattos, a novel little bent job. I liked it and went full steam ahead after that.
Over time I became a very good smoker, sometimes having two or three lit at the same time (one or two in my mouth and one in my hand, or visa versa). Jeanne Gladden was a legendary smoker; she smoked heavy duty Pall Malls. Sometimes when she talked, if the light was just right, you could see little hints of smoke lofting from her mouth. That was my next goal, to have smoke come out of my mouth even when I wasn’t smoking. Way cool. I only smoked when I drank and I smoked three packs a day; so this goal was achieved.
One night I was editing a video for a time-share promoter and I ran out of smokes. It was late and I wanted to get the job finished before morning, so I studied on how to get cigarettes without getting up from my desk. I could call any number of people and ask them to drop by and, oh yeah, bring some smokes. I could call Johnny O at the liquor store and he’d bring me a carton when he closed up. There were a number of options and I thought, “How many favors would you call in for a smoke?” This was sort of humiliating and I thought for a moment about Joe Lee and his quitting smoking.
I don’t remember who told me the story, Brant or Jeff, but one night Joe, the Lee patriarch, stood up from the dinner table and made everyone go into the bedroom. There he took the cigarettes out his pocket, put them on the dresser and, in an authorative voice, posed the question to the pack o' nails, “Who’s stronger, me or you?” That took balls, to stand up in front of your family and declare a war of wills against tobacco that was engineered to be addictive. Man vs. science and greed. Well, old Joe won and it always impressed me. I liked that he made it a competition.
So I figured I wouldn’t smoke at all until morning when the stores open. Morning came, I had gone all night and I thought I’d just see how deep into the day I could go before loosing to tobacco. I made it the day, and the next day too. The third day I was ready to fire up again, but then I felt like that was two days of not smoking wasted, so I’ll go another. I never really set out to quit, so there was never a major psychological struggle, I was just out of cigarettes, for life.
Although it’s sometimes an effort, twenty five years later, I can look at a pack of cigarettes and answer the question, “Who’s stronger?”
