SMOKE RINGS: PART 2 — A NEW KIND OF SOPHISTICATION

By the time I started smoking openly at home, the habit had become, I fancied, an added mark of sophistication in the new life I was suddenly setting out for myself. During the summer before the winter in which I would turn sixteen, my high school band director did me the honor of asking me to give summer private percussion lessons to beginners and junior high kids who were in the band. I could use the band room at the high school, he said, and earn a little extra money.

I was thrilled to say the least. But that wasn’t the end of the honors bestowed on me. The director also came to me during the following school year, and said that, if I wanted it, there was a part-time job for me at the top music store in the nearby city of Lima, Ohio, Monday and Friday evenings and Saturdays from nine to five, teaching whenever I had students and working as a sales clerk in between time. They’d let me have the use of a studio free of charge and the money from the lessons would be all mine. They would pay me about a dollar an hour (certainly not awful pay for a part-time high school kid employee in the mid-1960s) for the hours I accumulated on the sales floor, where I’d be expected to do some light maintenance and inventory as well.

Everyone...

I explained that while I’d love to say yes, it’d be another few months before I could get my driver’s license and even then, I’d have to see if my parents would lend me one of their cars to be able to commute the twelve or so miles that separated my home town of Wapakoneta from Lima. The director said not to worry, that he lived in Lima and on Monday and Friday evenings when the store was open until nine, he would take me, since he also taught there. Until I got my license, then, I’d only have to have my parents drive me home those two nights and take me in to work and pick me up on Saturdays.

Shaking my head, I said that my mother was too busy and I really doubted if I could talk Whitie (my dad) into coming to get me after he’d worked all day. But he insisted, saying it was a great opportunity that I shouldn’t miss. He was a regular customer at Whitie’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear, and evidently considered that would count for something in convincing my father, so he added, “And leave your dad to me.”

To my surprise, Whitie accepted the deal. Not only that, he had me take out a learner’s permit, and on the way home when he would pick me up after work, he would have me get behind the wheel of the big nine-passenger Olds 98 station wagon that he was driving at the time. Other than a certain penchant for road rage, Whitie was a more than competent driver and, surprisingly, since patience was not usually one of his virtues, also a serene and patient teacher.

I admired...

I recall one late-fall Monday evening, when I already had numerous trips under my belt, driving home to Wapakoneta from Lima, via the old North Dixie Highway, with Whitie in the passenger’s seat. It was raining pretty hard and visibility was far less than optimum. By this time, however, Whitie was no longer watching my every move and we were relaxed enough to chat a little as I drove, on topics beyond the scope of the myriad instructions that he had given me in the beginning. At one point, Whitie was sitting sideways, turned toward me on the broad bench seat—there were no seatbelts back then—and having just made some point in our conversation, had paused to pluck the hot cigarette lighter out of the dashboard, and was just then lighting up a Pall Mall, when suddenly, on the left, I saw a pick-up truck pulling out of a roadside tavern parking lot onto the two-lane highway in front of me as if I weren’t there.

I hit the brakes and lay on the horn simultaneously, saw Whitie fall sideways, shoulder first, against the dashboard, felt the big Olds start to fishtail, let off the brake, saw the pick-up’s brake lights and knew he’d stopped mid-lane, dropped two wheels onto the berm and gunned the engine to pull out of the slide as I slipped ever so closely past the side of the truck, still blasting the horn, before easing back onto the road.

Back under control on the pavement, shaking from head to toe, I saw Whitie calmly push himself back up onto his seat. He then went ahead lighting his smoke and after a deep drag, he said, “See that’s good training. And you handled it well. Know what the lesson is?”

“Be on the lookout for drunk assholes?”

“Nope. It’s that you have to drive defensively. You can’t take for granted, ever, that the other guy will do what he’s supposed to. In fact, you have to figure he won’t, that every other driver on the road is a stupid jerk, and know at all times what you’re going to do if the other guy screws up. It doesn’t matter who’s right. You’ll be just as dead if you’re right and the guy who plows into you is wrong.”

Smoking, to a certain almost imperceptible extent, changed, somewhat, my usually semi-hostile relationship with Whitie. Our feelings about everything from politics and sports to those about work and culture, our views and preferences were almost diametrically opposed and I’d come to find that avoidance was the best way to stay out of troubled waters. So at this stage, we seldom talked. But like boxing—one of the few passions and surely the only sport we shared as avid fans—smoking became a point of shared neutrality between us.

It wasn’t as if my father was glad I smoked. On the contrary, he early on told me it was a mistake to have taken up the habit. Afterward, however, he no longer preached about it. And as I say, there was a sort of tacit bond between us as smokers. It wouldn’t seem like much to anyone seeing us from the outside, but I could feel it. Like when I’d come home from somewhere and find him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a smoke and I’d serve myself a cup as well and sit there with him in brief, uncontroversial communion for the length of a cigarette or two.

...smoked

A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, and thus only days away from having my driver’s license, the band director said he had the solution for my travel problem. He had a car to sell me. A ’57 Dodge Royal that had belonged to his son, who was currently in the Army, serving a hitch in Vietnam. I said I was really grateful but didn’t have the money to pay for a car right now, since I was buying a new drum set in installments from the store where I worked. If he could, perhaps, wait a while...

“How much do you have to spare right now, Danny?” he asked.

“I don’t know...like maybe fifty bucks.”

“Done, fifty bucks and I’ll throw in tax and title fees.”

It was like a dream come true! I had a job as a musician. I was no longer being treated like a high school kid but as a responsible adult. And one of the old hands at work, a locally renowned organist in his sixties had just said, “Hey kid, my sax player and I are booked to play a four-hour gig at the Milano Club and our drummer just backed out. It’s a New Year’s Eve gig so it’ll pay fifty bucks for four hours. You free?”

Was I ever! My first pro jazz gig. I was in heaven. And now I had wheels! The very first day I had my license, the band director drove his son’s Dodge to school and had me drive him to work at the music store and then home. The car was now mine. Leaving his house, I flicked on the radio, dialed to a jazz station I knew and lit up a smoke. I felt like my whole life was changing and it was all good.

On the way home, I stopped off at a truck stop, ordered pie and coffee, put a quarter in the juke box and as Reg Owen’s rendition of Manhattan Spiritual started playing, I sat there with my coffee, pie and cigarettes feeling like a character from a movie about the Beat Generation. The menthol cigarette smoke and the strong black truck stop coffee felt like fluid happiness as they entered my gullet. It was a brand new world, and it was all mine. I was suddenly somebody.

To be continued...

SMOKE RINGS

It started as pilfering. Every time Whitie (my dad) opened a new pack of Pall Mall’s, which was about once a day, I’d wait until he’d smoked a few and then sneak one out of the pack and carefully into my pocket. I figured he’d never notice. But I had to be really cautious, because Whitie was nothing if not fastidious in his obsessive-compulsive tidiness. If you wrinkled or damaged the packaging in any way or left bits of tobacco lying around, he was going to notice. But, like any pre-teen, I figured I was way cleverer than he was. I was about twelve at the time.

His neatness was also what made it easy. He never liked bulges in his clothing, so whenever possible, he would leave his smokes lying on an end table, or on the telephone table, or on top of the TV, or wherever else they’d be handy without his having to carry them on him. He never used cigarette lighters for the same reason. He always used book matches that lay flat in his pockets and didn’t make a bulge.

Once I’d managed to nick one, I didn’t rush right out to smoke it. Instead, I’d take it to the room I shared with my little brother and, after making sure he wasn’t around—since he, Jim, would squeal on me for sure—I would place it in a piece of tinfoil with other purloined smokes, carefully re-wrap them, put them away in any of a number of hiding places I’d devised, and save them for a time when I could slip off by myself and “enjoy” them.

At this stage of my relationship with tobacco, “enjoy” was hardly the right word. Blowing the smoke out through my nose without actually inhaling caused a sinus pain not unlike “swallowing” water through my nose at the pool. And trying to inhale the way I’d seen Whitie do—deep and with apparent satisfaction, since he seemed to genuinely enjoy each smoke—made me cough, made my throat burn and made my eyes water. And usually, one deep drag was enough to make my head spin and make me feel a little nauseous so that I would have to sit down and put my head on my knees until the vertigo stopped and I got to feeling okay again. Of course, as soon as I did, I’d inhale again and have to go through the whole process all over. But, hey, practice made perfect, right?

Indeed it did, and it wasn’t long before I could smoke an entire cigarette without so much as a single cough, tear or dizzy spell. Most of my smoking I did down by the river, which was my haven as a boy, a place to be alone or with my closest friends and to do pretty much whatever I wished. It was there that, with my friend Dave, who lived across the river from me, we began acting out our Huck Finn fantasies, building log rafts and camouflaged shacks like hunting blinds in the scrubland behind his house. And part of that Mississippi fantasy on “our” Auglaize was corncob pipes. We fashioned them ourselves from dry cobs found in the cornfield along the riverbank with hard-dried hollow reeds as stems, stuck into holes worked open in the sides of the cobs with the leather punches on our pocketknives, once we’d used our blades to hollow out a bowl.

Most of our “pipe tobacco” was meticulously recycled from butts recovered from the trash when my dad dumped his ashtrays and Dave’s mother dumped hers. If we got lucky, Whitie would toss a San Felice cigar butt, but he usually only smoked those at work, because my mother, Reba Mae, didn’t like how they stank up the house. We kept our painstakingly harvested and rare assortment of “fine tobaccos” in small leather pouches that Dave generously provided. At home we had to carefully hide them from prying eyes. But they had extra-long drawstrings so that when we were living our fantasy lives down by the Auglaize, we could wear them like medicine bags around our necks in the tradition of the Shawnee braves who had made their home on these very banks a couple of centuries before us.

This kind of smoke was a nasty combination of stale, overdrawn cigarette filler and raw, scorched corncob inhaled through a moldy-tasting reed, but it fit so well with our adventures and our narrative that we could think of nothing finer than to sit by a small twig fire, puffing on our “Ohio Meerschaums” and swapping stories about everything from pirates, bank-robbers and murderers to the ghosts that supposedly rose up from the old, abandoned cemetery behind Dave’s dad’s barn and walked these riverbanks by the light of the moon.

By age fourteen, I had a habit. Not a bad one yet, but a habit all the same. Even before that I used to buy a pack of my own about once or twice a month besides swiping smokes from Whitie. I nervously bought them at corner grocery stores, always ready with some elaborate story about “buying them for my great-uncle who was up visiting from Florida,” or whatever. But seldom did anyone ask who they were for. So I started trying different brands until I found some that I liked better than Whitie’s harsh, filterless Pall Malls: smooth L&Ms, recessed-filter Parliaments, mentholated Salems (“one puff and it’s springtime”). Cigarettes that then made smoking the ones I stole from my dad seem a little like inhaling a brush fire...but smoke them I did, anyway.

Then I discovered cigarette vending machines and gas stations and there was no longer any need to make up stories of any sort. The machines were ubiquitous and often in the entrances of stores or restaurants where nobody paid any attention to who was or wasn’t buying cigarettes, and gas station attendants couldn’t have cared less whom they were selling smokes to.

I was in a teen rock band by this time. We were playing at teen centers and living the fantasy of one day becoming stars. Joe, our bass player, was the oldest boy in the band and had an old station wagon that became our band van. The rest of us were no older than fourteen at the time, but three of us were already regular smokers. Joe himself didn’t smoke, but with the way the rest of us left the inside of his battered old wagon smelling, he’d never have been able to convince his parents of that, I’m sure. He was, however, a really good and easy going guy and generous to a fault, so he not only let us smoke in his car and took us to our gigs and never wanted any extra for gas, but he also gave us driving lessons out on the rural back roads surrounding our home town. Joe was a hard guy not to like. Only his shy, quiet nature kept him from having more friends than he did.  

Dave, our lead singer and guitarist, was a wild kid who had no apparent complexes about his smoking—or anything else, for that matter. Pint-sized, bespectacled and as funny, entertaining, impertinent and irreverent as any teen could be. It was all part of his rocker persona. But keyboards man Ron and I (the group’s drummer) were often consumed by guilt about our habit (brought up as we both were in Methodism, where obligatory guilt and self-chastisement seemed almost as prevalent as in Judaism). Frequently, as we were lighting up, Ron would say, “God, man, I gotta quit doing this! I don’t want to get hooked.” And then, after a deep drag, “Do you think we’re hooked?”

Until finally, it started bothering me that he spoiled every other smoke I was about to have and I would snap, “Hell yes, we’re hooked! You wanna smoke, smoke. You don’t, don’t. But don’t lay this guilt trip on me!”

By fifteen, I was smoking, maybe, a half-pack or so a day. Still mostly down by the river. But now I also risked a smoke here and there at home: in my room with the window open and blowing the smoke out through the screen; in the basement, which had become my music studio, keeping the butts in a closed jar in an old cedar chest where I also kept my music books and percussion traps and accessories, until I could safely dispose of them; and on long walks around town that I often took after dark, my favorite places for a smoke being two of the bridges over the Auglaize, where I could stand as if gazing at the water and if anyone my parents knew happened by, flick my cigarette into the drink.

It was a few months after my fifteenth birthday that I one evening told my mother I was going over to the park to shoot some hoops with a couple of friends.

“Basketball players don’t smoke,” Reba Mae said, with a wry smile but a hurt look in her eyes.

I sputtered and started to think of something to say but she held up a hand to silence me. “God knows I don’t like it that you’re smoking, but I like it even less that you sneak around and think you can deceive me.”

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” I said lamely.

“Too late for that,” she answered, cutting me to the quick.

When I came back from the park, I found her and Whitie together and said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t want to sneak around anymore either. I’m going to smoke and want to smoke at home. No more sneaking around.”

Reba Mae looked stern but said, “Well I suppose at your age, if I try to stop you you’ll just do it behind my back, so...”

And Whitie added, “I’d like to tell you not to do it, Dan, but I’d be a hypocrite if I stood here and told you not to and then lit up myself, so I’m in no position to tell you what the hell to do. But if you gonna smoke, buy your own goddamn cigarettes and stop stealin’ mine!”

To be continued