Can I Bum A Butt

If John Prine, bless his heart, is listening, I hope you’ve passed the pearly gates and are enjoying your nine-mile long cigarette.

I am a former smoker and fortunately I quit before I developed neck and lung cancer like the songwriter supreme.

Prine was diagnosed in 1998 with neck cancer and was apparently healthy after radiation treatment and physical therapy. Fifteen years later, lung cancer was discovered. The tumor was removed but Prine’s immunity was compromised and he died this year from complications of COVID 19.

After the lung cancer, he wrote “When I Get to Heaven” about the things he had to give up after his illness, including smoking. It goes, in part:

“When I get to heaven, I’m gonna shake God’s hand

Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand

Then I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock-n-roll band

Check into a swell hotel, ain’t the afterlife grand?

And then I’m gonna get a cocktail, vodka and ginger ale

Yeah, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long

I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl

’Cause this old man is goin’ to town.”

I never smoked a nine-mile long cigarette but I can identify with Prine and I would have smoke one if I had one. My fantasy is they find that smoking is good for your health. I’d be back puffing away before you could say English Oval.

I loved to smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette, everything from unfiltered Cools to Luckies to Marlboros and discarded butts found in the college dorm. In lean times, I even bought a gizmo to roll my own filter cigarettes.

I wasn’t particular as to my nicotine delivery system, although I preferred cigarettes. I would smoke a pipe if necessary or chew Red Man tobacco and spit out of the window of my yellow VW leaving a telltale smear on the side of the car. Another lover of chew was my friend, Max, who left Long Island to fulfill his dream of starting his own farm. Only thing I never got into was snuff.

I tried to quit a million times. While using the patch, I smoked. While smoking the anti-cigarette gum, I smoked. I tried to quite gradually and every time, inevitably I was back to my full habit. I tried to quit cold turkey and nearly lost my mind. A friend quit for one year and then resumed smoking Benson and Hedges, the cigarette for cool people. I remember when the great Ray Charles said in an interview that it was harder to kick nicotine than to kick heroin.

I finally quit and never looked back after a doctor in the neonatal intensive care unit told me that my three months premature, newborn, 2 pound 4 ounces baby would die if he inhaled second hand smoke. That was 25 years ago.

I was 14 and regularly hung out on Friday nights at the Paramus Roller Rink on Route 17, the cool place to be. A classmate, Joey Shelton, who epitomized cool and who was the first kid in class to wear bell bottoms, taught me how to inhale in the bathroom at the roller rink. Of course, I just got dizzy but I was on my way and within a few days of trying, I conquered the dizziness leaving me to a future filled with deep inhalations of the nicotine. No more dizziness, just pure joy. There was nothing that compared with that first deep drag of the day, the moment when every piece of your lungs is filled with nicotine.

My curiosity about cigarettes started when I’d go to the neighborhood candy store to pick up a 35 cent package of unfiltered Chesterfields for my mother. In later years, she cut down to one Lark cigarette a night and lived to 93. My father, however, smoked Lucky Strikes and died of a stroke at 48.

Then there was my brother. While everybody else was nervously smoking three packs a day in Vietnam, he figured a tour in Vietnam was a good time to kick the habit. Go figure.

My neighbor, a brusque former Marine, taught me to unroll the cigarette stub and spread the remaining tobacco and then wad the residual paper in a ball and toss it. That way it didn’t litter the countryside with cigarette butts. He was an early environmentalist.

It seemed like everybody smoked. They all did in my family, including my parents and brother and sister. I was a freshman in college when I decided to finally tell my mother. I was in the living room and nervously lit up a Marlboro and watched while my mother didn’t miss a beat and said nothing.

All the actors smoked. Doctors did ads about the joys of smoking. Even Santa Claus shilled for Pall Mall. Lucky Strike LSMFT was shorthand for Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. And who can forget “You’ve come a long way, baby,” for Virginia Slims. A long way closer to the grave.—

And there was Kent with the asbestos-containing “micronite filter.” Lucky Strike was marketed for its ability to curb appetites. The Flintstones show was sponsored by Winston cigarettes, and Fred and Wilma could be seen lighting up at the end of episodes. Menthol cigarettes like Kools and Newport were specifically targeted to African Americans and it worked.

Joe Dimaggio smoked and so did Mickey Mantle while they joined with many baseball players who were featured in cigarette ads. There was the Marlboro man who brought willing smokers to Marlboro country, wherever that was. They had to keep changing the Marlboro man actors as each died of lung cancer.

I carried my pack in my rolled-up short sleeved white T-shirt, just like Brando and James Dean. I smoked when I shaved in the morning, just like Humphrey Bogart as I tried to keep the shaving cream from putting out the cigarette and I smoked before I went to bed.

In college, when funds were scarce, I was one of many students who scavenged the ash trays in the dorms, either for long butts or collected enough smaller butts and unraveled them for the remaining tobacco and rolled our own. We were creative and undaunted and nothing could stop us. We were unconcerned with the previous location and in whose mouths those discarded butts had been.

Cigarette smoking was all wrapped up in some macho, indestructible image until the government finally exposed the truth that smoking was anything but indestructible. Even Yul Brynner made a famous ad that ran after his death in 1985 about the dangers of smoking.

And today people continue to smoke while paying a small fortune for a pack of cigarettes. I see young girls smoking and mothers with cars filled with children, smoking. I can’t understand why smoking is banned in prisons and some psychiatric hospitals, two places were smoking is about the only means of escape. I’ve wondered if they waive the rule for prisoners on death row. You don’t want a condemned man to die of lung cancer before he’s fried in the electric chair.

I am beyond angry that the billions of dollars in bribes (lobbying and campaign contributions) from the tobacco industry won enough support in Congress to allow the unfettered sale of cigarettes to anyone, adult or minor, when they all knew that smoking was a potential death sentence. The industry, including the ad companies, the executives, the tobacco growers and Congress all have blood on their hands as they raked in the cash over the bones of dead Americans.

Pulling the wool over American eyes in the name of profit is as American as apple pie. It’s a playbook as old as the country but the tobacco experience makes President Trump’s campaign against wearing protective masks look like small potatoes. There are similarities.

The tobacco congress and its co-conspirators in congress were making billions though they knew smoking was unhealthy. Trump full well knows that protective masks can stem the flow of COVID 19. He is gambling that he can win the macho votes if he can convince enough Americans that masks are unnecessary and that the COVID 19 pandemic, or Kung Flu as he calls it, is a sham.

Imagine if all the actors and athletes joined in a campaign to fight protective masks, claiming they were unnecessary and not for real men. Not so far fetched, you say.