Butts

 

     Two cigarette stories. The first I heard in a pen full of chickens along French Creek above the River of No Return in central Idaho. The second was told in my own front yard by a gray-haired food photographer on a motorcycle.


    ONE

     “No thanks, don’t want no damned cigarette and I’m gonna tell you just exactly why. See that tower up there? Sixty-seven feet tall. At the top is what in 1965 was the world’s finest and most sensitive television antenna, ten feet long with more metal than a brand new Honda car. Has the remote control attachment too. You can spin the thing and zero right in on the signal.

     “It took a long time’s worth of egg money to buy that tower, antenna, and the Magnavox console that came with it. Better part of eight years to save ten quarts of coins. I figure maybe a couple thousand dozen eggs.

     “All my life I wanted to watch the Kentucky Derby. What with trying to keep all these birds alive in a part of the world populated with bears and cougars, and me and the wife being scared of flying, there was no way in hell that we were ever going to make it to Churchill Downs. So, when we heard that Lewiston and Moscow and Pullman were going to get television stations, we figured that we should get a system that would bring the Derby right into our home. So we put up the tower, plugged everything in, and by Golly we could get a picture even down here in this hole, mostly skip signals and fuzzy, but better than you would think.

     “On Derby day, Momma popped a big old bowl of corn and squoze fresh lemons into two jars and we plopped ourselves into our Barka loungers right up close to the set. We even had TV trays.

     “After all the falderol and carryings-on about who had the nicest bonnets and prettiest dresses  and after all the horses were saddled and led around the paddock and after Old Kentucky Home was sung and after the jockeys had saluted the Governor of Kentucky, after all this foreplay I was so excited I couldn’t do anything but squirm.

      “So, just as the horses were loading into the starting gate, I reached out on the TV tray, shook a Pall Mall out of the pack, fumbled around and found a match and fired up the butt. Just as the gate flew open I started coughing, and I hacked and wheezed and blew snot for every step of that race. I know that Willie Shoemaker rode Lucky Debonair for the win, cause Momma told me so, but I never saw a thing but the inside of my handkerchief. That’s the day I quit smoking and I ain’t looking back.”

 

TWO

     “I was in Nam. Joined. Still not sorry I did. It was after Tet sometime, the rainy Spring of 1968. I’d been over there a little more than a year, had been coughing a little, so I had laid-off smoking tobacco for maybe thirty days.

     “We were pinned down. There had been a nasty firefight all night. Intelligence said we could be over-run by daylight. I was butt-deep in water in a hole, watching the brush moving all around me, when this regular Army picketfence private jumps down there with me, pulls out a smoke, squats down and cups the fire so he won’t be sniped and lights up. He shakes the pack and offers me one. I say, “No. Thanks. I figure those things are not good for you. I quit a month ago.”

     I wish I had a picture of the look on his face. It was the most deliberate show of disbelief I have ever seen. Here we were, for Christ sake. We were pinned down in deep doodoo. We were together in a dank hole in the ground six thousand miles from home. There were tracer rounds buzzing around us like fireflies. There was a good chance we might not live to see lunch and I was concerned about the health risks of cigarette smoke. He shook the pack one more time and I became a cigarette smoker again.”

 

     

 

     

 

    

 

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