Being a memoir writer has its disadvantages. It’s May,
1954 in Manhattan, Kansas. Six high school boys have had lunch and now
they’re lounging in and around my old Chevy sedan waiting for the bell. The
doors of the car are hanging open and two boys sit on the seats looking out,
their feet resting on the wide running board. We’re all talking, laughing--and
smoking cigarettes.
Dressed identically in cuffed blue jeans and white
t-shirts, all have flat top haircuts. I’m the skinny one with glasses sitting
on the front fender. A lighted cigarette dangles from my lips. I hold my pack
of Luckies with my Zippo lighter in my free hand and with the other I lean my
weight against the curve of the fender. “Let’s play smokeout,” someone yells,
and we jump in the car, close the doors and roll up the windows. I take my seat
behind the steering wheel. Someone laughs and snorts, “This won’t take long.”
We light up. I light an extra one, and so do a couple of
the other guys.
“Hey, no fair,” a kid in the back we call Grammy says.
“No rule against it,” somebody says.
“No rule against starting a fire, either,” Grammy says,
flicking his thumb and sparking his lighter into a huge flame. He starts to
raise it to the cloth padding on the ceiling.
“Hey, come on,” I say, really serious.
“Well?” Grammy says. But suddenly he snaps his lighter
shut and settles down to smoking like the rest of us. Soon, still feeling
tricky, he places the lighted end of his cigarette carefully into his mouth,
closes his lips and blows. Smoke billows from the unlit end.
My eyes are stinging. Within minutes it’s possible to
smoke without lighting a cigarette because the air is thick with roiling clouds
of blue smoke. Laughing and even talking diminish while we work at the nearly
impossible task of making a lot of smoke but breathing as little as we can.
The seconds drag by. Six boys smoke and stare at one
another. I lean back and rest a hand on the necker’s knob of my steering wheel,
feigning nonchalance. I’m not even going to rub my eyes. I’m not going to be
the one to go.
Even so I’m relieved when one of us--it’s Grammy-- goes for
the door. The truth is we’re all glad, and we lunge from the car into fresh
air, falling to the ground, laughing, coughing and rolling around in the grass
like puppies.
“Grammy can’t take it!”
“Grammy is a chic-ken!” The kid who says this jumps up and
flaps his arms like wings. “Pluck pluck PLUCK!”
I look down on that scene now from the height of 2003. Can
that really have been me? It couldn’t have been. But it was me, penny loafers,
flat-top and all. It was my lungs too, smoke-filled and losing some of their
pinkness even then, and not to know a day without smoke for many years to
come--until finally one New Year’s Eve twenty-some years ago I too was finally
smoked out and, leaving a party and driving home, I flipped my last cigarette
butt out the car window and I quit. In 1954 we had never heard of second hand
smoke. We had never heard of carcinogens or cancer.
Nearly everybody smoked back then. Our teachers smoked.
Our parents smoked. Our doctors smoked. Even Ike, though he had quit, had been
a chain smoker for years. There were television and radio commercials for
cigarettes, billboards advertising cigarettes, ads in magazines,
newspapers--even on our matchbook covers. Everybody was walking a mile for a
Camel or calling for Philip Morris.
It makes me wonder about the human race and, since I’m the
part of it I’m closest to, myself. I remember and write now, knowing better.
But what took me--us--so long?
*In 1976, Charley Kempthorne started the first Reminiscence
Workshop in the nation in his hometown of Manhattan. To find out more about his
teaching and writing, check out his website at
www.thelifestoryinstitute.com
