DRESS CODES

From the chapter "The Gentlest Decade"

PUFF, PUFF, PUFF  THAT CIGARETTE

The federal and state government “knew its place” in the 1950s, and did not try to regulate and control every aspect of your life with petty laws that accomplish little real good, but strip another leaf or two of our personal freedom from the precious tree of liberty.  If you were in the cigarette business, for example, you could advertise your product whenever, wherever, and however you chose, without any interference from the tobacco police.   Smoking was commonplace in the movies and on television, and was advertised in practically every medium, although I doubt the rate of teenage smoking back then was any higher than it is today.  All of that smoking created a natural curiosity in the southern males of my generation as to what it was about smoking that caused men and women to seem to enjoy it so much. 

One of my neighborhood cronies talked me into trying a cigar when I was eleven years old.  I had the same experience that Tom Sawyer had when Huck Finn taught him how to smoke a corncob pipe.  I also reacted in an unmanly manner and actually got quite queasy from just puffing on the cigar.  God forbid if I had actually inhaled some of the smoke.  I slunk away from the smoking lounge in the Shady Road woods and made my way home, stopping several times to vigorously expectorate, and to wipe away the sweat that was all of a sudden pouring from every pore of my skin. 

I made it to our bedroom and lay down on the bed, trying to stop the room from spinning out of control.  Lying absolutely still and taking rapid, shallow breaths stabilized me to where I could doze fitfully without becoming nauseous.  I heard my mother talking on the telephone, and the next thing I knew, she was standing at the foot of the bed glaring at me.  The phone call must have been someone in the neighborhood parent Gestapo network calling to tell on me about some real or imagined sin I had committed.  It was.  The old maid busybody down the street called momma to say she had seen me and my compadre in the woods, puffing on cigars.

Mom asked me, “Well, Mr. Big shot, what have you been up to?  I understand from our nosey neighbor that you have taken up cigar smoking.” 

I wanted to ask if she was going to believe her precious first-born son or that lying old hag, but I couldn’t muster the strength to mutter the words.  All I was capable of saying was, “Yessum, but never again.”

“Oh, no,” she said, her voice filled with scathing sarcasm, “you are much too grown up to quit smoking.”  

Surely she could see I was on the verge of death.  If she did, she apparently didn’t care, because she made me get out of bed, follow her down the hall to the linen closet, pick up a pack of my father’s Lucky Strikes, and follow her to the back stoop.  She opened the pack of cigarettes, handed them to me along with a box of kitchen matches and said, “Holler when you finish smoking this pack of cigarettes, Mr. Tough Guy.”

I hollered way before I finished the entire pack.  That cured me from smoking anything ever again, well, at least until I was thirteen. 

The Story Page