Thank You for Smoking

all began in nineteen fifty-two. Well, puh!'

Puh?

'It's been going on for almost five hundred years. Does the name Rodrigo de Jerez mean anything to you?' Nick shook his head. 'No, I suppose it doesn't. I suppose they don't teach history in the schools anymore, just attitude. Well, for your information, sir, Rodrigo de Jerez went ashore with Christopher Columbus. And he watched the natives 'drink smoke,' as he put it, with their pipes. He brought tobacco back to the Old World with him. Sang its praises high to the frescoed ceilings. Do you know what happened to him? The Spanish Inquisition put him in jail for it. They said it was a 'devilish habit.' You think you have it bad having to deal with the Federal Trade Commission? How would you like to have to state your case before the Spanish Inquisition?'

'Well… '

'You bet you would not. Remember that name, Rodrigo de Jerez. You're walking in his footsteps. He was the first tobacco spokesman. I suppose he, too, found it 'challenging.' '

'Uh… '

'Does the name Edwin Proon mean anything to you?'

'Prune?'

'God in heaven, the billions of dollars we throw at the public schools. Edwin Proon lived in the Massachusetts Colony in the early 1600s when the Puritan fathers were going around nailing up the first no-smoking signs in the New World. You think you're the first to have to deal with building restrictions and public ordinances? No sir, I do not reckon that you are. Edwin Proon was fighting that battle long ago. They passed a law saying you couldn't smoke in public and 'public' meant anywhere more than one person was present. They put him in the stocks. And when they caught him smoking in the stocks they clamped an iron hood over his face. Do you suppose Edwin Proon found it 'challenging'?'

Fasten your seat belts, Nick thought, we have four hundred more years to go. In detail, the Captain reminded him that America had waged outright war against the 'pernicious practice' — in the 1790s, the 1850s, the 1880s. He reminded him that Horace Greeley had called a cigar 'a fire at one end and a fool at the other,' that Thomas Edison had refused to hire smokers, that in this very century, Americans — and not just women — had actually been arrested for the act of lighting a cigarette. On and on it went until little beads of perspiration appeared on the Captain's forehead, like julep sweat. Finally he stopped and patted his brow with his handkerchief.

'Forgive me. I seem to have this tendency since the operation to get… exercised. By the way, never get sick in California. Least nothing that requires surgery. They don't know the first thing about surgery. There was nothing wrong with me that a little bicarbonate of soda would not have rectified.'

They discussed the hypocrisy and villainy of Region 11 politicians. Almost all the anti-smoking ordinances came out of Region 11, California, Reichland of the Health Nazis. What justice was possible when Californians were allowed to determine national health standards?

'You know who Lucy Page Gaston was?' the Captain asked with one of his penetrating, interrogatory stares.

No, Nick did not know who Lucy Page Gaston was.

'She came out of the Temperance Union movement in the 1890s looking for more souls to save. She had six hundred cigarette vendors in Chicago arrested for selling to minors. Founded the Anti-Cigarette League. In 1913 she and some doctor started a clinic where they dragged in poor newspaper boys off the street and swabbed their throats with silver nitrate and told 'em to chew on gentian root whenever they got the urge. Now we got these damned patches. In 1919 she wrote Queen Mary and President Harding and asked them to stop smoking. What crust! Announced she was running for President. In 1924 she was struck down by a streetcar in Chicago coming out of an anti-cigarette meeting. She survived. She died eight months later. Do you know what she died of, Nick?'

'No, sir.'

The Captain smiled. 'Throat cancer. Do you know what that proves, Nick? It proves that there is a God.'

Outside the Club the Captain declared that since it was such a fine spring day he felt like strolling. So they strolled, with the Captain's car following slowly along.

'Tell me,' he asked, 'what is your opinion of BR?' He added, 'Just 'tween us girls.'

Suddenly the sidewalk was strewn with large banana peels. 'BR,' said Nick, 'is… my boss.'

The Captain gave a little bemused grunt. 'Well, I like to think that I'm your boss, son.'

Son?

'But I do admire loyalty in a man. I esteem loyalty. I can forgive almost anything in a man if he's loyal.' They walked along. He stopped to examine some vines. 'We should have the wisteria in three weeks. There's no smell like it. I imagine heaven smells like wisteria. BR's got this notion we ought to start bribing producers in Hollywood to make their actors smoke. Interesting notion. Year from now we may have a total advertising ban. He thinks this is the way around it. Cheaper, too, probably. We're spending almost a billion dollars a year in advertising now as it is. What do you think?'

'Interesting notion,' Nick said simmeringly.

'Yes, I like it quite a bit. Smart man, BR.'

'Oh yes. And loyal.'

'Glad to hear it. He comes from vending machines, you know. Rough part of our business. You need someone like BR these days. He's good with the Japs. Tough. The Far East is going to be increasingly important to us in the years ahead. That's why I made him an offer would've made Croesus blush. Not that anyone in corporate America has the capacity to blush these days. I did hate to let old JJ go. But, he's got his condominium down in Tarpon Springs right on the eighteenth hole. I suppose they'll be putting me out to stud soon enough. On the other hand,' he grunted, 'when you own twenty-eight percent of the stock you have the luxury of setting your own timetable. Still, I'm not getting any younger. Sometimes I feel like a Tyrannosaurus rex stumbling through the swamp one step ahead of the glaciers. Do you know,' he said with an air of incredulity, 'that the scientists are now saying that the dinosaurs died on account of their own flatulence?'

'No,' Nick said.

'They're saying all those dinosaur farts going up into the atmosphere created a kind of global warming effect that caused the ice cap to melt.' He shook his head. 'How do they know such things?'

'Where are the data?'

'That's right. That's right! Do you remember what Finisterre said?'

'Wake up, boys, it's Good Friday, let's go have a few beers?'

'Not that Finisterre. Romulus K. Finisterre. The president. You do remember him? He said, 'The torch is passed to a new generation.' He was talking about my generation. And now the time is coming to pass it to your generation. Are you ready to accept the torch, Nick?'

'Torch?'

'It won't be easy. It's a hostile world out there. I look around and all I see is muzzle flashes. What's more, I see muzzle flashes coming from where our friends sit. I had Jordan in to see me the other day.

That old whore, we put so much money into his campaigns over the years he put his children through college on the surplus. Hell, I couldn't even use my own corporate jet during his last campaign he was so busy using it. And what does he have the crust to tell me, in my own office, if you please? That he has to go along with this excise tax or the White House is going to shut down LaGroan Air Force Base.'

Nick had to agree: it was a sorry situation indeed when the Honorable Gentleman from North Carolina, Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, was casting his vote in favor of a two-dollar-a-pack cigarette tax.

'Sometimes I feel like a Colombian drug dealer. The other day, my seven-year-old granddaughter, flesh of flesh of my own loins, says to me, 'Granddaddy, is it true cigarettes are bad for you?' My own granddaughter, whose private education, and horse and everything else is being handsomely provided for by cigarette money!'