Thank You for Smoking

study looked as though it had been decorated in 1535: floor-to-ceiling Tudor wainscoting, mullioned windows, a threadbare Persian rug, and the faint smell of a hundred years of spilled dry sherry.

They had a little preliminary chin-wag about the recent controversial nomination of a female suffragan bishop. Being a lapsed Catholic, Nick had only a tenuous grasp of hierarchical Episcopalian nomenclature. In fact, he had no clue as to what a suffragan bishop was, except that it sounded like a bishop in distress. Eventually he grasped that it just meant the number-two bish. Since Joey's entire future lay in the hands of the Reverend Griggs, Nick feigned keen interest in the controversy, until even the Reverend Griggs seemed to lose interest and with a soft clearing of his long throat came to the much-awaited point.

'As you know, we hold an auction every year, to raise money for the scholarship students. I was wondering if your association might possibly be interested in participating? This recession has put everyone in a pinch. Even our more—' he smiled ' — pecunious parentry.'

Geez, Louise. For this Nick had been churning all week? So the Reverend Griggs could hit him up for some underwriting? And yet the Soma and the novocaine had him in a complaisant frame of mind. He reflected warmly and fuzzily that things really had not changed much since 1604. That was the year that James I, king of England, published (anonymously, pamphleteering not being seemly in monarchs) a 'Counterblaste to Tobacco.' He noted that two Indians from the Virginia colony had been brought to the Sceptered Isle in 1584 to demonstrate this newfangled thing called smoking. By the standards set by Dances With Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, James not been very pc.

'What honor or policie,' thundered His Royal Highness, 'can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manner of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indian, especially in so vile and stinking a custome?' He allowed as how it had first been used as an antidote to the dreaded 'pockes' — which had ruined the complexion of his relative Elizabeth I — but wrote that doctors now considered it a filthy, disgusting habit, providing in a way the first surgeon general's report, and a full 360 years before Luther Terry's in 1964.

As for himself, wrote His Grace, smoking was 'a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible, Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.'

By 1612, however, James I was having second thoughts. His exchequer was bursting at the bolts with the import duties on tobacco from the Virginia colony in the James River Valley. In fact, nothing further was heard from His Majesty ever again on the loathesome custome. And thus it has remained, in a way, even to the present day, as the U.S. government goes about like Captain Renaud in Rick's Cafe shouting, 'I'm shocked — shocked!' while its trade representatives squeeze foreign governments — particularly Asian ones — to relax their own warning labels and tariffs and let in U.S. weed.

'Mind if I smoke?'

The Rev looked momentarily stricken. 'No. Please, yes, by all means.'

Nick lit up a Camel, but refrained from blowing one of his nice tight smoke rings, despite what a nice halo it would have made around the Rev's head. 'Ashtray?'

'Of course, let's see,' the Rev fumbled, looking helplessly around the study. 'We must have an ashtray, somewhere.' But there was nothing, and with Nick's cigarette already lit, the fuse was, so to speak, burning. Nick took deep drags, hastening the process.

'Margaret,' the Rev said desperately into the phone, 'do we have an ashtray anywhere? Anything, yes.' He sat down.

'We're finding one.'

Nick took in another deep drag. The cigarette hovered over the Persian rug. The door opened, Margaret bearing a chipped tea plate embossed with the coat of arms of Saint Euthanasius. 'This was all I could find,' she said in a voice somewhere between embarrassment and resentment that she had been called upon to play enabler to the blacke stinking fume.

'Yes, thank you, Margaret,' said the Rev, nearly grabbing the plate and handing it over to Nick mere seconds before the ash fell onto the school motto: Esto Excellens Inter Se. ('Be Excellent to Each Other.')

'Mainly,' Nick said, 'we sponsor sports events. But we might be able to work something out.' 'Wonderful,' the Rev said.

'I'll have to run it by our Community Activities people. But we speak the same language.'

'Marvelous,' said the Rev, twisting in his Queen Anne chair. 'I wonder, would it be necessary to… promulgate the… exact provenance of the underwriting?'

' 'Underwriting by the Academy of Tobacco Studies' on the programs?' Nick exhaled. 'That is pretty standard.'

'Yes, certainly. Yes. I was only wondering if perhaps there was some other… corporate entity that we could acknowledge. Generously, of course.'

'Hm,' Nick said. 'Well, there is the Tobacco Research Council.'

'Yes,' the Rev said with disappointment, 'I suppose.' The TRC had been in the news recently because of the Benavides liability suit. It had come out that the TRC had been set up by the tobacco companies in the fifties as a front group, at a time when American smokers realized they were coughing more and enjoying it less, the idea being to persuade everyone that the tobacco industry, by gum, wanted to get to the bottom of these mysterious 'health' issues, too. The TRC's first white paper blamed the rise of lung cancer and emphysema on a global surge in pollens. All this, apparently, the Rev knew.

'Are there by chance any other groups?'

Nick clasped his hands together and made a steeple. 'We are affiliated with the Coalition for Health.'

'Ah!' the Rev said, clapping his hands. 'Perfect!'

The Rev walked Nick to his car. Nick asked, 'By the way, how's Joey doing?'

'Joey?'

'My son. He's in your seventh grade.'

'Ah! Extremely well,' the Rev said. 'Bright lad.'

'So everything's okay?'

'Spiffing. Well then,' he shook Nick's hand, 'thank you for coming. And I'll look forward to hearing from' — he winked, the dog-collared son of a bitch actually winked—'the Coalition for Health.'

11

The novocaine had worn off by now, but Nick still felt pretty good and loose as he roared out of the Saint Euthanasius parking lot ahead of his bodyguards, and after the way he'd handled the Rev, entitled to his sense of triumph. The Soma had crept in on its little cat feet and was now purring in his central nervous system, hissing away all bad thoughts. He lost Mike and the boys by executing a sudden left turn at a red light off Massachusetts Avenue, narrowly avoiding an oncoming dry cleaning van and almost flattening a group of Muslims returning from prayer at the mosque; at which point it occurred to him that Dr. Wheat had told him not even to drive, much less play Parnelli Jones in city traffic.

Jeannette reached him on the car phone to say that she needed to get with him on media planning for next week's Environmental Protection Agency's report on second-hand smoke. Yet another bit of good news on the tobacco horizon. Erhardt, their scientist in residence, was cranking up the report about tobacco retarding the onset of Parkinson's disease.

'I'll be there in ten minutes,' Nick said, feeling a little tired at the prospect of another meeting. His whole life was meetings. Did they have this many meetings in the Middle Ages? In Ancient Rome and Greece? No wonder their civilizations died out, they probably figured decadence and the Visigoths were preferable to more meetings.

'I'm going to swing by Cafe Ole, pick up some cappuccino,' he yawned, feeling a little Somatose. 'You want some?'

'God, please.'

He parked in the basement garage — no sight of Mike, Jeff, and Tom, he noted with satisfaction; some