Thank You for Smoking

'Five-foot-four,' Bobby Jay shot back. 'In heels. And every inch a lady. A simple descriptive sentence, so may I continue, Ms. Sty-nem? I had our camera crew there by noon the next day. It is as we speak being edited into the sweetest little old video you ever saw.' He spread his hands apart like a director framing the scene. 'We open with. 'Carburetor City, Texas. A mentally unbalanced federal bureaucrat—' '

'Nice,' Nick said.

'Gets better: '… attacks a church minister and choir.' Footage of ambulances, people on stretchers, people gnashing their teeth and rending their hair—'

'How,' Polly said, 'do people rend their hair?'

'Everywhere a scene of carnage,' Bobby Jay continued, 'a scene of devastation. Red chaos!'

'Red chaos?' Polly said.

'Shut up, Polly,' Nick said.

'Voice-over. And guess whose?' Bobby Jay asked coyly. 'Charlton Heston?'

'No sir,' Bobby said, all tickly and beaming. 'Guess again.'

'David Duke,' Polly said.

'Jack Taggardy,' Bobby Jay said triumphantly.

'Nice,' Nick said.

'Didn't he have his hips replaced? I read that in People.'

'What do his hips have to do with anything?' Bobby Jay said.

'Is he in a walker, or what?'

'No he's not in a any damn walker!'

'Go on,' Nick said.

Bobby reframed the scene. 'So Taggardy's voice-over: 'Could this awful human tragedy have been avoided?' '

'Question,' Nick said. 'Why 'human'?'

'Why not 'human'? They're humans.'

'I would have thought, 'inhuman tragedy'?'

'He's got a point,' Polly said.

'Look, we can edit. Do you want to hear this?'

'Yes,' Nick said, 'very much.'

'Now we cut to my little lady. She's sitting in a chair, all prim and pretty. Darling girl. I had her hairdresser come over. She wanted to do her makeup but I wouldn't hear of it. I wanted her eyes red from crying. We dabbed a little onion under the eyelids, nothing wrong with that, just to get her in the mood, get those ducts opened up.'

'Onion?'

'Didn't even need it. Soon as she saw those color police photos I was holding up for her off camera she started bawlin' like a baby. She's going on about how awful it was, and then she gets to the part about how she had to leave her pistol in the glove compartment. Then she looks right into the camera, right in your face, and dabs the corner of her eye — and that was not in the script — and says, 'Why won't our elected lawmakers just let us protect ourselves? Is that too much to ask?' Fade to black. Then Taggardy's voice comes back on and there's no mistaking that voice, like bourbon over sandpaper: 'The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Does your elected lawmaker support the Bill of Rights? Or are they selling you a Bill of Goods?' ' Bobby Jay leaned back in his chair. 'What do you think?'

'Transcendent,' Nick said. 'A deft manipulation of post-traumatic stress.'

Bobby Jay grinned. 'Sweeter than honeysuckle in moonlight.'

'Congratulations,' Polly said. 'Really masterful.'

'By this afternoon, every member of the Texas congressional delegation and the state legislature will have a copy. By tomorrow, every sinner in the Congress will have one. We may even air it nationally. Mr. Drum hasn't signed off on that yet, but I am most strongly recommending that we do.'

Bobby Jay's boss was one of the few in Washington who insisted on the mister. It was part of his aura, and he did cast a large aura. When he had taken over the leadership of the troubled SAFETY years back, there had been only fifty million guns circulating in America. There were now over 200 million. He was a physically imposing man with a trademark bald head. Redekamp of the Sun had dug up the fact that at the age of sixteen he had shot to death a seventeen-year-old in a dispute over the ownership of a box turtle. The conviction was later overturned on the grounds that the box turtle, having subsequently died, probably of stress, had never been introduced as evidence. Ever since, the anti-SAFETY Washington press, comprising all of the press except for the conservative Washington Moon, included a reference to this unfortunate incident in every mention of him.

Coffee arrived. Nick asked Polly, 'What's happening at Moderation?'

'We actually got some great news yesterday.' This was a stunner. Nick could not recall such words ever having been spoken over one of their lunches. 'The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that sobriety roadblocks were unconstitutional,' she said.

'Party down,' Nick said.

'The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are constitutional, so for now they're constitutional everywhere except Michigan.' Bobby Jay said, 'Don't you see?'

'See what?' Nick asked.

'The pattern. First they disarm us, then they start throwing up roadblocks. It's all happening on schedule.'

'Whose schedule?'

'Do you know how to beat a Breathalyzer?' Bobby Jay said. 'Activated charcoal tablets.'

'Maybe we could use that in our new Designated Driver campaign,' Polly said. ' 'If You Must Drive Drunk, Please, Suck Charcoal.' '

'You get them in pet stores. They purify the air that goes through the little pump. I don't know why they bother, all my kids' fish went belly-up within a day. You keep it under your tongue. Breaks down the ethanol molecules.'

'Don't the police wonder how come you've got a charcoal briquet in your mouth?'

'There's no law against charcoal,' Bobby Jay said.

'Yet,' they chimed in unison. It was understood among them that at any given moment, somewhere, someone in the 'vast federal bureaucracy' was issuing regulations against them. They were the Cavaliers of Consumption aligned on the field of battle against the Roundheads of Neo-Puritanism.

Polly said, 'My beer wholesalers convention next week. I'm worried.'

'Why?' Nick asked.

'I'm scheduled to debate with Craighead in front of two thousand of them.' Gordon R. Craighead was the chief 'unelected bureaucrat' in charge of the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services, 'Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid' to those in the alcohol and tobacco industries. Craighead's office dispensed about $300 million a year to anti-smoking and anti— drunk-driving groups. Though it had been calculated that the tobacco industry spends $2.5 billion a year, or $4,000 per second, promoting smoking, Nick nonetheless railed against OSAP's 'runaway budgets.'

'Oh, you can handle Craighead.'

'I'm not worried about that. It's my beer wholesalers. These are not subtle people. Most of them started out driving their own trucks. I'm worried that if Craighead starts talking about raising their excise taxes again, or if he gets into the recycling deposit, they'll start throwing things at him. They'll get abusive. That's not going to help anyone.'

'Are you doing Q and A?' Polly said yes, there would be a question and answer after the debate.

'Make them write down the questions. We did a panel once with Mothers Against Smoking at a vending- machine owners' convention. We took spoken questions. A nightmare. The vendors were wrestling the microphone away from each other, shouting at the mothers, 'You're stealing bread outa my kid's mouth and you call yourself a mother!' I was a little surprised. I always thought the mafia was traditionally more respectful of mothers. Now I can't get Mothers Against Smoking even to return my calls. After that I made it a policy, only written questions.