Thank You for Smoking

was half an hour late.

'How are you,' Nick said, thrusting out his hand. He decided to dispense with mendacious banter about the congestion of Friday afternoon traffic in D.C. 'Good to see you,' he said mendaciously. He didn't especially enjoy being singled out for silent contempt by the headmaster of a school whose parents included Persian Gulf emirs and members of Congress. For $11,742 a year, the Reverend Josiah Griggs could park his attitude in his narthex.

'The traffic was awful,' Nick said.

'Yes.' Griggs nodded slowly and ponderously, as though Nick had just proposed major changes in the Book of Common Prayer. 'Fridays… of course.'

'We're going fishing this weekend,' Nick said, changing the subject. 'Aren't we, Joe?'

Joey said nothing.

'I wonder if you might stop by sometime next week,' Griggs said in that assured, headmasterly way. Nick was seized with alarm. He looked over at Joey, who provided no clue as to this summons.

'Of course,' Nick said. 'I'm away on business the beginning of the week.' It crossed Nick's mind: did Griggs watch Oprah? Surely not.

'End of the week, then? Friday? You could come by to pick up Joseph a little… early?' A thin smile played over his narrow face.

.

'Fine,' Nick said.

'Splendid,' Griggs said, brightening. 'What are you fishing for?'

'Catfish.'

'Ah!' Griggs nodded. 'Ellie, our housekeeper, loves catfish. Of course, I can't get past their looks. Those fearsome whiskers.' He walked off to the deanery with his hands clasped behind his back.

Safely inside the car, Nick said, 'What did you do?'

'Nothing,' Joey said.

'How come he wants to see me?'

'I don't know,' said Joey. Twelve was not the most communicative age. Conversations consisted of games of Twenty Questions.

Great, Nick thought, I get to go into a principal conference totally blind.

'I'm offering total and unconditional amnesty. Whatever you did, it's all right. Just tell me: why does Griggs want to see me?'

'I said I don't know.'

'Okay.' Nick drove. 'How'd the game go?'

'Sucked.'

'Well, you know what Yogi Berra said. 'Ninety percent of baseball is half-mental.' '

Joey thought about this. 'That's forty-five percent.'

'It's a joke.' And, having nothing to do with revolting bodily functions, not likely to split the sides of a twelve- year-old. He extracted from Joey the score of the game: 9–1.

'The important thing is,' he ventured consolingly, 'is… ' What was the important thing? Having himself been brought up in the Vince Lombardi School of Child-Raising, where his father shoutingly questioned his manhood from the stands every time he missed a grounder, Nick had resolved on a more tolerant approach for his own son's education, '… is to feel tired at the end of the day.' Aristotle might not have constructed an entire philosophy on it, but it would do. True, Hitler and Stalin had probably felt tired at the end of their days. But theirs would not have been a good tired.

Joey registered no opinion of this Grand Unified Theory of Being, except to point out that Nick had just driven past Blockbuster Video and would now have to try a U-turn in busy traffic.

They went through their usual ritual, Joey proposing one unsuitable video after another, usually ones with covers showing a half-naked blond actress with ice picks, or the various steroid-swollen European bodybuilders- turned-actors in the act of decapitating people with chainsaws. Nick countering with Doris Day and Cary Grant movies from the fifties, Joey sticking his finger down his throat to indicate where he stood on the Grant-Day oeuvre. Nick was generally able to reach a compromise with World War II movies. Violent, yes, but tasteful by modern standards, without the super-slow-mo exit wounds pioneered by Peckinpah. 'Here's one we haven't seen,' he enthused, 'The Sands of Iwo Jima. John Wayne. Cool.' Joey showed no great zeal for the exploits of the Duke, John Agar, and Forrest Tucker as they fought their way up Mount Suribachi, but said he'd go along if they could also rent Animal House for the seventeenth time.

Nick lived in a one-bedroom off Dupont Circle that looked out onto a street where there had been eight muggings so far this year, though only two of them had been fatal. Most of his one-oh-five went to servicing the mortgage on the house a few miles up Connecticut Avenue in the leafy neighborhood of Cleveland Park, where Joey lived with his mother. On alternate weekends, Joey got to go get down and urban with Dad.

Together they ate a nourishing dinner of triple pepperoni pizza and cookie dough ice cream. Cookie dough ice cream. And society fretted about cigarettes?

The Sands of Iwo Jima was a little dated, but it was a good, big-hearted movie. And there was this… transfiguring moment where Wayne, having brought his men through hell to victory, exults, 'I never felt so good in my life. How about a cigarette?' And just as he's offering the pack around to his men, a Jap sniper drills him, dead. Without realizing it, Nick took out a cigarette and lit up.

'Da-ad,' Joey said.

Obediently, Nick went outside on the balcony.

4

BR did not offer Nick coffee from his pot, despite the fact that it was six-thirty on a Monday morning. He did not bother with 'Good morning,' only 'I really hope you've got something for us, Nick. A lot depends on it.'

'Good morning,' Nick said, anyway.

'I'm listening.' BR was signing things, or pretending to sign things.

'Could I get some coffee?'

'I'm listening,' BR said.

Better skip the coffee. Nick sat, took a deep breath. 'Movies.'

'I don't have time for Socratic dialogue, Nick. Get to the point.'

'That is the point.'

BR looked up slowly. 'What?'

'I think movies are the answer to our problem.'

'How?'

'Do you want the reasoning behind it? I could put it in a memo.'

'Just tell me.'

'In 1910,' Nick said, 'the U.S. was producing ten billion cigarettes a year. By 1930, we were producing one hundred twenty-three billion a year. What happened in between? Three things. World War I, dieting, and talking pictures.'

BR was listening.

'During the war, it was hard for soldiers to carry pipes or cigars on the battlefield, so they were given cigarettes. And they caught on so much that General Pershing sent a cable to Washington in 1917 that said, 'Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.' ' Nick left out the detail that it was in 1919, just after the war, that the first cases of an up-to-then nearly unheard of illness called lung cancer began to show up. The chairman of a medical school in St. Louis invited his students to watch him do the autopsy on a former doughboy because, he told them, they'd probably never see another case of it again.

'So now the men are smoking cigarettes. In 1925, Liggett and Myers ran the Chesterfield ad showing a woman saying to a man who's lighting up, 'Blow some my way.' It broke the gender taboo. But it wasn't until a few