way I came to see things, they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never loan money to a Marlboro menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultralights would not only throw a wrench into the works, but make it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight, but that all came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.
The pack I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas station attendants, and no doubt thought that they made me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf, and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.
It was odd. I’d always heard how clean Canada was, how peaceful, but perhaps people had been talking about a different part, the middle maybe, or those rocky islands off the eastern coast. Here it was just one creepy drunk after another. The ones who were passed out I didn’t mind so much, but those on their way to passing out — those who could still totter and flail their arms — made me afraid for my life.
Take this guy who approached me after I left the store, this guy with a long black braid. It wasn’t the gentle, ropy kind you’d have if you played the flute, but something more akin to a bullwhip: a prison braid, I told myself. A month earlier I might have simply cowered, but now I put a cigarette in my mouth, the way one might if he were about to be executed. This man was going to rob me, then lash me with his braid and set me on fire — but no. “Give me one of those,” he said, and he pointed to the pack I was holding. I handed him a Viceroy, and when he thanked me, I smiled and thanked him back.
It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a bouquet, and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences and somehow bring us together? I must have thought too that had the situation been reversed, he’d have been happy to give me a cigarette, though my theory was never tested. I may have been a Boy Scout for only two years, but the motto stuck with me forever: Be Prepared. This does not mean “Be Prepared to Ask People for Shit,” but “Think Ahead, and Plan Accordingly, Especially in Regard to Your Vices.”
Two
When I was in the fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this, and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. I date myself again when I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.
I recall seeing ashtrays in movie theaters and grocery stores, but they didn’t make me want to smoke. In fact, it was just the opposite. Once I drove an embroidery needle into my mother’s carton of Winstons, over and over, as if it were a voodoo doll. She then beat me for twenty seconds, at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting, “That’s . . . not . . . funny.”
A few years later, while sitting around the breakfast table, she invited me to take a puff. I did. Then I ran to the kitchen and drained a carton of orange juice, drinking so furiously that half of it ran down my chin and onto my shirt. How could she,