Butting in and butting out: Childhood, adulthood, and cigarette smoke (Georgetown, Ontario and beyond)

(38) smoke smoke smoke that cigarette Tex Williams with Lyrics – YouTube

From earliest childhood, I was constantly engulfed in a toxic cloud of cigarette smoke, and growing up in Georgetown, Ontario in the 1950s, I was mad keen to butt into the billowing, tenebrous realm of adult puffers.

My father served as an exemplary role model for any budding wheezer and hacker. He and all of his office cronies, as well as the vast majority of adults in our sphere, friends and relatives alike, smoked up a proverbial storm. People lit up everywhere: on the job; in trains, planes, and automobiles; at the doctor’s office and in the hospital; in the hockey arena; in shops and supermarkets; even while soaking in the tub.

And the non-smoking minority, in the main, cheerfully accepted their fate as bearers of ashtrays and inhalers of fumes. Even my mother, who considered smoking a “filthy habit,” supplied, emptied, and cleaned the Stygian ashtrays that were strategically placed throughout our nicotine-stained subdivision house on Georgetown’s Elizabeth Street.

In those sooty days of yore, tv journalists and tv doctors would take long, contemplative drags of their “fags” before delivering somber information or advice in a stentorian tone… with an undercurrent of rasping breath. Commercials on what my dad referred to as the “boob tube” with its rabbit ears, purchased from Mr. Wigo on main street, incessantly extolled the medicinal qualities as well as the exquisite taste of the touted cigs:
• Winston tastes good… like a cigarette should.
• Reach for a Lucky instead.
• Marlboro: Settle back and have a full-flavored smoke.
• I’d walk a mile for a Camel!

tobacco ad slogans 1950s and 1960s – Google Search

Following the science – and the money – physicians urged their flock to take up smoking, for the sake of good health, in magazine ads and medical journals:
• More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!
• 20,679 physicians say ‘Luckies are less irritating’!

Cigarettes were once ‘physician’ tested, approved

When I was a wee lad, doctors delivered advice, and even babies, while puffing sagely on a cigarette or pipe.

 

And an increasing number of women were taught to express their aspirations for emancipation by emulating, smokily seducing, or cocking a tar-stained snoot at the guys. “To keep a slender figure/Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet… Be happy–Go Lucky…” the gals were advised, a foreshadowing of the puffy ‘feminist’ messaging of the ‘70s, incarnated in the smoke and mirrors of Virginia Slims: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

cigarette ads targeting women – Google Search

I was destined to become an inveterate smoker. Given my addiction-prone personality and oral fixation, along with the plethora of wheezing role models from my Georgetown childhood, getting hooked on coffin nails was only a matter of time… and opportunity.

By the age of 16, as a sports junkie I had already begun emulating my idol, that chain-smoking commander of the fairways, the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer. I was a charter member of Arnie’s army, and when this titan of the links squinted through a cloud of billowing blue smoke, inhaled deeply, taking one last seemingly interminable drag, then slashed a laser shot 300 yards right to the pin, I knew which spiked shoes I wanted to fill.

Smoking and drinking contributed to Arnold Palmer’s ultimate heart failure – Villages-News.com

And if Arnie wasn’t exemplar enough, my favorite cousins from Vermont, U.S.A., the homeland of Camels and Lucky Strikes and the heartland of the Old Ball Game, provided shining examples of how to huff, puff, and blow, especially Cousin Malcolm, reputedly the finest semi-pro pitcher in Franklin County, and a veritable smoking machine, who rasped phlegmily whenever he cackled, punctuating each bout of chortling with the “Ack-Ack” exclamation points of a hacking smoker’s cough.

Like many an apprentice puffer, I began my descent into the nether world of tar and nicotine with menthol cigarettes, Kools and Cameos, which were touted as smooth and minty but in fact scorched a neophyte’s lungs like napalm. Upon leaving home for college in Switzerland in August 1969, I traded in corrosive menthols for the high-status Rothman brand, purchasing my first pack as soon as my parents receded out of sight, waving farewell as we Neuchâtel Junior College students headed for Europe on the good ship Empress of Canada, where smokers, not Britannia, ruled the waves. Thus began my 10-year run as a 40-cigarette-per-day tobacco fiend.

I learned to French inhale before I knew the meaning of French kiss.

Although the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were marked by a crescendo of dire warnings from certain perspicacious avatars of public health, smokers still ruled the roiling roost in most quarters. When I was at university studying English literature in the 1970s, classrooms were a Miltonic Hades “fed with ever burning sulphur… A dungeon horrible, on all sides round …” Attending seminars or lectures meant infiltrating a circle of Hell as described by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: “All are damned – they breathe an air, / Thick, infected, joy-dispelling.” Students and profs alike would extinguish butts with a sizzle, hiss, and pop in Styrofoam coffee cups and insouciantly flick molten ash and glowing embers onto classroom tables and industrial rugs, which became permanently pockmarked like material victims of some sort of other-worldly incandescent pox.

By the late 1970s, in-your-face smokers like me were meeting with ever-increasing opprobrium. And ten years of toxic enslavement had left me with multiple ill effects, both physical and psychological, not the least of which was an acute self-consciousness concerning my own miasmic stench. So in May of 1978, I managed to kick the filthy habit, not without displaying the sort of extreme crankiness for which reforming nicotine addicts are so justly renowned. In short, I threw fits; meanwhile my friend Donald, who was struggling just as mightily with his demeaning tobacco dependence, threw fish. That’s right: in a fit of last-gasp smoker’s pique, this companion-in-soot became so ferociously crabby that he chucked a carefully prepared fish dinner high into the air, whereupon it adhered momentarily to the dining room ceiling before spiraling with a splat to the floor below, waiting to be booted and trodden on, while leaving its outline on the upper vault for all to see, a sort of fossilized remnant of his kicking the habit.

I suffered such anguish during this weaning from the nicotine teat that I sought solace in novel oral fixations, becoming addicted to sucking toothpicks and chomping on sunflower seeds during all my waking hours, before abandoning these inadequate crutches and simply devouring every sort of tasty comestible that came my way in such colossal quantities that I begin expanding like the universe after the Big Bang, putting on about 30 pounds.

By the time I moved to Quebec City as a newly minted blimp the following fall, I had begun displaying all the fervent zeal of the fresh convert, seamlessly transitioning from a thoroughly obnoxious smoker to an insufferable anti-tobacco prig.

In those bygone days, stepping into the world of Quebec City was like being trapped on a temporal rewind reel or peering into a rearview mirror and experiencing déjà vu, especially as regards the filthy habit. Whereas the anti-smoking militias had been making considerable inroads elsewhere in North America, in the provincial capital of la nation québécoise the tar-and-nicotine brigade continued to hold the upper hand, circa 1980. Indeed, being a member of Quebec’s surging, redoubtable independence movement practically required a solemn pledge of tobacco addiction. The iconic figures of the Parti québécois government, from revered premier Rene Levesque to esteemed finance minister Jacques Parizeau on down, chain-smoked with the same smoldering intensity they brought to bear when addressing the weighty issues bedeviling Quebec society, such as how to legislate the French language translation of onion bhajis or hula hoops.

Although not sharing the political proclivities of these august political leaders, when it came to “butting in” the administrators, faculty members, and staff at the college where I worked more than matched the wizened, sallow, and smoke-stained PQ luminaries, hack for phlegmy hack and puff for sooty puff. The entire school was fully equipped with wall-to-wall cigarette disposal amenities, and faculty meetings featured a vast array of delivery systems for tar and nicotine, including pipes, cigarillos, and those roll-your-own coffin nails known as rollies, as well as a wide range of more conventional gaspers.

The cultural warfare around the portentous issue of butting in and butting out came to a fulminating head at a faculty meeting in the early 1990s. A student spokesperson with the wonderfully appropriate name of Karl Tabak dared to propose that the school restrict smoking in the cafeteria, where every scrumptious meal was permeated by ubiquitous billowing tobacco pollution and thus tasted like an ultra-stinky version of Swedish smoked eel. Mr. Tabak’s intrepid intervention calling for a non-smoking section to be established in the institutional mess hall caused a colossal ruckus and led one waggish faculty member, a devoted high priest and purveyor of the tobacco cult, to propose a tongue-in-cheek compromise motion, to wit that all smokers would become non-smokers during faculty assembly, if all non-smokers would become smokers. There was a call for the vote and the motion nearly carried the day!

As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard pointed out, nothing is more dangerous than to recollect. Ruminating upon the long-lost days described herein, I feel myself yielding to the deceptive lure of nostalgia, longing to return to a world more innocent, more familiar, pining for the simple battle lines that were drawn and redrawn again… before going up in smoke. For me, the flame of the past is flickering, and the future is butting out.

When a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes (Song by The Platters)

Time [is] passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. ― Jonathan Safran Foer

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you. It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures. ― Ally Condie

What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed. ― Julian Barnes
I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.
― Kris Kristofferson

Your friend,
Robert

Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com