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or read the transcript below:
THE DOMINO MATCH THEORY GOES UP IN SMOKE
Jimmy Three lives and breathes in a 1950s Deep South village. Lower your eyelids for a moment and travel back in time with me. Let’s take a look at this young boy named Jimmy Three. He actually exists, both back then and, seventy years later, right now.
There he sits behind the itchy bushes of his front yard on Eastwood Avenue, the stub of a pencil held tight in his teeth. There is a scraggly notebook in his lap. A fizzed-out Pepsi Cola bottle leans against his leg on the uneven red dirt. A box of wooden kitchen matches is at his side, next to two filched cigarettes.
Jimmy Three is a daydreamer who writes down his dreams and ideas and fleeting thoughts and oblique notions. He writes them with his penknife-sharpened pencil. He hides his papered outpourings in a special place inside the house.
Jimmy Three is looking around to make sure nobody can see him from the street. His Mom is downtown paying bills in person, his siblings are away adventuring. For this moment, Jimmy Three is alone and loving it.
This is his first time to attempt to smoke a real cigarette. Up till now his playtime fantasies consist of unlit pretend smokes—twig cigars, whittled pipes, rabbit tobacco scraps, pantomimed Bogart gestures. Smoking looks so cool to Jimmy Three.
He picks up a Lucky Strike, pokes it into his mouth, pushes open the cardboard drawer and selects one hardwood Phosphorous-tipped stick. He recalls his Mom cautioning him to close the box prior to striking a match, lest the whole shebang lights up.
Now he has met his match and is about to rub it quickly against the sandpapered strip affixed to the Domino label. How will this work? he wonders. Do I take the cigarette out of my mouth to light it or do I risk singeing my eyebrows?
He tries to remove the cigarette from his mouth but OUCH! finds that his moistened lips are stuck to the thin paper. Another lesson learned: Dry your lips before smoking.
The soggy end of the cigarette isn’t fit to use, so Jimmy Three reverses it, placing the untouched part between dry lips. He strikes the match, reassured by the acrid smell, and holds its lighted end to the cigarette.
What to do next? He blows through the Lucky Strike but the tobacco goes cold. Why won’t it remain lit? By now he’s yelling OUCH! Number Two because the match has burned down to his fingertips.
He stomps on the embers. Taking a deep breath, once again scanning his whereabouts to make sure no-one is there to observe his humiliation, he picks up the second cigarette. The first one is a mess shredded useless on the red clay. Here is my final chance to get this thing going, he mutters.
What other way do you smoke a cigarette? Well, maybe I can light up, suck in instead of blowing out, and see what happens. What if I suck the flaming tip into my mouth. Third OUCH!?
Lucky Strike between dry lips, flaming match held to the cigarette tip, he sucks powerfully.
It works. It works so well his lungs suddenly fill with unaccustomed smoke, his coughing spasms seem endless, his tearing-up eyes are blinding, and his entire project is doomed.
Jimmy Three extinguishes the match, shreds the cigarettes, buries all the evidence, returns the Domino Matches to the kitchen and hopes nobody will ever suspect what happened.
Saving the empty Pepsi bottle for deposit return, Jimmy Three goes to his room and nurses the upset stomach he will have the rest of the day…an upset stomach created from the inhalation of Phosphorous fumes and wood smoke and smoldering tobacco and a dash of guilt.
Jimmy Three retrieves his notebook and pencil stub and makes some notes.
And he resolves to move on to less risky experiments, a resolution he sometimes keeps and sometimes breaks. Like the time he climbs the old smokestack near the neighborhood and nearly gets into a whole passel of trouble.
But that story comes later
Jim Reed © 2021 A.D.
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