UP IN SMOKE | redclaydiary.com

Listen to the 4-minute podcast on youtube: https://youtu.be/i7Abe0yzPZU

or read the transcript (BELOW)

Life, actually…

as it was more decades ago than you can count on one hand…

UP IN SMOKE

Oh was it cool to smoke, oh was it was even cooler to smoke Kools, oh it was so cool to

look cool

smoke cool

inhale cool

exhale cool

light up cool

tamp ashes off the tip cool

extinguish cool

light one cigarette off the lighted end of another cigarette cool

pause thoughtfully while tamping the unfiltered tip of an unlighted cigarette against the back of your hand cool.

Everything about smoking tobacco was oh so cool when I was young.

Young and clueless cool.

Somewhere in the shrubbery beside our home on Eastwood Avenue, I tried to learn how to smoke, having snuck some of my Uncle Adron’s free-sample Lucky Strikes and a few wooden matches from our gas stove.

Luckily, I didn’t know what you did once you lit up, didn’t know that you had to draw air through a cigarette while holding the lighted match to the other end. I lit up and blew, and the danged cigarette just wouldn’t stay lit.

I didn’t know you had to inhale to appreciate the smoking habit, I kept blowing out and the effort eventually made me sick from secondary smoke and sick from guilt—not guilt of smoking without permission but guilt from having taken the cigarettes undetected.

Thus, I taught myself my own lesson about smoking—don’t do it till you know how.

But it was so seductive, watching all those famous people smoking away, watching how suave and graceful they were, lighting up while posturing. While being beautiful and charming and in-charge.

Watching those sexy women look twice as tough and twice as possible because they dared to smoke in public.

Smoking was so cool.

Cigars were tough-guy smokes. Only a real man—whatever that was—could handle those big cigars, could use them to punctuate speech, to mark off territory, to hold bad dudes at bay. And a cigar-smoking woman could look twice as riveting as any mere macho man.

And pipes were even cooler. You could look thoughtful even when you hadn’t a thought in your head if you knew how to handle a pipe.

Lighting up, puffing, packing tobacco into the bowl, reaming the bowl, clacking the pipe against an ashtray or the heel of your shoe, taking the pipe apart and carefully cleaning it during a deep conversation, and never having to answer any question immediately—everybody would pause, waiting for your answer, while you prepared that pipe for your ceremonial smoke.

It wasn’t the taste, the feel, the odor. It was the process of lighting up a cigarette or cigar or pipe, it was the way you moved, it was the kind of smoking paraphernalia you carried, it was the way you accentuated your every action, that made smoking so cool.

The coolest thing you could do was master the art of nonchalantly lighting up without missing a beat or blinking an eye. It was America’s version of Zen mastery. It was art.

Threats of death, threats of ill health, threats of being ousted, threats of smelling bad, threats of divorce would never make you stop smoking back then because it was about the coolest thing you could possibly do in public without getting arrested. It was the closest you could possibly get to being somebody worthy of notice.

It was the thing you did BECAUSE you knew you would never be famous.

It was a way to strut when you had nothing whatsoever to strut about.

It was as close to immortality as you could ever hope to be, looking and acting like all those beautiful famous people you looked up to and secretly wished you were