Seeing Through the Smoke

As I was growing up, the symbolism of the various cigarette brands coloured my fantasies and aspirations and contributed elements to my very identity in ways that were subtle and powerful, yet virtually invisible at the time.

            I realized this one insomniac night, while rummaging around in a drawer.  I discovered part of a long-forgotten pack of Salem.  Images of witches and legal procedures came fleetingly to mind.  As I sucked on one to ignite it and exhaled my essence into the room, I was painfully conscious of the irrationality of the act.

            My mother smoked during her pregnancy with me and I am convinced I emerged from the womb looking for a fag.  I was born an infant addict, condemned by regular placental infusions to a childhood of miserable, but mercifully unconscious, cold turkey.  It took me a full fourteen and a half years to get my next fix.

            That first time behind the barn, when all the other boys were coughing and gagging and turning green and throwing up, I was in a reverie of deja vu, having recognized something familiar; knowing that at last I’d found something that had been missing; something that gave me solace.  That black and white image of the rebel without a cause, slouched in his leather jacket with his hands in his pockets, with a fag dangling from his lips, played a part too.  I know it did.

How was I to know any better, back in those days, long before the Marlboro Man died of lonely, hacking emphysema?  After all, the iconography of tobacco was seamlessly woven into the fabric of society.  On the back covers of my mother’s Women’s Day magazines, that I’d leaf through looking for brassiere and corset ads while sitting on the toilet, there were colour photographs of sincere-looking, white-coated doctors pausing for a smoke between surgical procedures, with stethoscopes round their necks and those round, silvery reflector disks with a hole in centre on their foreheads, telling me that Lucky Strikes would stimulate my heart and circulation.  How true, in a way.

             And those Camels, posed in front of palm trees and the pyramids, and the bearded sailor in the little circle on the sea-blue packs of Players spoke to me of romance and distant shores, and brought to mind images of the droopy, bare-breasted, black women I’d seen in the National Geographic Magazine, beating their millet with mortars and pestles made from poles and hollowed-out logs.