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.

Pausing for a Smoke

I’d been riding in the first of a four-truck convoy full of soldiers down the Pan American Highway out of the capital in the dry January heat. We’d left at dawn, headed for Morazan to confront the forces of the insurrection. I’d been snapping off-to-war shots for a story, joshing and jostling with the macho teenagers in the back of the truck, trying to make sure that their rifles pointed skyward and not inadvertently at me, laughing at their jokes as they passed around water bottles and surreptitious joints, when we turned off onto a dusty track and stopped so that everyone could take a leak by the side of the road.

I leaped down and peed with everybody else but when the smokes were passed around and everyone lit up, I declined, “no quiero, gracias,” and took in a big whiff of the dried-out pine and tamarind that was hanging in the dusty air amid the hibiscus blossoms and the bougainvillea and the shiny, green banana leaves, and told myself it’d been almost six months and I was clean. And while I could see the satisfaction it produced for those teenage boys sucking on those fags, I reminded myself of the misery I’d gone through to get this far, and that it’d been worth it, and that it wouldn’t be worth it to have to go through it all again.

For some reason the first truck set off without me and I climbed into the second, with its identical cargo of armed adolescents. We hadn’t gone very far, grinding along the rutted roadway in low gear, slapped by overhanging branches, jolted and bruised, when the first truck hit an anti-tank mine buried in the dust and instantly disintegrated in a spectacular ball of flame and noise that cut every living one of those boys into seared and singed chunks about the size of a Sunday roast, and sent a splattering of blood and pieces over us like a brief, warm hail storm.

In the contemplative sadness that follows sudden, cosmic fear, in the stunned, stupefied, ear-ringing deafness of the aftermath, I watched mesmerized as the boy beside me slowly and meticulously extracted a knitting needle-sized splinter of human bone which was embedded an inch in his forearm like an arrow, and then, sucking at the oozing wound, offered me a Winston from the red and white pack he fished out of the baggy pocket on the thigh of his camouflage fatigues. I accepted, and was immediately hooked again.