I don’t deny that there are moments when I’d kill for a cigarette. Well, maybe not kill a person or a cat, but certainly a mouse or even a squirrel.
The other night we watched the classic film To Have and Have Not with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Pure Hollywood magic: Lauren Bacall made smoking look like the most glamorous, seductive, relaxing, and natural thing that a woman could do. How many premature deaths were indirectly caused by Lauren Bacall lighting a cigarette off of a match, muttering something in her husky voice, and blowing out a 2-foot long plume of smoke?
If I found out that the world was ending tomorrow, I’d hole up with Mr. P in the woods with 2 bottles of wine and a carton of American Spirits. If I were selecting a last meal before my state-sponsored execution, I’d ask for a baguette, a slab of Camembert, a stack of pancakes with strawberries and maple syrup, a Kit Kat, a bottle of champagne, and a pack of cigarettes (although the ultimate perversity in America’s system of capital punishment is that an inmate’s last request for alcohol or cigarettes will usually be denied.)
But my nicotine urges and smoking fantasies are short-lived. I’ll be walking around downtown Boston on a sunny early-Spring day, and I’ll see a dozen examples of tobacco’s vileness: A sallow-skinned man who looks like Skeletor mechanically sucking down his dose, a wheezing businessman with a wobbly butt pacing around a building entrance, a plump frizzy-haired woman with a cigarette in one hand, a Dunkin Donuts cup in the other hand, and a pig-in-slop look on her jowly wrinkling face.
Quick, quick, cue up Lauren Bacall!
