TOBACCO ROAD
Longer than a Marlboro 100 and no Virginia Slim,
my first ‘cancer stick,’ when assembled, was a
filter-tip-free ‘clown cigar’ eight and a half
inches long and fat as a toilet paper tube…
our little warlock coven-of-three (second-grade,
born-to-be-wild Bogart wannabes) mustered all
hands-and-knees down on the magic carpet of
nature’s free ‘tobacco’ (the tinder-dry pine
needles blanketing the forest primeval beneath
Grove Street’s towering conifers), hard-focused
on that sheet of composition paper swiped from
Ol’ Lady Hawthorne’s desk along with her
Scotch tape… all of us enthralled in the black art of
‘rolling our own’… but the forest floor proving way
too punky-soft and bumpy, nothing like the hard,
flat boys’ room floor we’d practiced on with
our wastebasket-pencil-sharpener shavings– this
‘tobacco’ refusing to cooperate, spilling out all-over
everywhere like Pick-Up Sticks before we could get
the darn thing taped up– so OK, Bogeys we weren’t.
But nobody back then, not Mom, not Dad, not even
the family doctor, was buying into any of those silly
myths suggesting that there might be some serious
health hazards posed by the Great American
Cigarette lifestyle. So there I was, the little fire-eater
with a home-made ‘road flare’ clamped in his teeth,
all set to inhale a volcanic cannonball of atomized
pine tar destined to clear-cut some sixty square inches
of my lungs’ cilia and drop-kick me onto my butt like
some Raid-sprayed, dying-cockroach wheeze-bag
with blistered fingerprints– but anyway… you
always remember your first of everything:
first date, first kiss, first heartbreak, first car, first sip.
Well, my first ‘coffin nail’ was no Winston nor Pall Mall,
and there was nothing Lucky about it either. And
oh yeah, it was most definitely a Kool.
(return to NO DAFFODILS, NO CLOUDS)
my first ‘cancer stick,’ when assembled, was a
filter-tip-free ‘clown cigar’ eight and a half
inches long and fat as a toilet paper tube…
our little warlock coven-of-three (second-grade,
born-to-be-wild Bogart wannabes) mustered all
hands-and-knees down on the magic carpet of
nature’s free ‘tobacco’ (the tinder-dry pine
needles blanketing the forest primeval beneath
Grove Street’s towering conifers), hard-focused
on that sheet of composition paper swiped from
Ol’ Lady Hawthorne’s desk along with her
Scotch tape… all of us enthralled in the black art of
‘rolling our own’… but the forest floor proving way
too punky-soft and bumpy, nothing like the hard,
flat boys’ room floor we’d practiced on with
our wastebasket-pencil-sharpener shavings– this
‘tobacco’ refusing to cooperate, spilling out all-over
everywhere like Pick-Up Sticks before we could get
the darn thing taped up– so OK, Bogeys we weren’t.
But nobody back then, not Mom, not Dad, not even
the family doctor, was buying into any of those silly
myths suggesting that there might be some serious
health hazards posed by the Great American
Cigarette lifestyle. So there I was, the little fire-eater
with a home-made ‘road flare’ clamped in his teeth,
all set to inhale a volcanic cannonball of atomized
pine tar destined to clear-cut some sixty square inches
of my lungs’ cilia and drop-kick me onto my butt like
some Raid-sprayed, dying-cockroach wheeze-bag
with blistered fingerprints– but anyway… you
always remember your first of everything:
first date, first kiss, first heartbreak, first car, first sip.
Well, my first ‘coffin nail’ was no Winston nor Pall Mall,
and there was nothing Lucky about it either. And
oh yeah, it was most definitely a Kool.
(return to NO DAFFODILS, NO CLOUDS)
