TO THE LAST GASP

Meyer, Ernest L.

To The Last Gasp By ERNEST L. MEYER THE historian of the future will find small source of humor in the cumulation of horror and tragedy that marked the course of World War II. One aspect of the...

...And there is, too, the phenomenon of weird new cigarette brands springing up like mushrooms in a rainy dawn: strange paper tubes stuffed, I believe, with alfalfa, dried maple leaves tinctured with rum, upholstery from grandfather's horsehair sofa, and the grounds from last Tuesday's coffee...
...However, in certain empty Chicago lots we did find a weed which we dubbed, with happy scientific inaccuracy, "Indian tobacco...
...We also experimented with pieces of rattan snitched from mother's favorite cane chair and, especially during the July Fourth season, with fragments of Chinese punk...
...We didn't believe, for example, that cigarettes brought on "lung fever" and stunted growth...
...That is the Great Cigarette Famine, still unrelieved and indeed somewhat more acute even with half the war won, and the stories that have emerged out of the dearth...
...These dreadful concoctions produce in me not nausea but nostalgia, and my heart sings, for lo I am once again a little boy behind a billboard being initiated into the blessed fraternity of the adult and the free...
...These were medicated cigarettes made of herbs, essences, and mysterious sweepings from the workshop of an alchemist...
...These had a flavor and smell sufficiently villainous to make us feel virile, yet I do not recommend them...
...And all this is why in the long season of the Great Cigarette Famine, 1945 A. D., I shall survive quite happily and to the last gasp...
...The Blessed Fraternity Guaranteed free of tobacco and nicotine, Cubebs were sold as a remedy for asthma, coughs, and sundry allied wheezes...
...And so we emulated Big Butch, covertly but with ingenuity...
...There was one exception...
...One aspect of the conflict, however, is not without its farcical side...
...For there was living refutation in the person of Big Butch Halloran, the neighborhood lamplighter, a man of enormous stature and muscularity even though he had been smoking since the age of 10...
...Not living on a farm, we were denied the luxury of corn-silk wrapped in toilet tissue, one of the more ancient inventions of ersatz wickedness...
...Stories of people in Italy and France paying $2 in sound American money for one package of black market weeds, and stories of men and women in New York City and elsewhere in these civilized States fainting in long lines at tobacco shops while waiting hours for their dole of nicotinic delight...
...Indian Tobacco' And yet we lads growing up in Chicago at the turn of the century were both skeptics and adventurers...
...If any adolescent eyes should be scanning this piece, I urgently warn against rattan and Chinese punk and counsel the smoking neophyte to be content with the more restrained awfulness of crushed dried leaves, especially of the elm and maple species...
...Occasionally we could find an amiable druggist willing to sell a pack of Cubebs...
...That is simply because I belong to the generation of Spartan smokers, who learned a bad habit the hard way, and acquired in the process an amazing set of brass-lined windpipes and a double-riveted duodenum...
...In those days, of course, we had to resort to synthetic cigarettes because storekeepers still had ethics and neither the "tailor-made" varieties nor even the "makings" could be purchased anywhere by a minor...
...Its seeds, when rubbed briskly between the hands, yielded dry, brown, aromatic shreds of terriffic pungency when lighted and drawn down our larynxes...
...I am happy to report that research in later years proved that the growth was not marijuana, but an innocent variety of ragweed that produced not sin, but sneezes...
...While my friends strangle and gag, I revel in the familiar fragrances of rattan, ragweed, Cubebs, and Chinese punk which in this day of dearth have been plucked from the ragbag of the past...
...With a real "tailor-made" between our lips we had climbed in one giant stride from the ignominy of youth to the glorious pants of manhood...
...Cigarette smoking among males was confined to shady characters who inhabited pool halls, mustached villains in the Bijou Circuit melodramas, and professional safe-blowers...
...My brass-lined windpipes and double-riveted duodenum laugh at the weird new cigarette brands dug up by tobacconists from sinister shelves...
...So that if we invaded the shop of a kindly apothecary and coughed forlornly and with sufficient conviction, we were able to wangle a package of Cubebs on the plea that without them we would presently die of the whoops...
...Personally, though an incurable cigarette puffer, I have survived the Great Famine with discomforts less than average...
...Oak leaves are far too fibrous for the connoisseur in juvenile delinquency...
...And yet, there behind the billboard, coughing and with tears in our eyes, we boys felt strangely exalted...
...As for females, great heavens, if you saw a girl or woman blowing smoke-rings you were pretty safe in hazarding that she was a member of a guild that was venerable and yet hardly —well, episcopalian...
...We would light them behind the nearest billboard—and then we would really cough...
...For Cubebs, though undoubtedly medicinal, had the kick o'f a Missouri mule and a flavor that lingered without love...
...Men of my age will recall that 40 years ago no really decent boy, Horatio Alger Model T, would be caught with a coffin-nail...

Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 24


 
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