Marlboro man
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY MARLBORO NAN When smoke got in his eyes When I was in my teens, I didn't take up smoking be-cause of Philip Morris. I took it up because of Philip Marlowe. I began smoking at the age...
...I knew that I had conquered when I found myself at a party full of African journalists, all of whom smoked Camels-my brand when I couldn't get Gauloise, which were stronger-and as I drank and ate good food (always the best occasion for smoking) I resisted cadging a cigarette, and walked into the winter night smelling of other people's smoke, knowing I had quit for sure...
...That may be so...
...I couldn't go to a movie without becoming anxious after the first hour...
...A lot of Americans seem to think that if you don't smoke, if you keep fit and avoid bad foods, you will live forever, or at least live in comfort until the inevitable end...
...I enjoyed it, but toward the end it became a burden...
...Until then my smoking experience was limited to dried corn silks...
...But I envy her...
...It wasn't until high school that my smoking got serious...
...While it is true that there are people in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue who want to sell us things, and manipulate images to do it, there are things we seem to want them to sell us...
...But there is something about the puritanism that often accompanies this topic that gets to me...
...Christianity means that death is ultimately defeated, is overcome, but from the point of view of what we can control with our own good behavior, our puritan intentions, gravity wins.gravity wins...
...We all wind up down there...
...They were at first incredulous about the no-smoking policy of our church hall, though they came to accept it with good, if baffled, humor...
...They found the idea of not smoking hard to understand...
...I took up smoking because I thought it was cool...
...I began smoking at the age of thirteen, but didn't get serious until a few years later...
...Gravity wins...
...I have an aunt who is in her late eighties...
...The horror of underage smoking," he writes, "veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality, and one of the biggest pleasant empty dreams being pushed these days by Madison Avenue is that a child is innocent until his or her eighteenth birthday...
...Here again I suspect that the tobacco industry is being scapegoated-made to bear the brunt of a more general societal rage at the displacement of the family by the corporation...
...And I know we'll both end up in the same place...
...Her mind is good, she has never paid much attention to diet, except to eat foods that taste good to her, she drinks, and she smokes...
...I was a Raymond Chandler fan and liked unfiltered Camels, and if I thought I could get away with it, I would have had a flask of rye in the glove box of the car...
...But although they love this country in ways many Americans do not, they find certain American attitudes toward food, drink, and smoking to be strange...
...For ten years I was pastor at an Albanian Orthodox church, many of whose members were immigrants...
...It wouldn't have worked...
...It is as if it were a matter of morality not to smoke, and not merely good health sense...
...What they want most of all is to sample the pleasures of adulthood, like sex or booze or cigarettes...
...But if you give it up for moral reasons, you'll take credit for it, which is ridiculous...
...To impute to cigarette advertising a 'predatory' power is to admit that parents now have less control over the moral education of their children than the commercial culture has...
...A confessor once told me, "You shouldn't give up smoking for moral reasons...
...I lived at the edge of an Illinois town, across the street from a cornfield...
...Still, it was my choice, a stupid one, and it was, though a struggle, possible to stop...
...Hell, we buy them...
...I had seen enough cowboy movies to like this idea...
...I live in New York City, where a very strict smoking ban is being put into effect...
...She's lucky...
...Albania's history is so full of misfortune that this lesson is in their bones...
...I managed to quit at the age of thirty, after five years of false starts, and endured two weeks of screaming nerve ends...
...The truth is that without firm parental guidance teenagers make all sorts of irrevocable decisions before they're old enough to appreciate the consequences-they drop out of school, they get pregnant, they major in sociology...
...Not only death, but suffering, is inevitable for most of us, and some of us are luckier than others...
...But I wonder, as I get older, what I am saving myself for...
...I avoid lung cancer, saving myself for another kind, or for Parkinson's disease, or Alzheimer's...
...My friends and I would tear the tassels off the corn, dry them, roll them in paper that burned too fast, and sear our lungs...
...To be anything like him I had to smoke...
...I was ready for a change...
...I know how addictive it is, and what liars the tobacco companies are...
...But I had to borrow the car from my father...
...The point is, Chandler's Philip Marlowe was cool...
...I agree with it, and because I now can't stand to be around smoke (something that doesn't much affect my wife, who was never a smoker) I will find bars and restaurants more pleasant...
...I quit smoking for reasons of health...
...If you give it up for reasons of health, fine...
...I don't count on luck, and I'm glad I gave up smoking...
...No one is guilt-free here, and we really do get the culture we deserve...
...Jonathan Franzen's new book of essays, How to Be Alone (Far-rar, Straus and Giroux), has a good essay on smoking...
...They seem more aware than we are that even if you do everything right, you may still suffer, and you can't control everything that happens to you...
...I started because a kid in the grade ahead of me had a pouch of Bull Durham and a packet of cigarette papers...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 5
