Cigarettes, Booze, and Senseless Violence, as Long as You are Home in Time for Dinner
We spent so much time as children wanting to be older. Every birthday was an event, each lost tooth, shoe size, or new pencil mark on the wall a step closer to adulthood. Still, it took too long. It’s hard to remember now as a middle-aged man witnessing the years flying by, that time didn’t travel as quickly for us back then. The eons of time you had to endure waiting to get your braces off or even making it through one school year were hard enough to wrap your head around, thinking years into the future must’ve seemed like pure fantasy.
In lieu of reaching significant milestones in an acceptable amount of time, we would use our imaginations to pretend to do what the adults around us were already doing. However, instead of picturing ourselves with a house and career, we tended to find ourselves exploring the darker side of adulthood.
Cigarettes were cool. To be more accurate, the mannerisms adults or older kids adopted while smoking cigarettes were cool. The bright blaze of a struck match, the cupping of hands while lighting followed by the first long exhale of smoke, like a locomotive coming to a stop. The combinations of glamorous moves you could employ while working your way through your Winston were infinite. My particular favorite combo was to shake an opened pack of smokes until an unfiltered cigarette slid out. It was then tapped a few times on the face of a wristwatch to pack the tobacco in tighter. Next, light a match, initiate the cigarette, shake the match flame out and toss it into the ashtray with a “clink” - bonus points for keeping a conversation going at the same time. We couldn’t smoke yet, but we made do. Any pretzel rod or carrot stick became a cigarette in our tiny little hands. Held between the middle and forefinger, we would take a drag and raise our head to blow out the smoke, maybe even tap it over a nearby ashtray.
Nothing goes better with a good smoke than a stiff drink. How many spies, cowboys, and hard-boiled detectives had we seen hunched over a bar by the time we were ten years old? I wouldn’t be allowed to smoke cigarettes until I reached eighteen. It would be an even longer wait until a salty bartender could slide a shot into my waiting hand. All of those drinks with cool names and special glasses were and still are, an exotic world that ceased to exist sometime after the start of the Eighties. I wasn’t attracted to beer as much. Plus, our uncles already let us sip from their cans at parties. Although it tasted like what I would imagine piss to taste like, it didn’t matter. Everyone seemed to love it. I would get used to it.
Darker still was the desire to shoot a gun. Any object bent at a right angle that could fit in your hand became a weapon, transforming you into a pint-sized killing machine. It was not a mystery why. Any weeknight in the Seventies, on any network after 9:00 Central time, we were spoon-fed a diet of bloody, gritty police shows. Unless it was Kojak, they were all smoking, drinking, punching faces, or killing someone in between the commercial breaks and still had time at the end of the program for a lighthearted one-liner before the credits rolled. Afterward, in the living room, it was time for us to do a little fake-fighting, maybe dive-roll behind the couch and then jump out with guns blazing. Man, we could not wait to kill someone.
Did we ever have the choice to be something kinder or more innocent? Maybe the daily dose of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers was enough to pull some of us in a different direction. Or it could be that getting older, witnessing a real gun being fired by a passing car, as well as seeing several drunk people first-hand was enough to convince me that there were some aspects of the adult world that were best left in my childhood.
PS - When my chance to smoke my first real live cigarette arrived, it wasn’t so exciting. I sat in a circle with my friends and some older kids in the neighborhood while they passed a cigarette around for us to try. When it came to my turn, I took the cigarette with one hand, gave it to the other, and on to the next person. I had the benefit of being the youngest of my friend group, so if I punked out on something, it wasn’t a big deal. They thought of me as a baby anyway. Whenever dangerous situations presented themselves back then, I would take a couple of steps in that direction before my moral compass would steer me back towards lameness. For such a cautious kid, I occasionally joined in on some pretty risky shit, but in this case, I guess I just didn’t want to be like these older teens who thought it was okay to give cigarettes to children.
