by Marc Colten
My Father's Monkey
A Memoir
by Marc Colten
Copyright 2014 Marc Colten
My Father's Monkey
A Memoir
by
Marc Colten
My father did not start smoking until relatively late in life. In his youth he had played semi-pro football and perhaps dreamt of an athletic career. Even while overseas during World War II, a time of incredible stress and great boredom, he said he only used his cheap G.I. cigarettes as barter. What he bartered them for I don’t know, and maybe that’s for the best. When he returned home in 1944 he was 32 years old, an old man by Army Air Corps standards (he joked that “The Old Man” to whom he was supposed to take all of his problems had been only 22 years old) and he seems to have started smoking seriously at that time.
My mother apparently began smoking before my father, which meant that even before he returned from Europe she was packing cigarettes and matches in those tiny little purses all women seemed to carry back then. They are both gone now and I suppose I will never know whether her habit drew him in, or whether he simply realized that there really was no reason not to smoke. By the time I was born, he had been smoking for about five years, and I cannot remember a time when he was not coughing. I could always find him in a department store, even when the clothing racks towered over me, by listening for that cough that was, to me, as distinctive as his voice. Both of my parents smoked until a year or so before each of their deaths. It would be satisfying to blame my mother's multiple cancers on cigarettes, but her family history points more strongly to genetic disposition. My father had his first heart attack in 1959, and he was never the same again. After that it was one thing after another. Some seem related to tobacco, others to bad luck. His second heart attack was in 1975, while I was there to witness it, and I still remember the icy sweat on his forehead as he gasped for breath.
Cigarettes were a big part of my life, although I never smoked them. They were everywhere. Cartons were stored in the closets, packs lay on tables in almost every room. When my father's doctor suggested simple craft projects as therapy after his first heart attack, the first thing he made was a cigarette box with little tiles glued to the lid. They got a card table and chairs and other household items from Raleigh coupons. I used to joke that they should just keep saving them up until they had enough for the Iron Lungs they would eventually need. Lighters were everywhere, some with flip tops and others with levers that exposed the wick and threw the spark at the same time. There were cans of lighter fluid and little dispensers of flint that looked like bits of broken pencil lead. Years later they switched to butane lighters, more out of a desire to keep up with progress than anything else, and welcomed disposable butane lighters as an invention that saved them from all that time consuming maintenance. They were never too comfortable with cans of pressurized butane used to refill the earlier versions.
They smoked after every meal and during every television show. If a meal took too long to arrive in a restaurant, they would light up. They smoked before bedtime and on car trips. There were ashtrays in every room, except my bedroom, and they were heaped with ashes and butts, some of them still smoldering. Ashes were everywhere. The smell of smoke was part of every meal.
Cigarettes were expensive and this became an obsession for my parents, an addiction to saving money on top of their addiction to tobacco. Taxes were blamed for the extra cost and “buttleggers” began smuggling untaxed cigarettes into New York City. These prized smokes could not be bought in stores and had to be purchased on the growing black market. I remember that, as a child, my father drove me to an old apartment building a few blocks from our home in Coney Island and sent me inside with a bag of money. I'm sure he would have gone himself, but someone had to stay with the car. The building had once been quite fashionable, only a few blocks from the ocean, but it had fallen on hard times. The massive foyer was ill lit and you had to peer into the dark to see the two broad staircases leading up from both sides. I walked up those dark stairs to the apartment whose number was written on the scrap of paper he had given me, and made the “score”. I was terrified. What if Federal agents popped out of the shadows? What if thieves were waiting for me? What if the guy just took my money and laughed at me, daring me to call the cops? I wondered if any of those possibilities worried my father as much as paying a couple of extra bucks for his smokes.
On the first vacation that I and my, then, wife-to-be took together, we were to drive down from New England, pass through Brooklyn to visit my parents and then on to New Jersey, where we lived at the time. My parents were overjoyed. We would be driving through New Hampshire, the Promised Land of untaxed cigarettes. I had gone to college in New Hampshire (no, not Dartmouth, but a college that no longer exists) but I’m sure my parents visited me not just to buy cheaper cigarettes but because they loved me. Right? Anyway, before we left we were given a detailed list. How many cartons. What brand. What length. What pack style. As we drove south a week later we saw the massive cigarette warehouse stores with huge white letters painted across their roofs. “CIGARETTES”, they screamed. We ignored them. We had decided between ourselves, in a late night motel conference, that we would not honor their request. If they chose to poison themselves they would have to do it without our help. When we arrived empty handed there was a big scene and we were no longer welcome. We had betrayed their trust. Their affection for us was overshadowed by the needs of the addiction eating them up.
My mother died in 1987 and my father's condition deteriorated. He was diagnosed with emphysema, but kept smoking. His hospitalizations became more frequent and more varied. Unexplained stomach pains at Coney Island Hospital, a bleeding nose they could not stop at the Veteran's Administration Hospital, a perforated ulcer. I became familiar with the waiting rooms of many different hospitals, and spent many days and nights waiting to see if he would live or die.
At every hospitalization he demanded cigarettes and became furious when I tried to explain that not only were they forbidden (smoking was after all a bad idea in a building full of sick people and liberally dispensed oxygen) but that they were bad for him as well. He wasn't interested in explanations, he wanted a cigarette, and if I was going to visit, I'd damn well better bring some. Several times he attempted to sign himself out before a diagnosis could be made because they would not allow him to smoke while he waited. He was frantic without his cigarettes, and not even the shadow of death could keep him from them. Finally, sick of arguing, I smuggled in a pack. He hid one cigarette, and a disposable lighter, in his eyeglass case. I stayed by his room and watched him hobble down the hallway in his pajamas, his slippers shuffling on the linoleum floor, the precious contraband in his left hand, his right rolling his IV stand alongside, searching for an empty bathroom or closet.
We brought my father to New Jersey to have a hernia repaired and a CAT scan revealed an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, a life threatening bulge in the blood vessel supplying several major organs. The New Jersey doctors said that they could attempt to fix it, but they had only done three or four. If he wanted the best, the man who pioneered the operation, he would have to go to Methodist Hospital in Houston to see Dr. Stanley Crawford. After a day of extensive tests Dr. Crawford, a distinguished man with white hair, came in to the hospital room, pinned a small flower on my father's hospital gown and told him he was going home. The aneurysm was operable, but my father's heart and lungs were too damaged to stand up to the six hour operation. Dr. Crawford told him to go home and enjoy the time he had left. Ironically, my father, who continued to smoke, survived a few more years, including more hospitalizations, and operations for the he
rnia and a perforated ulcer, only to die a month after Dr. Crawford himself. When we cleaned up his house, the letter I had sent him with the obituary lay unopened on his kitchen table. Although he told me he had finally quit smoking, there were still cigarettes and lighters on the table.
Do smokers always regret too late? Comedians Bill Hicks and Denis Leary exulted in their smoking. “Non-smokers die every day,” Hicks joked. Actors Yul Brynner and William Talman (the perennially losing District Attorney Hamilton Burger on “Perry Mason”) both made public service announcements shortly before their deaths
