Thank You for Smoking

by Christopher Buckley

  Polly smoked — chain-smoked, in fact — which gave her voice a nice husky rasp, so that her flawless equivocations on the subject of blood alcohol content, phenolics, and excise taxes sounded downright sexy, as if she were sharing them with you in bed, with the sheets rumpled, jazz on the stereo, the candle flickering, smoke curling toward the ceiling. She was a stylish dresser too — unusual in Washington, where stylishness in women is suspect — favoring Donna Karan black and white suits, especially the ones with the oversized collars that manage to impart a touch of the schoolgirl while also announcing that it would be very foolish to take this woman lightly. All in all, an effective voice in Washington for ethanol.

  The liquor industry had been using women to sell its stuff since time began, rubbing them up against phallic bottles, displaying their gams while they cooed about how the new boyfriend drank their brand of scotch; why, Nick wondered, had it only recently occurred to them to use a good-looking lady while pitching public policy? Weren't congressmen and senators who decided on health warning labels and excise taxes as susceptible as anyone else to sex? Indeed, Nick himself was now in the midst of justifying his own traditional white-male self to his own boss, who seemed increasingly eager to replace him with the telegenic Jeannette.

  Polly had come from southern California and gone to Georgetown University with thoughts of entering the foreign service, flunked the foreign service exam, gone to work on Capitol Hill, where she spent a good deal of time running from congressmen who had more than cloture on their minds.

  She ended up as assistant staff director for the House Agricultural Committee, her member being the ranking majority member. He was from northern California, whose vineyards at the time were being virtually wiped out by the phylloxera parasite; it was Polly who brilliantly maneuvered an alliance of convenience between her member and the member from the citrus region, screwing the members from the avocado and artichoke regions out of their subsidies in the process, but all's fair in love and appropriations. Her member rewarded her hard work and diligence by passing her over and appointing someone else staff director, so when the genuinely grateful head of Wines at the Moderation Council called to congratulate her on her brilliant victory and mention in passing how he wished he had someone like her on his staff, she leapt.

  While still in her twenties, Polly had married a fellow Hill rat named Hector, a smart, attractive, and ambitious young man who seemed destined for some kind of big role eventually in someone's presidential administration; but after attending a lecture by Paul Ehrlich, the overpopulation guru, he became a devotee to the cause, and quit his job on the Hill and went to work for a non-profit organization that distributed birth control — condoms, mainly: three hundred million a year — free throughout the Third World. He spent four-fifths of his time in the Third World. The remaining fifth he spent back home in Washington looking for cures for various exotic tropical and infectious diseases, some of which made it unpleasant to be around him. Hector was passionate about overpopulation, Nick gathered from Polly's accounts, to the point where it was pretty much all he talked about.

  Returning from a long trip to West Africa, however, he announced to Polly, in rather an unromantic, businesslike way, that he wanted to start having children, lots of them, and right away. This took Polly by surprise. Whether it was guilt over all those billions and billions of thwarted Third World sperm, or simply the desire to populate his own little corner of the world, Polly could not say; at this point all she did know was that she had, in a moment of weakness brought on by being chased around desks by too many congressmen, married a total loser.

  Hector, meanwhile, became more and more adamant. By this time his skin had turned greenish from some suspect malaria pills dispensed by the local apothecary in Brazzaville. This, combined with his monomaniacal procreative fervor, had a calamitous effect on Polly's libido. He presented her with an ultimatum, and when she refused, he announced that it was all over and he was taking his fertility stick elsewhere. The divorce would become final in the fall. He was now living in Lagos, Nigeria, organizing a massive airdrop of condoms on the crowds expected to attend the pope's mass on his upcoming visit.

  Discreet as the Mod Squad was, from time to time they invited other spokespeople to lunch to promote camaraderie among the despised. Their guests had come from such groups as the Society for the Humane Treatment of Calves, representing the veal industry, the Friends of Dolphins, formerly the Pacific Tuna Fishermen's Association, the American Highway Safety Association, representing the triple-trailer truckers, the Land Enrichment Foundation, formerly the Coalition for the Responsible Disposal of Radioactive Waste; others. Sometimes they had foreign guests. The chief spokesman for the Brazilian Cattlemen's Association had come by recently to share with them his views on rainforest management, and had entertained them with his imitation of a flock of cockatiels fleeing from bulldozers.

  Their regular table was in the smoking section of Bert's, next to a fireplace with a fake electric fire that gave off a cozy, if ersatz, glow. Nick ordered his usual Cobb salad, which at Bert's came with about a quart of gloppy blue cheese dressing on top of enough bacon and chopped egg to clog an artery the size of the Holland Tunnel, and iced black coffee to wash it down and zap the thalamus for an afternoon of jousting with the media.

  Bobby Jay ordered his usual: batter-fried shrimp with tasso mayonnaise. Polly, after briefly contemplating calamari, went for a trimming tossed green salad, French dressing on the side, and a glass of the house chenin blanc, crisp with a nice finish and not overpriced at $3.75 a glass.

  Polly noticed that Nick was staring morosely into his iced coffee.

  "So," she said, "how're we doing?" This was the traditional Mod Squad gambit. The answer was always awful, for it was unlikely that medical science had discovered that smoking prolonged life, or that the handgun murder rate had declined, or that somewhere out there some promising young life had been saved, instead of tragically snuffed out by a teenager with a blood alcohol content of.24 percent.

  "How did your Lungs thing go?" Polly said, dragging deeply on a long low-tar cigarette. Nick had told her not to bother with the low-tars, since research showed you only smoked more of them to get the same amount of nicotine, a point nowhere to be found in the voluminous literature of the Academy of Tobacco Studies.

  "Oh," Nick said, "it was all right. She called for a total advertising ban. Big surprise."

  "I caught a bit of you on C-SPAN. Liked the Murad bit."

  "Uh-huh."

  "You all right?"

  Nick explained about his meeting with BR and how he had until six-thirty A.M. on Monday to come up with a plan that would reverse forty years of antismoking trends. Polly cut directly to the heart of the matter. "He wants to put Jeannette in. That's what this is about." She promised to try to think of something by Monday.

  She changed the subject back to the surgeon general. "You know she's going after us next. Never met an excise tax she didn't love. It has nothing to do with financing national health. She just doesn't want anyone to drink. Period. I've got my beer wholesalers coming into town for their annual convention next week and they're ready to kill. They're threatening to drive all their trucks onto the Mall."

  "That would be an interesting visual," Nick said, rallying slightly from his depression. "The Washington Monument, surrounded by Budweiser trucks."

  "They're pissed off. Sixty-four cents on a six-pack? They're trying to erase the deficit on the backs of the beer industry, and they don't think that's exactly fair." The Mod Squad in ways resembled the gatherings of Hollywood comedy writers who met over coffee to bounce new jokes off one another. Only here it was sound bites de-emphasizing the lethality of their products.

  Until now Bobby Jay had not joined in on the conversation, as his cellular telephone was pressed to his ear. He was in the midst of a "developing news story," which for people in their business tended to be a bad news story. Another "disgruntled postal worker," those Bad News Bears of the gun ind
ustry, had been up to the usual shenanigans again. This one had gone as usual to Sunday church in Carburetor City, Texas, and halfway through a sermon on the theme of "The Almighty's Far-Reaching Tentacles of Love" had stood up and blasted the minister clear out of the pulpit, and then trained withering fire on the choir. Here he had departed from the usual text, for he did not then, as the newspapers put it, "turn the gun on himself." He was disgruntled, but not so disgruntled as to part with his own life. He was now the object of the most massive manhunt in Texas history. Bobby Jay told them that SAFETY was logging over two thousand calls a day.

  "Pro or con?" Nick said. Bobby Jay did not rise to the bait.

  "Do you know how many 'disgruntled postal workers' have pulled this sort of stunt in the last twenty years?" Bobby Jay said through a large forkful of shrimp. "Seven. Do you know what I want to know? I want to know what are they so disgruntled about? We're the ones whose mail never comes."

  "Assault rifle?" Polly asked professionally.

  Bobby Jay ripped off a shrimp tail with his front teeth. "Under the circumstances I'm tempted to say, probably, yeah. 'Course, nine times out of ten what they call an 'assault rifle' isn't. But try explaining that to our friends" — he hooked a greasy thumb in the direction of the Washington Sun building—"over there. To them, my ten-year-old's BB gun is an 'assault rifle.' " He held up his fork. "To them, this could be an 'assault' weapon. What are we going to do, start outlawing forks?"

  "Forks?" Nick said.

  "Forks Don't Kill People, People Kill People," Polly said. "I don't know. Needs work."

  "It was a Commando Mark forty-five. You could, technically, consider it a semiautomatic assault rifle."

  "With a name like that, yeah," Polly said. "Maybe you should ask the manufacturers to give them less awful names? Like, 'Gentle Persuader,' or 'Housewife's Companion'?"

  "What I don't get is, the son of a gun was using hollow-point Hydra-Shok loads."

  "Ouch," Nick said.

  "That's a military load. They use those on, on terrorists. They blow up inside you." Bobby demonstrated with his hand the action of a Hydra-Shok bullet inside the human body.

  "Please," Polly said.

  "What was he expecting?" asked Bobby Jay rhetorically. "That the minister and the choir were wearing Kevlar bulletproof vests underneath their robes? What gets into people?"

  "Good question," Nick said.

  "So, what are you doing?" Polly asked.

  "And why is it every time some… nutcase postal worker shoots up a church, they come rope in hand, to hang us? Did we give him the piece and tell him, 'Go forth, massacre a whole congregation'? Redekamp" — a reporter for the Sun—"calls me up and I can hear him gloating. He loves massacres. Thrives on massacres, Godless swine. I said to him, 'When a plane crashes on account of pilot error do you blame the Boeing Corporation?' "

  "That's good," Nick said.

  "When some booze-besotten drunk goes and runs someone down, do you go banging on the door of General Motors and shout, 'J'accuse!' "

  "You didn't tell him that?" Polly winced.

  "Okay," Nick said, "but how are you handling the situation?"

  Bobby Jay wiped a gob of tasso mayonnaise from his lips. A glint came into his eye. "The Lord is handling it."

  Nick knew Bobby Jay to be an upright, car-prayer-pooling citizen, who occasionally salted his language with biblical phrases like so-and-so had "sold himself for a mess of porridge, like Esau's brother," but he was not a nut. You could have a normal, secular conversation with him. But this suggestion that the Lord himself was engaged in spin control made Nick wonder if Bobby Jay was crossing the line over into the Casualties column. He stared. "What?"

  Bobby Jay looked over his shoulder and leaned in toward them. He said, "It had to be. Opportunities like this can only come from above. And they happen only to the righteous."

  "Bobby Jay," Polly said, looking alarmed, "are you all right?"

  "Listen, O ye of little faith, then tell me if you don't think the Lord was looking out for old Bobby Jay. I'm in the car driving to work—"

  "With Commuters for Christ?"

  "No, Polly, and I don't see the humor in that. It was just me. I'm listening to Gordon Liddy's call-in show—"

  "Figures," Polly said.

  "Gordon happens to be a friend of mine. Anyway, he's yakkety-yak-yakking about the shooting, his lines are lit up, and suddenly he says, 'Carburetor City, you're on the air,' and there's this woman's voice saying, 'I was in that church and I want to tell that last person you had on that he is just wrong.' I practically drove right off the road. She was saying, 'I own a pistol, but because the law in Texas says you cannot carry it on your person, you can only keep it in your car, I left it in the glove compartment. And if I had had that handgun with me there inside the church, that choir would still be singing 'Walk with Me, Jesus.' "

  Nick felt a pang of jealousy. No one had ever called while he was being flayed alive on a radio talk show to say, If I hadn't smoked five packs of cigarettes every day for forty years, I'd be dead by now.

  Bobby Jay, eyes bulging, went on. "Gordon was in seventh heaven. He kept her on the line for must have been fifteen minutes. She went on and on about how what a tragedy it was she didn't have her little S & W.38 airweight with her in that pew, how the whole misery could have been avoided. She was this far away from him! She couldn't have missed him! A clean head shot." Bobby held out his arm in combat shooting stance and aimed at a person at the next table. "Bam!"

  "You're scaring the other patrons."

  "So what did you do?" Nick asked.

  "What did I do?" Bobby Jay bubbled. "What did I do? I'll tell you what I did. I put the pedal to the metal and went straight to National Airport and got on the next plane to Carburetor City. There is no 'next plane to Carburetor City.' You got to go through Dallas. But I was in that little lady's living room before six o'clock that afternoon."

  " 'Little lady's'?" Polly said. "You're such a trog."

  "Five-foot-four," Bobby Jay shot back. "In heels. And every inch a lady. A simple descriptive sentence, so may I continue, Ms. Sty-nem? I had our camera crew there by noon the next day. It is as we speak being edited into the sweetest little old video you ever saw." He spread his hands apart like a director framing the scene. "We open with. 'Carburetor City, Texas. A mentally unbalanced federal bureaucrat—' "

  "Nice," Nick said.

  "Gets better: '… attacks a church minister and choir.' Footage of ambulances, people on stretchers, people gnashing their teeth and rending their hair—"

  "How," Polly said, "do people rend their hair?"

  "Everywhere a scene of carnage," Bobby Jay continued, "a scene of devastation. Red chaos!"

  "Red chaos?" Polly said.

  "Shut up, Polly," Nick said.

  "Voice-over. And guess whose?" Bobby Jay asked coyly. "Charlton Heston?"

  "No sir," Bobby said, all tickly and beaming. "Guess again."

  "David Duke," Polly said.

  "Jack Taggardy," Bobby Jay said triumphantly.

  "Nice," Nick said.

  "Didn't he have his hips replaced? I read that in People."

  "What do his hips have to do with anything?" Bobby Jay said.

  "Is he in a walker, or what?"

  "No he's not in a any damn walker!"

  "Go on," Nick said.

  Bobby reframed the scene. "So Taggardy's voice-over: 'Could this awful human tragedy have been avoided?' "

  "Question," Nick said. "Why 'human'?"

  "Why not 'human'? They're humans."

  "I would have thought, 'inhuman tragedy'?"

  "He's got a point," Polly said.

  "Look, we can edit. Do you want to hear this?"

  "Yes," Nick said, "very much."

  "Now we cut to my little lady. She's sitting in a chair, all prim and pretty. Darling girl. I had her hairdresser come over. She wanted to do her makeup but I wouldn't hear of it. I wanted her eyes red from crying. We dabbed a little onion under the
eyelids, nothing wrong with that, just to get her in the mood, get those ducts opened up."

  "Onion?"

  "Didn't even need it. Soon as she saw those color police photos I was holding up for her off camera she started bawlin' like a baby. She's going on about how awful it was, and then she gets to the part about how she had to leave her pistol in the glove compartment. Then she looks right into the camera, right in your face, and dabs the corner of her eye — and that was not in the script — and says, 'Why won't our elected lawmakers just let us protect ourselves? Is that too much to ask?' Fade to black. Then Taggardy's voice comes back on and there's no mistaking that voice, like bourbon over sandpaper: 'The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Does your elected lawmaker support the Bill of Rights? Or are they selling you a Bill of Goods?' " Bobby Jay leaned back in his chair. "What do you think?"

  "Transcendent," Nick said. "A deft manipulation of post-traumatic stress."

  Bobby Jay grinned. "Sweeter than honeysuckle in moonlight."

  "Congratulations," Polly said. "Really masterful."

  "By this afternoon, every member of the Texas congressional delegation and the state legislature will have a copy. By tomorrow, every sinner in the Congress will have one. We may even air it nationally. Mr. Drum hasn't signed off on that yet, but I am most strongly recommending that we do."