Thank You for Smoking

by Christopher Buckley

  Bobby Jay's boss was one of the few in Washington who insisted on the mister. It was part of his aura, and he did cast a large aura. When he had taken over the leadership of the troubled SAFETY years back, there had been only fifty million guns circulating in America. There were now over 200 million. He was a physically imposing man with a trademark bald head. Redekamp of the Sun had dug up the fact that at the age of sixteen he had shot to death a seventeen-year-old in a dispute over the ownership of a box turtle. The conviction was later overturned on the grounds that the box turtle, having subsequently died, probably of stress, had never been introduced as evidence. Ever since, the anti-SAFETY Washington press, comprising all of the press except for the conservative Washington Moon, included a reference to this unfortunate incident in every mention of him.

  Coffee arrived. Nick asked Polly, "What's happening at Moderation?"

  "We actually got some great news yesterday." This was a stunner. Nick could not recall such words ever having been spoken over one of their lunches. "The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that sobriety roadblocks were unconstitutional," she said.

  "Party down," Nick said.

  "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are constitutional, so for now they're constitutional everywhere except Michigan." Bobby Jay said, "Don't you see?"

  "See what?" Nick asked.

  "The pattern. First they disarm us, then they start throwing up roadblocks. It's all happening on schedule."

  "Whose schedule?"

  "Do you know how to beat a Breathalyzer?" Bobby Jay said. "Activated charcoal tablets."

  "Maybe we could use that in our new Designated Driver campaign," Polly said. " 'If You Must Drive Drunk, Please, Suck Charcoal.' "

  "You get them in pet stores. They purify the air that goes through the little pump. I don't know why they bother, all my kids' fish went belly-up within a day. You keep it under your tongue. Breaks down the ethanol molecules."

  "Don't the police wonder how come you've got a charcoal briquet in your mouth?"

  "There's no law against charcoal," Bobby Jay said.

  "Yet," they chimed in unison. It was understood among them that at any given moment, somewhere, someone in the "vast federal bureaucracy" was issuing regulations against them. They were the Cavaliers of Consumption aligned on the field of battle against the Roundheads of Neo-Puritanism.

  Polly said, "My beer wholesalers convention next week. I'm worried."

  "Why?" Nick asked.

  "I'm scheduled to debate with Craighead in front of two thousand of them." Gordon R. Craighead was the chief "unelected bureaucrat" in charge of the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services, "Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid" to those in the alcohol and tobacco industries. Craighead's office dispensed about $300 million a year to anti-smoking and anti— drunk-driving groups. Though it had been calculated that the tobacco industry spends $2.5 billion a year, or $4,000 per second, promoting smoking, Nick nonetheless railed against OSAP's "runaway budgets."

  "Oh, you can handle Craighead."

  "I'm not worried about that. It's my beer wholesalers. These are not subtle people. Most of them started out driving their own trucks. I'm worried that if Craighead starts talking about raising their excise taxes again, or if he gets into the recycling deposit, they'll start throwing things at him. They'll get abusive. That's not going to help anyone."

  "Are you doing Q and A?" Polly said yes, there would be a question and answer after the debate.

  "Make them write down the questions. We did a panel once with Mothers Against Smoking at a vending-machine owners' convention. We took spoken questions. A nightmare. The vendors were wrestling the microphone away from each other, shouting at the mothers, 'You're stealing bread outa my kid's mouth and you call yourself a mother!' I was a little surprised. I always thought the mafia was traditionally more respectful of mothers. Now I can't get Mothers Against Smoking even to return my calls. After that I made it a policy, only written questions. Have you got a slogan for the meeting?"

  " 'We're Part of the Solution,' " she said. "What do you think?"

  Nick considered. "I like it."

  "We had a hard time with it," Polly said. "They wanted something more aggressive. They're very feisty, the wholesalers."

  "I've got a slogan for you," Bobby Jay said. "I saw it on a T-shirt. 'A Day Without a Buzz Is a Day That Never Wuz.' "

  "Our first choice," Polly continued, ignoring him, "was 'In the Spirit of Cooperation,' but they said it sounded too much like 'spirits.' I spend half my time keeping my beer people from killing my spirits people, and my wine people from trying to kill the other two. The whole idea behind the Moderation Council was strength through unity at a time of volumetric decline, but it's like trying to unify Yugoslavia." She sipped her iced cappuccino. "It's tribal."

  Polly lit a cigarette. Nick appreciated a woman who smoked sexily. She leaned back and tucked her left arm under her breasts to support her right elbow, the arm going straight up, cigarette pointing at the ceiling. She took long, deep drags, tilted her head back, and let the smoke out in long, slow, elegant exhalations, with a little lung-clearing shot at the end. A beautiful smoker. Nick's own mother, in her day, had been a beautiful smoker. He remembered her by the pool, summers in the fifties, all long legs and short pants, pointy sunglasses and broad straw hats and lipstick that left bright, sticky smudges on the butts that he filched and coughingly relit behind the garage.

  Nick was rousted from the reverie by the shrill cricketing of Bobby Jay's cellular phone. Bobby Jay flipped it open with practiced cool, like it was a switchblade.

  .

  "Bliss. Yeah?" Bobby said. "Great." He said to Nick and Polly, "The postal worker. They got him. Uh-huh… uh-huh… Missouri… uh-huh… uh-huh… what?" His brow beetled. "Well how the hell does CNN know? It was on him? FBI… what did, you didn't say anything to them, did you? Look, did you check with Membership?" Nick watched Bobby's face sag and thought, This face is in free fall. "Sustaining? Was he paid up? Well, yes, check, right away, before you do anything. No, don't call CNN or the FBI back. I don't care. I'll be there in three minutes."

  Bobby Jay folded up his phone. Nick and Polly stared, awaiting explication.

  "I got to go," Bobby Jay said, tossing a twenty onto the table. It landed like a fall leaf in a little puddle of melting ice.

  "Do we have to find out what happened from CNN?"

  Bobby Jay looked like he was about to break a sweat. "Take deep breaths," Nick suggested.

  "The son of a bitch was a member," Bobby Jay said. "Not just a member, but a sustaining life member."

  "How did CNN find out?"

  "He had his membership card with him. CNN got a shot of it lying with the rest of his wallet. In a pool of blood."

  "Hm," Nick said, no longer jealous about Bobby Jay's incredible good luck. At least with tobacco the casualties were tucked away in hospital wards.

  "I'm on SAFETY!" Polly said, doing a take on the famous SAFETY ads showing macho, if slightly fading, actors standing on skeet ranges, holding expensive, engraved shotguns.

  "Polly," Nick rebuked her. She was so cynical, Polly. Sometimes Nick wanted to spank her. She made a big-deal gesture. Bobby Jay was oblivious, staring at the center of the table. Polly waved a hand back and forth in front of his face and said to Nick, "I think he's going into shock."

  "Oh my Lord," Bobby Jay said quietly, "the video."

  "You probably want to recall it," Nick said, but Bobby Jay was already out the door, on his way, it appeared, to a long afternoon of certain buttlock.

  3

  While you were out a producer for the Oprah Winfrey show had called to ask if Nick would go on the show in Chicago on Monday afternoon. The SG's call for an outright ad ban was getting a lot of play, and Oprah wanted a show on smoking right away. Nick called back immediately to say that, yes, he'd be available. This was face time, major face time. Millions and millions of women — tobacco's most important custom
ers — watched Oprah. He was tempted to pick up the phone and tell BR, but decided to play it cool and conduct a little experiment. He called Jeannette and, in the course of asking her about some routine stuff, slipped it in. "Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do the Oprah show on Monday, so can you get me everything we have on the ineffectiveness of advertising?"

  He set the timer on his watch. Four minutes later BR was on the line wanting to know what the deal with the Oprah show was. Nick laid it on a bit about how he'd been "cultivating" one of the producers for a long time and it had finally paid off.

  "I was thinking maybe we should send Jeannette," BR said.

  Nick ground his jaw muscles. "It's going to be a pretty splashy show. Top people. They made it pretty clear that they want the chief spokesman for the tobacco industry." Not your office squeeze.

  BR said with an edge, "All right," and hung up.

  His mother called to remind him that he and Joey had not been by for Sunday supper in over a month. Nick reminded her that the last time he had, his father had called him a "prostitute" at the table.

  "I think it says how much he respects you that he feels he can speak to you so frankly," she said. "Oh, by the way, Betsy Edgeworth called this morning to say she saw you on C-SPAN talking about some Turkish sultan. She said, 'Nick's so attractive. It's such a shame he didn't stay in journalism. He might have had his own show by now.'"

  "I've got to go," Nick said.

  "I want you to bring Joey for supper on Sunday."

  "Can't. Sunday's bad."

  "How can Sunday be bad, Nick?"

  "I have to cram for the Oprah show on Monday afternoon."

  Pause. "You're doing the Oprah Winfrey show?"

  "Yes."

  "Well. You'd better get her autograph for Sarah. Sarah loves Oprah Winfrey." Sarah was the housekeeper, the reason Nick was incapable of standing up to his own secretary. "Does Oprah smoke?"

  "I doubt it."

  "Maybe you'd better get her autograph before the show. Just in case everyone gets angry, the way they did when you were on with Regis and Kathy Lee."

  He was late. He hurried down to the basement garage and drove aggressively through the Friday afternoon traffic, and pulled up in front of Saint Euthanasius a good half hour late. Joey, in his uniform, was sitting on the curb outside the main building looking miserable. Nick screeched to a stop and bolted out of the car as if he were part of a SWAT team operation. "I'm late!" he shouted, loudly belaboring the obvious. Joey cast him a withering glance.

  "Ah, Mr. Naylor." Uh-oh. Griggs, the headmaster.

  "Reverend," Nick said with what forced delight he could muster. Griggs had never quite forgiven him for putting down under "Father's Occupation" on Joey's school application form, "Vice President of Major Manufacturers' Trade Association." Little had he realized that Nick was a senior vice president of Genocide, Inc., until one night when he caught Nick on Nightline duking it out with the head of the flight attendants' union over the effects of secondhand smoke in airplanes. But by then Joey was safely enrolled at this, the most prestigious boys' school in Washington. Griggs glanced at his watch to indicate that it was not lost on him that Nick was half an hour late.

  "How are you," Nick said, thrusting out his hand. He decided to dispense with mendacious banter about the congestion of Friday afternoon traffic in D.C. "Good to see you," he said mendaciously. He didn't especially enjoy being singled out for silent contempt by the headmaster of a school whose parents included Persian Gulf emirs and members of Congress. For $11,742 a year, the Reverend Josiah Griggs could park his attitude in his narthex.

  "The traffic was awful," Nick said.

  "Yes." Griggs nodded slowly and ponderously, as though Nick had just proposed major changes in the Book of Common Prayer. "Fridays… of course."

  "We're going fishing this weekend," Nick said, changing the subject. "Aren't we, Joe?"

  Joey said nothing.

  "I wonder if you might stop by sometime next week," Griggs said in that assured, headmasterly way. Nick was seized with alarm. He looked over at Joey, who provided no clue as to this summons.

  "Of course," Nick said. "I'm away on business the beginning of the week." It crossed Nick's mind: did Griggs watch Oprah? Surely not.

  "End of the week, then? Friday? You could come by to pick up Joseph a little… early?" A thin smile played over his narrow face.

  .

  "Fine," Nick said.

  "Splendid," Griggs said, brightening. "What are you fishing for?"

  "Catfish."

  "Ah!" Griggs nodded. "Ellie, our housekeeper, loves catfish. Of course, I can't get past their looks. Those fearsome whiskers." He walked off to the deanery with his hands clasped behind his back.

  Safely inside the car, Nick said, "What did you do?"

  "Nothing," Joey said.

  "How come he wants to see me?"

  "I don't know," said Joey. Twelve was not the most communicative age. Conversations consisted of games of Twenty Questions.

  Great, Nick thought, I get to go into a principal conference totally blind.

  "I'm offering total and unconditional amnesty. Whatever you did, it's all right. Just tell me: why does Griggs want to see me?"

  "I said I don't know."

  "Okay." Nick drove. "How'd the game go?"

  "Sucked."

  "Well, you know what Yogi Berra said. 'Ninety percent of baseball is half-mental.' "

  Joey thought about this. "That's forty-five percent."

  "It's a joke." And, having nothing to do with revolting bodily functions, not likely to split the sides of a twelve-year-old. He extracted from Joey the score of the game: 9–1.

  "The important thing is," he ventured consolingly, "is… " What was the important thing? Having himself been brought up in the Vince Lombardi School of Child-Raising, where his father shoutingly questioned his manhood from the stands every time he missed a grounder, Nick had resolved on a more tolerant approach for his own son's education, "… is to feel tired at the end of the day." Aristotle might not have constructed an entire philosophy on it, but it would do. True, Hitler and Stalin had probably felt tired at the end of their days. But theirs would not have been a good tired.

  Joey registered no opinion of this Grand Unified Theory of Being, except to point out that Nick had just driven past Blockbuster Video and would now have to try a U-turn in busy traffic.

  They went through their usual ritual, Joey proposing one unsuitable video after another, usually ones with covers showing a half-naked blond actress with ice picks, or the various steroid-swollen European bodybuilders-turned-actors in the act of decapitating people with chainsaws. Nick countering with Doris Day and Cary Grant movies from the fifties, Joey sticking his finger down his throat to indicate where he stood on the Grant-Day oeuvre. Nick was generally able to reach a compromise with World War II movies. Violent, yes, but tasteful by modern standards, without the super-slow-mo exit wounds pioneered by Peckinpah. "Here's one we haven't seen," he enthused, "The Sands of Iwo Jima. John Wayne. Cool." Joey showed no great zeal for the exploits of the Duke, John Agar, and Forrest Tucker as they fought their way up Mount Suribachi, but said he'd go along if they could also rent Animal House for the seventeenth time.

  Nick lived in a one-bedroom off Dupont Circle that looked out onto a street where there had been eight muggings so far this year, though only two of them had been fatal. Most of his one-oh-five went to servicing the mortgage on the house a few miles up Connecticut Avenue in the leafy neighborhood of Cleveland Park, where Joey lived with his mother. On alternate weekends, Joey got to go get down and urban with Dad.

  Together they ate a nourishing dinner of triple pepperoni pizza and cookie dough ice cream. Cookie dough ice cream. And society fretted about cigarettes?

  The Sands of Iwo Jima was a little dated, but it was a good, big-hearted movie. And there was this… transfiguring moment where Wayne, having brought his men through hell to victory, exults, "I never felt so good in my life. How abou
t a cigarette?" And just as he's offering the pack around to his men, a Jap sniper drills him, dead. Without realizing it, Nick took out a cigarette and lit up.

  "Da-ad," Joey said.

  Obediently, Nick went outside on the balcony.

  4

  BR did not offer Nick coffee from his pot, despite the fact that it was six-thirty on a Monday morning. He did not bother with "Good morning," only "I really hope you've got something for us, Nick. A lot depends on it."

  "Good morning," Nick said, anyway.

  "I'm listening." BR was signing things, or pretending to sign things.

  "Could I get some coffee?"

  "I'm listening," BR said.

  Better skip the coffee. Nick sat, took a deep breath. "Movies."

  "I don't have time for Socratic dialogue, Nick. Get to the point."

  "That is the point."

  BR looked up slowly. "What?"

  "I think movies are the answer to our problem."

  "How?"

  "Do you want the reasoning behind it? I could put it in a memo."

  "Just tell me."

  "In 1910," Nick said, "the U.S. was producing ten billion cigarettes a year. By 1930, we were producing one hundred twenty-three billion a year. What happened in between? Three things. World War I, dieting, and talking pictures."

  BR was listening.

  "During the war, it was hard for soldiers to carry pipes or cigars on the battlefield, so they were given cigarettes. And they caught on so much that General Pershing sent a cable to Washington in 1917 that said, 'Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.' " Nick left out the detail that it was in 1919, just after the war, that the first cases of an up-to-then nearly unheard of illness called lung cancer began to show up. The chairman of a medical school in St. Louis invited his students to watch him do the autopsy on a former doughboy because, he told them, they'd probably never see another case of it again.