Thank You for Smoking

by Christopher Buckley

  "Well why do you take down every word these, these drooling maniacs with high-powered rifles tell you, and you don't bother to take down what a reporter says? And why are you so surly today? What's the deal here, anyway?"

  "Do you want me to get you Sven Gland on the phone, or what?"

  "Yes, please," he said through gritted teeth. "And coffee," though he didn't want any; that was just for punishment.

  "It's five-thirty, what do you want coffee for? You won't be able to sleep." She walked out. What a smart decision that had been, to go to bed with Gazelle that night after they'd been working late and they went out afterward to Bert's for a few pops. One thing had led to another — it always does — and before he knew it he was booking a room at the Madison Hotel from a smartass night clerk. No, no reservation. No, no luggage. Yes, for two people. No, not two single beds. Riding up in the elevator with the porter, who insisted on showing him how the minibar worked, the heat, the A/C, the TV, Christ, he was about to explain about the dry cleaning procedures when Nick shoved him out the door with a ten-dollar bill. Then the next day they had to go through the whole office awkwardness. Good morning, Miss Tully. Good morning, Mr. Naylor. Coffee? Yes, please, Miss Tully. Then the first time she got something wrong and he said something to her, boom, kettledrums, the evil eye, and a lecture about sexual attitude. And every time they'd worked late since and he'd said what about a few pops at Bert's it was, No, it's late, and I've got to pick up Jerome at my sister's, leaving Nick in the role of Caucasian sexual paranoid, to wonder if he had somehow… failed in what he seemed, anyway, to recall of that sweaty evening as a perfectly honorable performance. Series of performances. It was true what they said about black women, every word — they were insatiable. No wonder black men fled their homes in droves. They needed sleep.

  Nick turned his attention to the boards. They were compelling, brilliant, arresting. He was right to have fired the Academy's dull ad agency and gone to Buda/Munganaro/Gland, the hot-hot new, small-is-beautiful agency in Minneapolis that had taken a second-rate Swedish vodka with an aftertaste of herring scales and turned it into the number-one selling liquor in the country. He sighed.

  "Sven," he said into the speakerphone, "it's dazzling. I'm totally blown away."

  "I know," Sven said. "So are we."

  "That's the problem. It's a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is we've got to make it a turkey. It's going to have to gobble, or my people aren't going to go for it. The good news is, they're willing to spend five million dollars on this campaign." Between fees and commissions, BMG stood to make northward of $750,000.

  "Sven? You there?"

  "You want it to gobble"?"

  "Yes. It must gobble."

  "That's not really what we do, Nick."

  "No, you convince millions of people to think they're hip because they drink vodka that tastes like any other vodka, only worse. I heard no one in Sweden in his right mind drinks that stuff. It tastes like fish. They must be rolling in the snow in Stockholm, laughing. So you want to tell me that for massive amounts of money you can't produce a dull anti-smoking campaign aimed at underage kids."

  Pause. "We could do that."

  "Then what's the problem?"

  "No problem."

  Nick said he would need something to show the grown-ups by Friday because they were already getting heat from the Advertising Council, which was getting heat from the gasper groups, who sniffed a large, hairy rat.

  He called Sammy Najeeb. The secretary of Health and Human Services was calling for Nick's resignation. "I'm always the last to know," Nick said. Larry wanted him on the show tomorrow. As soon as Nick hung up, Jeannette stuck her head in his office to tell him that Secretary Furioso of Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid (above) was calling for his resignation, and Nick was able to say that he'd just heard this from Larry King's executive producer. When you're hot, you're hot.

  BR called him five minutes later. Talk about an attitude implant. His whole tone had changed. He'd heard about the Larry King invite.

  A definite score, nice going. Now this Furioso thing, how should they play it? Tobacco Fighting Back, that was good, that was fine. Nick was definitely earning his two-oh-oh. But she's a cabinet secretary and we don't want you too out-front. Right?

  Right. They agreed. Nick would be unyielding on the points, but respectful. He'd push the theme of we're-on-the-same-side-here, to the extent that was possible. Furioso was a tough old buzzardess. BR paid him a compliment. Amazing. He said, "You better put your five-million-dollar baby on display. May turn out to be the best money we ever spent." We! Team Tobacco!

  The planets were in harmonious alignment. Polly was having a good day, a really good day. In fact, it was possible that she might never ever have such a day again. For several years now, the Neo-Prohibitionists within the federal government had been using a phrase that drove the liquor, beer, and wine lobbies crazy: "alcohol and other drugs." The Moderation Council had spent millions in trying to get Uncle Sam's roundheads to stop using it in all their communications. To no avail. And now the pope had publicly said that wine should not be considered a drug. True, he was talking about sacramental wine, and wine used in moderation, at the family dinner table, preferably while working up to a little connubial and reproductive sex. Nonetheless, Polly was running with His Holiness's pontification in a big way, issuing a blizzard of paper. Her wine people were beside themselves. Her beer people were passing peach pits. The head of Gutmeister-Melch had spent thirty minutes reaming her out for not having "gotten him" to say the same thing about beer.

  "I told him it wasn't us who did it. It was the Italian producers. They saw the plummeting U.S. consumption figures and worked it through one of the cardinals."

  "It's hard to see what the pope could say good about beer," Bobby Jay said. "It's not like the Good Lord changed water into beer at Cana. And they weren't hardly drinking beer in the upper room at the Last Supper."

  "Then my distilled spirits people called to bitch."

  "What do they expect," Nick said, "that he's going to come out for scotch?"

  "No, they just — it's a zero-sum game. We're in declining volumetrics, and they're all totally paranoid. They see anything good happen to wine or beer and they think, Less for us. I spend over half my time keeping them from killing each other, when they should be protecting each other's backs."

  "Well, cheers anyway," Nick said, raising his glass. "Nicely done, even if you didn't have anything to do with it. Say, do either of you guys know a Heather Holloway, works for the Moon? She wants to do a piece on me."

  "Heather Holloway? Oh yeah," Bobby Jay said. "Irish type, reddish hair, big green eyes, great skin. Amazing tits."

  "Tits?" Polly said. "Why are her tits relevant?"

  "Humh," Bobby Jay said through his food. "World-class honkers on a reporter interviewing a male of the species are relevant, believe you me."

  "I thought Jesus freaks didn't talk locker-room."

  "I am not a 'Jesus freak.' I do not accost strangers on street corners. I do not play the guitar. I am a born-again Christian. And I shoot," Bobby Jay said, "to kill."

  "You're going to end up just like that guy in Waco. Praising the Lord, passing the ammo, and shooting ATF agents. I get very nervous around guns and religion."

  Nick said, "Is there anything else you can tell me about her, aside from what size bra she wears?"

  Bobby Jay said that Heather Holloway had come to one of SAFETY's press conferences, in which Mr. Drum called for building more jails. It was part of SAFETY's offensive strategy: instead of sitting still and being a punching bag for liberals who didn't want criminals to have guns, they went after liberals for releasing people who had shot people in the first place. Heather had charmed the socks off Drum, and had written a more or less antigun-control piece — the Moon being a conservative paper — but she had taken issue with Drum for insisting that a prior history of mental illness ought not to disqualify a person from buying a handgun. So Drum suspe
cted her of liberal tendencies.

  "What's the focus of her piece?" Polly asked. "Tobacco fighting back?"

  "She says it's for a series on the New Puritanism. Maybe the Moon's looking for some tobacco advertising."

  "You be careful," Bobby Jay said. "Just pretend it's some ugly old harelip interviewing you."

  "Bobby, I think I can handle a good-looking girl reporter."

  "Seen it happen again and again. They come in, bat their pretty eyes at you, cross their legs a few times, and before you know, it's 'I shouldn't really be telling you this' and 'Would you like to see our confidential files?' Beware of Jezebels with tape recorders."

  "Bobby Jay, you've got to lay off the breakfast prayer groups. You're getting kind of weird."

  "All I'm saying is that most men, confronted with a babe reporter, talk too much."

  "Well thanks for the advice."

  "Hundred bucks says you end up spilling the company beans all over the floor so bad you need a Wet-Vac to clean up. You in for a piece of the action, Ms. Steinem?"

  "I think Nick can manage."

  "A hundred each says he commits at least one major indiscretion."

  "You're on," Nick said.

  "Done," Polly said. "Damnit," she said, "I've got a two-thirty meeting. Prime Time Live is doing a segment on fetal alcohol syndrome next Thursday."

  "Um," Nick said, sipping coffee, "that's a tough one."

  "We're going to get creamed."

  "I saw this piece on CNN about a woman who drank a gallon of vodka every day in her third trimester. Oddly, her child has problems."

  "Got any ideas for me?"

  Nick thought. "I don't know. Deformed kids are tough. I'm lucky. My product only makes them bald before it kills them."

  "That's a big help."

  "Challenge their data. Demand to see the mothers' medical histories. Her mother's m.h., her mother's mother's m.h. Say, 'Look, where's the science here? This is just anecdotal.' "

  "Maybe you could hug the kids," Bobby Jay said, "like Mrs. Bush and the AIDS baby."

  "They're not going to let me hug the kids, for Christsake, Bobby."

  "Who's doing the segment? Donaldson or Sawyer?"

  "Sawyer, I think. They're being cagey about it, but the producer we're dealing with is one of hers, so I'm pretty sure."

  "That is tough."

  "Why?"

  '"Cause she's going to hug them. Look, if it looks like, if you see her reaching to hug one, try to get in a hug first."

  "God, I'm really not looking forward to this."

  "Set up a fund," Bobby Jay suggested. "The Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Foundation. F-A-S-F. Fasfuff."

  "Bight, I can just see Arnie Melch's face, or Peck Gibson's or Gino Grenachi's faces, when I tell him I want money for the kids of drunken mothers. And we're going to have the words 'Fetal' and 'Alcohol' in the name. That's a brilliant goddamn idea. But excuse me. I forget I was talking to the master spin doctor of the Carburetor City Church Choir Massacre."

  "Why not? It would show compassion, generosity of heart."

  "Do you set up funds for people who get shot?" Polly said testily. "No, because you'd go broke."

  "Guns don't kill people, Polly."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "No, he's right," Nick said. "Bullets kill people."

  "I've got to go," Polly sighed heavily. "Jesus, this is going to be just awful."

  Nick walked with her part of the way back to the Moderation Council. It was a beautiful Washington spring day — the hideous Washington summers are Nature's revenge for the loveliness of Washington's springs — and the magnolia tree on the corner of Rhode Island and Seventeenth was blooming. Nick noticed that Polly was wearing white stockings with a bit of silver sparkle in them that gave her long legs a shimmer of frost as they disappeared up into her pleated blue skirt. He found himself looking down at her legs. All that talk about Heather Holloway's tits, Gazelle at the Madison Hotel, the spring weather, it had Nick thinking. The white stockings, boy they were nice, reminded him of the night ten, no, twelve years ago, after he'd first come to Washington, in the summer, and he and Amanda had put away two bottles of crisp, cold Sancerre between them and strolled on down to the Lincoln Memorial. It was one of those steamy Washington July evenings. She was wearing this cotton, floral print dress that with all the humidity clung to her and, well, he couldn't say about Heather Holloway, but Amanda's body had no apologies to make, the way, um, and she was wearing white stockings, thigh-highs, the kind that didn't need garters, but allowed easy access to the dreamy area above, and um, yes, well, Nick had a definite thing about white thigh-highs. They went around to the back of the Lincoln, where it looks out onto Arlington Cemetery, and Amanda was leaning up against one of the massive granite columns, giggling about how the ridges were digging into her back. Nick was down on his knees, which wasn't so comfortable on the marble but he wasn't thinking about his knees, and lifting the floral print dress slowly, slowly, planting kisses until the cool thighs appeared, then a triangle of white— white again! — silk panties and.

  "Do you want to have a drink tonight later, after the King show?" Nick asked.

  Polly looked at him. "A drink?"

  "The studio's down on Mass and whatever, Third or something. We could go to Il Peccatore." Senator Finisterre, nephew of the slain president, had recently made it famous when a waitress walked into the private back room with the food and found the senator filibustering a young female aide on the table. The incident made print and ever since the tour buses had been stopping there next to the sidewalk in front, where Il Peccatore's outside tables were set up and the tour guides would say over the loudspeakers, "That's where the incident involving Senator Finisterre took place," and people from Indiana would take their pictures while Il Peccatore's sidewalk patrons tried to eat their arugula and calamari without feeling that they were background in some live sex act show.

  "I.."

  "Aw, come on."

  "I better not."

  "Why?"

  "I've got a Designated Driver Committee dinner."

  "After the dinner, then. How late can a Designated Driver Committee dinner go?"

  For a second there it looked like she was going to say yes, yes I will, yes. Then she said, "I really can't. Maybe some other time."

  8

  Sammy Najeeb, Larry King's producer and a force of nature, six-foot-something, big, hearty, came to fetch him in the reception area and take him to makeup. "I used to smoke like a chimney," she said.

  "It's never too late to take it back up again. By the way, who's on the second segment?"

  "You don't want to know," Sammy said.

  Nick stopped. "Not the cancer kid?"

  "No. This isn't Oprah. But you're in the right ballpark."

  "Who?"

  "Trust me, you won't have to be in the same room at the same time, I promise. It's all fixed. I gave instructions." "Who?"

  "It's Lorne Lutch."

  "I'm on with the Tumbleweed Man? Are you nuts?"

  "You're not on with anyone. It's two completely different segments. Look, it's not a setup, Larry wanted you on, then Atlanta said he had to put someone else from the other side on after, for balance."

  "Balance," Nick muttered.

  "It's gonna be fine. Larry loved what you did on Oprah. He's a fan.

  He used to smoke three packs a day."

  "Hi there," said the makeup lady.

  Fuming, Nick took his seat. "I take Innocent Bisque?"

  "I'm out of Innocent," she said. "But Indigo is close."

  "All right. And Tawny Blush highlight."

  Jesus, the Tumbleweed Man. For over twenty years the very symbol of America's smoking manhood in the saddle, his rugged, granite face on the back cover of every magazine, on billboards, on TV, in those happy bygone days. Now he was breathing through a hole in his throat and with every breath he had left — which was not many, thank God, according to Gomez O'Neal, the head of the Academy's intelligence unit — paving hi
s way to the Pearly Gate by warning everyone about the evils of smoking. Ironically, it was Nick who had talked Total Tobacco Company management out of suing him for breach of faith, on the grounds that it would do no good to the industry's image to sue a dying man with three kids and twelve grandchildren, especially since his croaky pleas to the nation's youth had made him a media darling (at least with the broadcast media since they couldn't accept cigarette ads anyway). Maybe, thought Nick, he could trot out this pathetic little detail in his defense tonight.

  Sammy was hovering, as if she didn't trust him not to flee down the fire stairs with his makeup bib still on.

  Larry King was very welcoming. "Good to see you. Thanks for coming."

  "Pleasure," Nick said tightly. His trapezius muscles were hyper-contracting. He was going to need a session with Dr. Wheat soon. He could use a session with Dr. Wheat right now.

  "I used to smoke three packs a day," Larry said. "And you know something, I still miss it. We're gonna have a good show tonight. Lot of calls. Very emotional issue."

  "I understand Lorne Lutch is on the second segment," Nick said.

  Larry shrugged. "What can you do? I'll tell you something, though."

  "What's that?"

  "He's a nice guy."

  "Yes, that's what we hear."

  "By the way, you know what that hole is called? The one in the throat. Stoma. Must be Greek, right?"

  "Undoubtedly." Nick screwed in his earpiece.

  "Good evening everyone. My first guest tonight is Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for the tobacco lobby here in Washington, D.C. Good evening, Nick."

  "Good evening, Larry."

  "A couple of days ago you were on the Oprah show and stirred up quite a fuss, right?"

  "Apparently, Larry."

  "And now the secretary of Health and Human Services and the surgeon general are calling for you to be fired, I understand. Kind of rare, isn't it?"

  "Well, those two aren't exactly unbiased when it comes to tobacco. Actually, I would have thought that they would have been pleased by our announcement that our industry is prepared to spend five million dollars on a very high-level campaign to keep underage kids from smoking. But I guess politics got in the way. Too bad."