Thank You for Smoking

by Christopher Buckley

  "Because he knows that it was you talked us out of suing his saddle-sore butt when he first started making this fuss. And because of this kidnapping, you been blooded. You've suffered. He's a cowboy, he'll respect that. He's also a snob — I happen to know that personally— and now that you're a big media star, he won't be able to resist. Do it for me, son."

  Nick sighed. "All right, but I honestly—"

  "Good. Now obviously, we don't want to get into a bidding war with him, so we want our first offer to be impressive enough to get his attention. Where are my glasses? That woman stole them, I know it. Here they are. Now I'm looking at Gomez O'Neal's background report… I see he had a little alcohol problem in his background, couple of bar fights, nothing too out of the ordinary, no wife beating. Stopped drinking… joined AA. No one drinks anymore, do they? It's all about health, these days. Health, health, health, jog, jog, jog. Life used to be so much more interesting. Went out to California myself last year on business, and you go to a cocktail party and all anyone's talking about is their cholesterol levels. The last thing I want to know about a man is the ratio of his bad cholesterol to his good cholesterol. Three children. From the looks of this report I don't think they'll be going too far in life. But there's five grandchildren in their teens. Five times twenty-five thousand dollars…" Nick heard him mumbling through some calculations"… times four makes five hundred thousand. Throw in a little more for his troubles. An even million dollars. We'll pay the IRS's share so everything'll be above-board, all nice and clean and legal. We could always write the check on the Coalition for Health. No, I suppose we don't want any reporter getting his hands on a canceled check. Wouldn't they just go to town over that? Let's make it cash. Anyway, there's nothing so dramatic as a great big pile of cold, hard cash. When I was first starting out in the business, in sales, I'd fill a satchel full of five- and ten-dollar bills and drive around to country stores paying off the owners to give us rack space. Those were the days. Yes, let's make it cash, cash on the barrelhead."

  Nick said, "Let me try out a headline on you: dying tumbleweed man rejects tobacco lobby hush money. And that's The Wall Street Journal headline. The tabloid version would probably be something like merchant of death to tumbleweed man: shut up and die!"

  "It's not a bribe," the Captain said with feeling, "not at all. You're going out there on wings of angels, son. This is altruism at its finest."

  "Now, honestly… "

  "Absolutely. A gesture of profound humanitarianism. Here's a man going around calling us merchants of death and how do we respond?"

  "By trying to sue him for breach of contract."

  "That's water under the bridge. We're proposing to put his grandchildren through college so that they won't have to pump gas and night-manage convenience stores like their parents. Plus we're throwing in a half million dollars just to say, 'No hard feelings.' Talk about turning the other cheek. I think Christ himself would say, 'That's mighty white of you, boys.' And he merely admonished us to love our enemies. He never said we had to make the sumbitches rich."

  "You're saying," Nick said, "that we're just… giving him the money?"

  "Well, what have I been saying? Of course that's what I mean."

  "He doesn't have to sign anything?"

  "Not a thing."

  "No gag agreement?"

  "What's your problem, son. Do you not understand the mother tongue? No. Though, obviously, you might tell him that we would appreciate it if he kept our gesture private. A family matter. You might add that if he'd come to us in the first place, instead of to the press, we would have helped him out. Tobacco takes care of its own."

  "Well," Nick said, feeling relieved, "I don't have any problem with that." The Captain, in his hospital bed, contemplating his own mortality, must have decided to make his peace with his enemies.

  "The way I see it," the Captain chuckled, "is the sumbitch'll be so damn overcome with gratitude he'll have to shut up. Or if we get truly lucky, he'll have a heart attack at the sight of all that money."

  Gazelle buzzed him on the intercom to tell him that agents from the FBI were here to see him.

  Agent Allman, the friendly-looking one, shook Nick's hand. Agent Monmaney, looking like he'd just had a lunch of ground glass and nails, merely nodded.

  "Did you get them?" Nick said.

  "Who?" Agent Monmaney said.

  "The kidnappers. Who else?"

  Monmaney stared. What was it with him? Nick turned to Allman, who seemed to be giving Nick's office the once-over. Strange bedside manners, these two.

  "Am I missing something here?" Nick said.

  "The investigation is proceeding," Monmaney said.

  "Well," Nick said, "is there something I can help you with?"

  "Is there?" Monmaney said. Great, more tough-guy Zen.

  Nick said, "Is there something you fellows want to talk about? Or did you just drop by to reassure me?"

  Agent Allman was looking at the poster of the Lucky Strike-endorsing doctor. He chuckled. "Funny."

  "Yes," Nick said. "My job would have been a lot easier back then."

  "My dad smoked Luckies."

  "Is that a fact?" Nick said.

  "Uh-huh," Allman said, in a tone that made Nick suspect that his father had died a ghastly, protracted death from lung cancer. Swell, just what he needed on his side, an anti-smoking zealot.

  "Is he," Nick groped, "was he… in law enforcement?"

  "No, he owned a garage. He's retired, in Florida."

  Nick felt great relief that Papa Allman was still among the living. Allman said, "The sun'll probably get him before the cigarettes."

  "Hah," Nick said.

  "Does anyone else use your office phone?" Agent Monmaney said. "My phone? Uh, sure, possibly."

  " 'Sure, possibly'?"

  "Maybe. Why?"

  "No reason."

  Nick and Monmaney stared at each other. Allman said, "Have you ever used nicotine patches before, yourself?"

  "Me?" Nick said. He was getting a very uncomfortable feeling from this line of questioning. "I used to enjoy smoking. I wish I still could."

  "You certainly picked an extreme way to give up," Allman said, holding up Nick's World War I trench-knife paperweight. "This is mean."

  "Excuse me?" Nick said. "You said, 'Picked'?"

  "I said that?"

  "Yes," Nick said firmly, "you did."

  "Did I?" Allman said to Monmaney. "I didn't hear," Monmaney said.

  Nick sucked in his chest. "Why," he said, "do I get the feeling this is an interrogation?"

  "I just saw an article in one of the scientific journals on skin cancer," Agent Allman said. "Pretty scary. You've really got to watch it these days."

  "Yes," Nick said with asperity, "you certainly do."

  "Mr. Naylor," said Agent Monmaney, "you're getting a lot of favorable publicity as a result of this incident."

  "Well, it's not every day a lobbyist is abducted, tortured, and nearly killed," Nick said, "though a lot of people probably think it should happen more often."

  "That wasn't my point."

  "What was your point, exactly?"

  "You're portraying yourself as a martyr. A hero."

  "Agent Monmaney," Nick said, "do you have a problem with cigarettes?"

  The faintest trace of a smile played on Monmaney's lupine features, not a nourishing smile. "Not since I quit."

  "I'd say this," Nick said. "For the first time since I took this job, I'm getting fair publicity. Now at least they wait until the fourth paragraph in the story to compare me to Goebbels."

  "Funny," Agent Allman said. Agent Monmaney did not share in the amusement.

  The three held a staring bee. Nick was determined not to break the silence.

  "You received a raise recently," Agent Monmaney said. "Uh-huh," Nick said.

  "A very considerable one. They doubled your salary."

  "More or less," Nick said.

  "I'd say," said Agent Allman, rising up off the sofa
beneath the Luckies doctor, "that you deserve it. You seem to be doing a very competent job promoting cigarettes."

  "Thank you," Nick said tardy.

  "We'll be in touch," Agent Allman said.

  15

  Stress — which Nick was now distinctly feeling — tended to make him horny. He went out onto the balcony off his office and looked down at the fountain. It was a warm spring day outside and the office women were in their summer dresses. He found himself watching one, below, walking along as she ate her frozen yoghurt, a lovely, tall, busty blonde in a sheer sleeveless dress, stockings, and heels, taking long, slow licks of her cone. Even at this altitude he could make out her bra straps. Heather did the bra strap thing to very good effect. It was a trick among certain professional Washington women of bounteous endowment. They wouldn't go so far as to wear too-small sweaters or appear too decollete — sex had to be flaunted in a more subversive way here — so instead they'd make sure a bit of strap showed for the photographer and pretend to be embarrassed when they saw it.

  Looking down on the atrium, he began to dream. He dimmed the lights, got rid of all the people eating yoghurt and calzone. Around the fountain he assembled a full orchestra consisting of stunningly toothsome women wearing nothing but their instruments. He put the cellists out front. Yes. There's just something about nude women cellists. He had them play the cigarette song from act I in Carmen, where the young Sevillian men are serenaded by their sweethearts, the girls who work in the cigarette factory. The Academy had underwritten the opera at the Kennedy Center two years ago. Ever since, Nick had been humming it in the shower.

  C'est fumee, c'est fumee!

  In the air, we follow with our eyes,

  The smoke, the smoke,

  that rises toward the sky, sweet-smelling smoke.

  How pleasantly it goes, to your head, to your head,

  so sweetly

  and fills your soul with joy!

  The sweet talk of lovers— that is smoke.

  Their transports and their vows— all that is smoke.

  The scene was set. There remained only the piece de resistance: Heather, buxom, pink, and entirely au naturel, looking like one of Renoir's bathing beauties, sitting in the uppermost bowl of the fountain, with him, drinking champagne (Veuve Clicquot, demi-sec) from iced flutes.

  He went back inside and called Heather.

  "Hi," Heather said, sounding very throaty, "I can't come to the phone right now. Leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can. If you want to speak to an operator, press zero."

  He left a message asking her if she wanted to have dinner that night at Il Peccatore, then went back outside to see if his tableau was still vivant. It wasn't. The orchestra had been replaced by worker bees eating calzones and frozen yoghurts.

  He sat at his desk and turned to the work at hand with the enthusiasm of a man changing a flat tire on a sweltering day on the interstate. It was to ghostwrite an op-ed piece for congressman Jud Jawkins (D-Ky), challenging an NIH study showing that children of smoking mothers have 80 percent more asthma attacks than children of nonsmoking mothers. Nick sighed.

  He wrote: "No one is more respectful of the work carried on at the National Institutes of Health than I, yet it is unfortunate that at a time when so many ghastly severe health problems face our nation — AIDS, skyrocketing cholesterol levels, and the recent outbreak of measles in my own home state, to name but a few examples — that the NIH has become so riven with political correctness that it is spending precious resources to bombard the American people with information that they already have."

  It was one of his more conventional devices — the old Deja Voodoo — but it would have to do. He was just cranking up some moral counter-outrage and pleas for common decency and fairness when there was a rap on his door and Jeannette said, "Am I interrupting?"

  He looked up from his dissimulations to see Jeannette's head sticking out from behind the door. She looked much more relaxed than she usually did. She'd furloughed her ice-blond hair from its normal prison of a bun at the back and had it loosely ponytailed with a barrette. She was in her standard Don't Mess With Me dark blue suit, worn tightly so as to show off every minute of every sweaty hour at the health club; but she'd added an explosively colorful silk scarf from Hermes or Chanel that gave her the look of a rich woman on the prowl for fun. Nick had to admit that Jeannette was looking mighty fine this afternoon. Maybe one of her focus groups had told her to lighten up and lose the dominatrix look. After all, the whole idea of having a spokesbabe was to take the viewer's mind off cancer and heart disease and emphysema, not to beat back their own libidos with a chair and whip.

  "Hi," she said in a friendly way. "Am I interrupting?"

  "No," Nick said. "I was just making some op-ed mush."

  She closed the door behind her. "God," she said, "I'd kill to have your touch with op-eds."

  "Ah," Nick said, "easy as breathing."

  "I can recite the one you did for Jordan when Deukmejian banned smoking on flights in California. 'I have a lot of respect for Governor Deukmejian. It's his respect for the Constitution that concerns me.' October eighty-seven, right?"

  Nick blushed. "Lot of good it did."

  She sat down, crossed her stockinged legs, which, Nick noticed, looked very sleek today. He looked up and saw that she'd seen him purloining a glance at her gams. He looked down at his op-ed and frowned as though he were trying to think of the right word.

  "What's up?" he said in a businesslike way, though it was by now obvious to both of them what, precisely, was up.

  "I've got this idea that I'm really excited about."

  "Oh?" Nick said, still looking down at his op-ed piece.

  "A magazine for smokers."

  "Hm," Nick said, sitting back and looking at her, careful to keep his eyes above the waist. "Couple of the companies tried it. Controlled circulation, no newsstand."

  "Precisely," Jeannette said, "where I think they went wrong. I want this on the newsstands. In their faces. Look at newsstands these days. Magazines for everyone, except smokers."

  "What would you call it?"

  "Inhale!" Jeannette said, "with the exclamation mark in the form of a cigarette, you know, with the ash. Dynamic, unapologetic, and hot."

  "Hot?"

  "Sexy," Jeannette said. "Dripping."

  " 'Inhale!' " said Nick. "Tell me more."

  "We've got fifty-five million customers out there, huddling outside in doorways, feeling persecuted. Why wouldn't they want a magazine all their own? We're talking more readers than TV Guide. A magazine for the smoking lifestyle. Overweight women, minorities, blue-collar workers, depressives, alcoholics—"

  "Rugged individualists," Nick said. "Independent spirits. Risk takers. Which is quintessentially American. I sometimes think that our customers are the most American people left."

  "And dying out fast."

  "Feature stories on the American West, fast, sexy muscle cars—"

  "Bungee jumping."

  "Yes."

  "Listings of smoker-friendly restaurants. A real service magazine."

  "But sexy."

  "Hot. Sports Illustrated-type babes in swimsuits, only holding cigarettes. So much of the sex has gone out of smoking."

  "But with substance."

  "Absolutely. Interviews with prominent smokers."

  "Are there any?"

  "Castro."

  "He gave up. Anyway, I'm not sure Caribbean Commies are sexy anymore. Nixon. Nixon smokes. Not many people know that."

  "Is Nixon sexy?"

  "Clinton. Cigars."

  "He doesn't light them."

  "We'll find someone."

  Gazelle came over the intercom. She sounded amused. "Nick, the two gentlemen from Modern Man magazine—"

  "Young Modern Man," corrected a Japanese voice in the background.

  "Sorry. To see you."

  Nick rolled his eyes. "BR's idea."

  "Later," Jeannette said.

  "Later
when?" Nick said.

  "Later-later? I'm crashing on sick building syndrome, but I'd really want to get with you on this."

  "You want to grab a drink later-later? Or a bite later-later-later?"

  "Perfect. BR wants me to do a drop-by at the Healthy Heart 2000 thing at-the Omni-Shoreham. You know, show the flag."

  "Uch. Bring your flak jacket."

  "Believe me, I'm not sticking around. Eight?"

  "Great. You like soft-shell crabs?"

  "I love soft-shell crabs."

  Heather called in the middle of his session with the reporter and photographer from Young Modern Man, who, to judge from the questions—"Who do you consider are the true smoking heroes in America today?" — were on the side of the angels. But then the Japanese were amazingly tolerant where it came to smoking: they allowed cigarette advertising in children's TV programming. Maybe he should ask for a transfer to Tokyo.

  "I can't do dinner tonight," said Heather, sounding busy, sounds of the newsroom about her. Thank God. Nick realized that he had asked two women to dinner.

  "No sweat. By the way, we're going to roll out the new anti-underage smoking campaign next week, and I wondered if the Moon wanted an exclusive preview."

  "Nick, I told you I don't do propaganda."

  "Look, we're committing economic suicide. Tell me that's not news?"

  "Maybe to Oprah."

  "What's the matter, are you worried that jerk at the Sun will think you're soft on tobacco?"

  "Hardly."

  "All right," Nick said, "but don't blame me if something interesting happens at the press conference."

  "Like what? An announcement that smoking cures cancer?"

  "You laugh," Nick said, "but we've just seen a study showing that smoking retards the onset of Parkinson's."

  "In what? Tobacco Farmer's Almanac?"

  "Half my job," Nick said to Young Modern Man after hanging up, "is maintaining good communications with the media. Information doesn't do any good if you don't get it out there. Right?"

  The maitre d' at Il Peccatore led Nick to the same corner booth where he'd had the first lunch with Heather. It made him hope Heather didn't show up; though what the hell, to her it would just look like he was having dinner with a co-worker.