Smokers ((Finished) ) -- (Author) dogboy

[llsadmin]

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: dogboy
Timestamp: Aug 18, 2020 at 10:01 PM
Content: This is the second of two autobiographical stories I wrote for a creative writing course I took in the winter of 2019. Though it doesn't contain anything related to diapers, to be sure, I was definitely wearing and using whatever I could get a hold of as diaper from the age of 12 on. This is a coming of age story and since most of us related to being a child, I hope you will enjoy reading this. Everything in it is true. This was my life, the good, the bad and mostly, the crazy. Writing may be the only way to go back one more time and experience what it was to be a kid.

Smokers

dogboy
I grew up well enough considering it was the 1950’s, just a few years to separate the painful memories of World War II and all the young men whose tattered remains would be buried on foreign shores, never to return to their parents. The ‘50s contained the remnants of that war, the annexation of Germany by the conquering countries, nations that didn’t play well with each other, like disgruntled children but much more aggressive.

Television was new, society’s representative, delivering the news and so much more. Actresses dressed to the nines, elegant dresses that came down to their conservative ankles, and the men: dark suits and silk ties, Fedora hats and smoke rising past the brims, every man smoking and looking like they belonged on the cover of Forbes magazine or a detective paperback novella. Their cities glistened in metallic black and white on tube televisions, projecting black and white replicas of American life.

Like most people, my parents lived on the fringes of that American life. We also lived on the fringes of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a desolate stretch of sandy soil and scrub pines that encompasses 1.1 million acres. It is preserved by the Pinelands Protection Act. It also is considered to be uninhabitable though there have been residents and squatters for centuries. They are called Pineys and they make up the outcasts of southern New Jersey. Historically, many were fugitives either hiding from the law, or from the Patriots of the Revolutionary War, having sided with the British. More recently the barrens would offer shelter for moonshiners, a refuge for the very poor and the lost, often those who wished to remain unseen. It is also home to the Jersey Devil. This is where my father’s family lived, his mother full blooded Leni Lennape Indian and his father, descended British Piney and a habitual alcoholic.

My mother’s family moved from Newark, New Jersey into this almost wilderness because of the Great Depression. Years later I would be adopted at the age of two, a move from one house to another from a family that didn’t want me, to one that did. That move would be the first of several that by the time I was eight, would take me to Holly Park, closer to the fringes of the barrens, to houses in the woods and roads that led to the water, Barnegat Bay.

I complained about moving. I wouldn’t know anyone and I’d be bored. Loneliness was often my companion and it wouldn’t play with me or talk or be a friend, but that changed. I pestered my mom, “Who can I play with. Who can I play with,” over and over. Eventually we found a family down the street. They had a boy a year older than me. He had friends, all older than him and suddenly the friend sphere was expanding. At eight years old I learned I could hang, me little and them bigger.

The neighborhood, and it barely passed as that, was house and woods, house and woods, one house surrounded by trees and paths that ran through the woods, houses and trees all connected by the trails that we kids ran, generation after generation of kids running in the woods, talking, swearing, telling jokes and smoking. That’s how I had my first cigarette. I was tagging along with Chucky and his older friends, a first get to know you experience and as we walked, they ducked into the woods, walking along an old path, taking us to a small clearing.

Out came the pack and the oldest and biggest said, “Hey kid. If you want to hang with us, you gotta’ smoke so you don’t rat on us.” He added, “And don’t get the end wet.”

He stuck it in my mouth and I took a drag off it though because this was my first time and because I was eight, I took a puff, not a drag, coughed and they all laughed. It was the story of my life. Kids are brutal to each other and every one of us at one time or another becomes someone’s target, someone to laugh at. Most all of the shit that happens in your kid life you forget, like it never happened, but I remember this. One of them had a Coke, glass bottles being the vessel for all sodas back in the fifties. He asked me if I wanted a sip but I said no because he had his lips on it and probably his spit in it. Again more laughter and this is what I remember.

“Shit. We drink each other’s spit all the time. Hell, we’d even drink each other’s piss.”

I was afraid of them, the older boys. I looked down, didn’t make eye contact. I took another drag off the cigarette as it got passed around, spit or piss be damned.

All of our parents smoked so it was no surprise that their kids smoked. Getting cigarettes was easy. You just stole your old man’s or your mom’s. Sometimes my mom would want to smell my breath but she couldn’t tell because her breath was also stained by all that tar and nicotine.

The woods were a great place to smoke, that and the marsh, part of the tidewater of Barnegat Bay. It was a great place to play in the summer, full of mystery and begging to be explored. We poked the crabs and small fish with sticks. The marsh stank from everything that died in it and we didn’t care. It also was plagued by a million mosquitoes and green head flies which bit us unmercifully. Our parents would put Oil ‘O Sol on the bites, and a mixture of Iodine and baby oil for suntan lotion. I think the baby oil acted like tiny little magnifying glasses, helping the sun to burn us like ants. I’d spend summers with Chucky running through the marshes and swimming on the beach, burning to a dark Leni Lennape red/brown. My mom would show off my tan to her friends by pulling down my shorts, the contrast between my bare white ass and dark back and legs. They’d laugh and applaud, all of it eluding me. Who could ever understand adults.

The mosquitoes were a problem as they carried Encephalitis, what we called “the sleeping sickness”. One year I lost two classmates to Encephalitis, a girl and boy, fraternal twins. We would burn cattails that grew in abundance, nature’s mosquito repellent. Chucky and I would go into the marsh and find several that looked good and dry, cut the stalk they grew on, a chance to use our knives, deliberately cutting to allow enough stalk to hold the burning brown collection of plant fibers. One of us usually had a lighter we had stolen from a parent. The flame, once held long enough to the cattail, would cause the cattail to smolder. They never went up in flames; only smoldered and we had something else to smoke. It was vile, horrid, but we’d breath it in, inhale just like it was a cig, and let the euphoria hit. It probably had no real drug component to it: it just robbed our lungs of oxygen. We’d laugh, role around on the ground, wrestle, and mostly, suck in the dark blue-gray smoke.

We’d do the same thing when the Cherry brothers would fly overhead. To combat the Encephalitis epidemics that accompanied every summer, the township hired the Cherry Brothers, four siblings who flew crop dusting by-planes: Boeing Stearmans. My dad said the Stearman was the most beautiful bi-plane ever built, and I agree, though my dad flew a Jenny. I have a picture of him leaning against the cowling, donning his leather pilot’s cap.

The Cherry brothers were carrying DDT, a pesticide that would kill both the mosquitoes and eventually, bald eagles. We could hear the planes long before they arrived, and when we heard those Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines roaring in the sky, we’d run out; every kid in that small community, flying like Stearmans out from our small, aging houses like kid airplane hangers, all those back doors slamming shut, parents shouting and we, flights of children running into our yards to be sprayed by DDT, its smell intoxicating, kids running into the descending cloud like the smoke screens from World War II destroyers that we all saw on the TV show, Victory at Sea, the black and white war now real to us in a much less menacing way, smoking in the toxic DDT, feeling so lightheaded and free.

When my daughter was young, I would tell her about Holly Park and what it was like to be a kid all on your own, running the well worn paths, how much fun we had being independent in the woods and she would say, “Oh daddy, I wish we could live there.” Four years later my parents moved across the state: paradise lost.

It didn’t matter how many times my parents moved or where I lived, what school I went to or who my friends were, I smoked. My brand was Lucky Strikes if I could get them, maybe because they made you look tough. Maybe it was because they were included in C-rations during W. W. II or maybe it was the big bright red target on the pack and of course, they were unfiltered. My dad smoked Camels until he had his first major heart attack and his doctor told him to quit. I guess the decision to walk a mile for a Camel was snatched away from him just like his health which seemed ironic since 20,679 physicians said in a Lucky Strike commercial that Lucky Strikes were less irritating. One of the commercials had nine out of ten doctors affirm cigarettes were good for your health. So was the spitting that accompanied unfiltered cigarettes.

We’d all tap the pack on the back of our hand; pack held upside down so the tobacco would travel to one end. We’d put the other end in our mouth hoping the tobacco rolled inside the paper would stay put, but there would always be a stray shred that would find its way into your mouth and then there would be the accompanying sound, “Pttt!” Typically there would be a lot of pttt, pttt, pttt, as each little shred would be spit out, making the too young to smoke look bad-ass, like Dylan Thomas’s smoker in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” but none of us wanted to be seen as children, and so we smoked the soldier’s narcotic.

My friends and I had our own commercial. “Are you brave enough to face cancer? Hell yah!” we’d yell and take a drag. I had been “taking a drag” now for several years, pulling in that first hit, feeling it go all the way down into the farthest reaches of my lungs and the euphoria, lightheaded: the rush. But there was something else.

Cigarettes smelled differently than they do now. They say that reformed smokers are the first to complain about another smoker’s exhaust and the awful, irritating smell. I’m one of them, but that’s not how they smelled when I was a kid. Lucky Strikes were like coffee. Coffee smells so much better, both as a ground bean, that aroma when you first open the bag, and more so when it’s brewing. Drinking it is another matter. The smell of a freshly opened pack of Lucky Strikes was intoxicating. The American Tobacco Company knew this to be true because they told you on the pack, “Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco”. All you had to do was open that little corner on the top of the pack, peel back the shiny aluminum foil and the exquisite smell hit you, so much better than coffee, all this and it only cost twenty-five cents. We were always looking for spare change; nickels or dimes lost by preoccupied adults, a quarter that would take us to a gas station and its cigarette machines.

The cigarette machine was prepubescent sex; alluring, dangerous especially if the gas station attendant yelled at you or worse, knew you parents. But the allure was real, the seduction from chrome, glass and knobs sensually awakening something deep inside. The idea of doing something illegal, minors not allowed or tolerated only heightened the need that felt at its most basic level, primitive. We’d ride our bikes to the highway, hugging the side as cars and trucks sped by on Rt. 9, a two line concrete aging ribbon that connected New York City and Atlantic City. It only heightened our senses, adding to the adventure to ride at break-neck speed, slide our bikes sideways like motorcycles, kicking up gravel and parking lot dust, the call of the Siren waiting patiently, knobs and all.

After the predictable, “Go on chicken. Go get the fucking cigs,” was the sound of the quarter rattling down to where all quarters must eventually go. Inside my head was: pull the knob: pull the fucking knob before the grease monkey notices and gets you because they would get you, pull you up by your britches and say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”

My chest was pounding with excitement as the knob made its metallic clanking sound, the bright white pack with the red round target sliding down and into the worn metal tray, soon in hand and racing out the door, all of us on our bikes digging into rusted pedals, heading home and to the woods. Holly Park was the greatest place in the world to live. And my parents moved, not once but twice in the span of two years.

For each year and each move, I had new friends and we all smoked. First year in high school was a new experience and with it came new freedoms. The school was overcrowded and if your parents signed a slip of paper that you had to remember to bring home, you could go downtown and buy lunch at one of several lunch counters. That paper got shown to my mom and signed, but there was another paper I didn’t dare bring home, the permission slip that allowed you to smoke. None of my friends did either, but the minute we stepped off the curb that signaled we were in the free from school zone, safe to smoke zone, we all pulled a cigarette from the pack that was in our front shirt pocket, all of us moving in synch, cigarette to mouth, Zippo in hand lighted and first drag one great release from stress bullying violence and everything that high school was on the Jersey Shore. I was thoroughly hooked and it was going to kill me. Almost.

I am a musician. I have always been a musician. When I was adopted at the age of two my parents were told I would be a musician. They weren’t told how difficult it was to raise a musical child because we are crazy. Music runs in my head like a run-away train along with a constant stream of unrelated thoughts, music and thoughts headed toward derailment. That train wreck occurred August 4th, 1963.

I studied both organ and piano and on that Saturday I had an afternoon organ lesson across state in Philadelphia. I told my mom I was going to take my bike to the hobby store and get a magazine. She was reluctant to let me go but I promised I’d be home in time for my lesson, a promise I would not keep. It was hot even for early morning, a shorts and t-shirt day, a hot and sweaty ride to the hobby store and the gas station next door.

I was now smoking Marlboros: “Are you man enough to smoke a Marlboro,” the Marlboro man exclaimed while riding his horse, horse rearing up on its hind legs.

“Hell yes,” as I reared the front wheel of my Raleigh bike off the pavement, which was Rt. 37, the only road to the beach, now backed with traffic flooding in from both Philadelphia and New York City, one concrete lane running East and the other in the opposite direction. I made it safely across, ducked quickly into the gas station and made my habitual acquaintance with the metallic and glass goddess, two quarters and two packs, now safely tucked into my black leather saddle bag, hit the hobby store so there would be a magazine for the mom inspection and faced the line of stalled beach traffic.

As I stood there contemplating crossing, calculating when it was safe to dart out, I was suddenly lightheaded, in a dream like state, the sun lulling me into a trance. I remember being in a safe place, maybe home in my bedroom, but safer and there was a great light that surrounded me. I had never experienced such peace and then I woke up lying on Rt. 37. In the distance I could hear an ambulance siren and there was a crowd of people standing around me. I tried to get up. I had to be home for my lesson. I tried to sit up, move my legs and it was then I saw my fibula bulge, trying to break free from my leg, pushing the skin out.

I remember saying, “Oh shit.”

Later, after the ambulance ride and the pronouncement that I was going to live, they let my mom and dad see me, a sight I’m sure that was disturbing, especially since my head had been caught by the steel bumper of a ’57 Ford. Witnesses said I flew over the car, flipped and landed on my back. After my mom hugged me and told me she loved me, she said, “Well, we know you smoke.” Apparently there were Marlboros scattered across the highway, the Marlboro man finally ratting me out. After some thought, having my carefully kept secret finally revealed, I said, “So you know. Okay. Could I have a cigarette? I’m dying for a smoke,”

And my mom said in her coldest Germanic voice, “I don’t think you need that!”

It was six months before I was able to go back to school. I spent most of that time in plaster and various stages of physical rehabilitation. I was told by doctors that I would never walk normally. The good news was that the Army wouldn’t want me, but apparently, none of my friends wanted me either as none of them came to visit. Then came the unexpected.

At age thirteen, I was a paid church organist. One of the choir members lived up the street from my parents and she had two sons, one who was my age. She brought them over and I became best friends with the oldest. He was a gifted athlete, played football, weight lifted and ran. He rehabilitated me, both physically and morally. He got me to lift weights. In order to hang out with him, I had to run: run with him for football. I left all my old friends, gang members and kids who got in trouble with the law.

I rewarded him by getting him to smoke. We’d go into the woods and smoke, sucking in that gray euphoria. I guess the Marlboro man was alive and well though I believe the actor who played him eventually died of lung cancer.

In the succeeding years I would graduate from college and move to Ohio where I would meet my wife. One summer we returned to Toms River to see my parents and look up old friends. I had long ago quit smoking as my wife didn’t like the smell. My best friend had not. We had a nice visit with him. When we were leaving, I apologized to him for getting him hooked. I begged him to quit. I’ve often wondered if he did.

Holly Park changed with the years as well. The wooded paths disappeared as newer and bigger homes were built, people from the cities wanting to live by the water. Children now preferred the indoors to the woods, no longer running and exploring. And the Cherry brothers died one by one, one fatal plane crash after another, the end of an era.

############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
Author: dogboy
Timestamp: Aug 19, 2020 at 2:36 AM
Content:

pampers4U said:

Any constellation I starting smoking at age 14 in Seaside Park across the bridge from you, amazing area to grow up in, I have so many fond summer memories from the age of 14 through my early 20’s. I have since moved away but still keep in touch with friends from down there, certainly a very different way of life.

[End of quote]

Oh my God I can't believe that (actually I do, but what a small world). My aunt and uncle had a house in Seaside Park so I spent a lot of time there and on the ocean. The Seaside Heights boardwalk was always amazing! When I was 11, I stayed at a small rental with my mom's boss and her 12 year old son. The mother would leave us for days as she would go to northern New Jersey and play the horses. I had just learned about law of averages in math class so I would play the ball game where you'd put down a nickel on a color and the guy would throw the ball into the cage with all the numbers and colors. If it landed on your color you would win three packs of cigarettes. Since I was playing the odds, seeing what didn't come up for a while, I'd make my move and bet. I won arm loads of cigarettes. My crazy little friend and I would up and down the beach selling the cigarettes for half price and then we'd go on all the rides, eat junk food, go to the movies and smoke. It was amazing.