smoke-'em if you got-'em

His name was Jess Roach, and he started the whole fucking thing for me. Or maybe it was someone else... I really can't remember. Pall Mall. Red package, no filter. Ray Raff, the guy who owned the filling station at 10th and Tyler, would let me buy them out of the machine. They cost a quarter. The year was 1960. I thought that my mother didn't know that I was smoking. Stupid kid. I was 14. I hid my cigaretes under the front porch, along with the matches. I hated when it rained... I would be constantly worried about them getting wet. That only happened once. After that I put them in a plastic sack. I don't really know when I got hooked. Jess Roach. Richard Chavez. Jimmy... what the hell was Jimmy's last name? He moved to Texas before we started high school. Duane Luthi. Jim Porter. A coupla others that I don't remember. We all smoked. It was cool. The girls thought it was cool, anyway, to see us smoke. They said that we looked so... adult. So sexy. What greater motivation could there possibly be? Ginny Atchison. Tanya Wells. Leota... Cheryl. Donna. I worshipped each and every one of them. They thought that I was sexy when I smoked. I only got to kiss two of them, though. They thought that every guy was sexy when they smoked. Duane and I would stand at the corner of 10th and Polk every morning before going to school at Topeka High, just caddy-corner across the street. On really cold or rainy days we would hang around Ray's gas station a block east. Occasionally we would be joined by other smokers, but they never seemed to last very long. It was our corner. Everybody knew that. I lived at 1115 Polk, and Duane lived at 1536 Polk, so he would walk to my house, I would get my cigarettes from under the porch and off we would go. Stand on the corner, smoke them Pall Malls, watch the people go by until time to go in. Them we'd grimace, stomp our fags out and go to class. Duane and I never had too much to say to each other... we just smoked together. I ran across Duane about fifteen years ago. He's still smoking those Pall Malls. We vowed to get together, but we never did. He lives north of town somewhere. I need to give him a call, just to see how many heart attacks he's had. No... we didn't know that it would kill us. We were, after all, teenagers, and immune from death. And nobody knew. Well, Mom knew, but I thought that it was just some religious crap... y'know... if it feels good, it's a sin and you will go to hell. I ignored her, of course. All of the males and some of the females in my family all smoked, y'know. It was cool... the thing to do. And I did it well.

Part II

All material ©1998 by Doug Franklin

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