smoke-'em if you got-'em
Part II

Phase II of my personal smoking saga... I was going to skip high school, but I just really couldn't. So. I started at Topeka High in 1961. I had a part-time job working for Helen Krahn, Leota's mother. She ran a catering/party house business, and she would come by and pick me up. I was saving up for a car, and I had enough money in my junior year to get one. It was a 1951 Ford, gray 2-door. Flat-head V-8. Manual Tranny. So what the hell does this have to do with smoking? Why, that's easy! I didn't have to hide my cigarettes under the porch anymore. And I was the only one in my little group that had a car. None of the others wanted to work, and we were a poor lot generally. There was a real problem with smoking Pall Malls, though. They were filterless, of course... and if you hung one from your lower lip, y'know, to lok even cooler... well, you got these little bits of tobacco on your lips and in your mouth. And they tasted really really bad. And it wasn't cool to have to spit and gag all of the time. So I started smoking Marlboro Reds... the only kind there was at the time. Filters. You could look cool and not suffer. See, you had to hold the cigarette in your mouth... it took two hands to drive. There was that manual transmission... and no power steering. If you wanted to be really cool you had a "suicide knob" clamped on your steering wheel. I tried that and just about broke my arm a couple of times. And the Marlboros worked out all right. I didn't cough so much when I smoked them either. Them Pall Malls are HARSH fucking cigarettes! We weren't supposed to take cigarettes into school, of course, but almost everyone did. I didn't, though. I followed the rules. To the letter. I never did smoke in the boy's room, either. Never. Only skoff-laws did that, and I was many things, but never a skoff-law. We could go home for lunch, and I did every day, usually taking Duane Luthi along. Smoke as soon as we hit the car, went home, ate, back in the car, smoke, back to school. Maybe another one as we were sitting ther id we had time before class. Getting out of school at 15:40... hit the car, smoke. I think that I confessed to mom that I smoked sometime in my junior year. Her only comment: "I know." It was a relief not to have to hide it from her, but it was still a while before I could smoke in her presence.

Part I
Part III

All material ©1998 by Doug Franklin

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