hear her mother’s TV—The Hit Parade- through the wall separating the two bedrooms. “But your mom’s home!” I said. “So what?” she said. “Aren’t you afraid she’ll find out what you’re doing?” “She doesn’t care!” With a whoop and a hurrah, freedom called me forth. This was the first truly democratic household I had ever been in. Now her mother became a sanctioning presence in the next room (although I hadn’t even seen her that evening. As a matter of fact I had never seen her. For all I knew, Nancy just wanted me to think her mother was home and had turned the TV on herself before I got there). I watched as Nancy took long draws on her Salem as she French-inhared. So worldly! She blew eight doughnut-like smoke rings in front of us. A pro at seventeen! On TV Bette Davis was also smoking. She had just been told that she was going blind. Upon receiving this unfortunate piece of news the first thing she did was take a cigarette out of a silver case and tap it on the case five times—as if it were a call for help in Morse Code. tap tap tap—tap tap Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1987 After she stuck the cigarette delicately between her parted lips and the doctor lit it for her, she smoked it as if this was her last hope to keep from going blind. The two of them were making it look like such an amusing sport that I put one of the Salems into my mouth and lit it. Now all three of us were smoking and the room was so thick with smoke we could barely see each other. But I wasn’t really smoking. I was just taking it into my mouth and blowing it out. I wasn’t yet taking it in all the way. Nancy spent the rest of the evening teaching me how to draw the smoke deep into my lungs. She taught me how to French inhale. It was fun. For the next week or two, like any decent dope peddler, Nancy let me smoke as many of her Salems as I wanted. After that I was on my own. Sometimes I wonder what ever became of Nancy. She probably got married and then divorced and is living in a trailer park with two kids outside Las Vegas. Confessions of a Teenage Smoker nee Nancy had gotten all the teenage girls in my neighborhood hooked, we begged, borrowed and stole our cigarette money. We squandered our babysitting money and allowances on them. We marched through the plum orchard to the Shell gas station in squadrons with the change jangling in our pockets. We slipped our quarters into the slot of the vending machine and grinned sheepishly while we watched the green packs of Salems (we had yet to show independence in our choice of brands) slide down the chute. Once the packs were in our pockets we walked back to the orchard and sat under the trees smoking and talking about boys. Judy Heron was the only holdout. Her pockets bulged with nickel packs of David’s sunflower seeds which she cracked between her teeth every ten seconds. When I was fourteen I kept my cigarettes hidden outside under a rock. By age fifteen I hid them under my mattress. At sixteen they were in my top bureau drawer with my underwear. When I was seventeen I was carrying them in my purse. In 1963 cigarettes were twenty-five cents a pack and gasoline was twenty- five cents a gallon. For a mere seventy- five cents I could drive over the hill from Sunnyvale to Santa Cruz and spend the day smoking on the beach with my friends. For the ride they would pitch in and buy my lunch. Pretty good deal. But smoking wasn’t just a bed of roses. It all began simply enough: 1. My parents went to San Francisco one weekend. 2.1 threw a party at our house while they were gone. 3. Some of my girlfriends called the local radio station KLIV and not only told the D.J. about the party but gave him the address. 4. This information was put on the air. At that point my party was no longer a party—it was an “event.” People I had never seen before showed up. Soon I was outside helping the troops of cops the neighbors had called reroute the scores of low riders in ‘55 Chevys and football players in Continentals to distant shores. Meanwhile, all my friends were having a good ol’ time inside my house listening to my 45s, drinking beer and smoking. Even from the street I could see the cigarette smoke pouring out the windows. Somewhere around 11:00 p.m. the cops raided the party a second time. After about eighty people had been booted out one of the cops asked me, “Where are your parents?” I told him they were in San Francisco. (It is a big city. The cops would never find them.) “Do they know you’re having a party?” “Yes,” I lied.
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