Gotta Smoke? The Sound of Work Boots Going Up the Stairs

                        (Anon- 1932 Rockefeller Building- One of my all-time favorite photographs.)

Paul Harvey once said

It’s the sound of work boots going up the steps, and the sound of bedroom slippers coming down.

I’ve written about on this subject before, for it goes to not only what the heartbeat of America should sound like, but what the feel of its skin and its aroma should be like.

Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

Mr Sandburg wrote that in 1914, but Mr Harvey was reminding America in  the 1960s.

It is also true that the trek up the steps in heavy boots is heavy laden with sweaty socks, underwear that is not necessarily washed or changed daily, patched trousers, and of course, the sweet (or acrid, your choice) aroma of cigarette smoke.

So check this close-up of that picture at the top, far left:

It’s just that way; smoking is part of every vibrant, movin’-on-up society. You can’t have one without the other. And it’s attached to so many more laws about civilization that it can’t just be amputated and then everyone continuing to pretend they don’t live in a one-armed society.

Mr Harvey made that comment during the Vietnam War, but it was not until I began traveling to the Third World that I saw how integral smoking is to optimistic working people. Smoking serves many purposes, none of which I ever contemplated when I first tried smoking as a kid.

I first noted this in Japan in the 1970s, then China in the 80’s and Russia and the Eastern bloc in the 90’s and 2000’s.

Of course, a lot of that was just pent up demand for better quality products since all those countries already had tobacco and alcohol products, only not of the highest quality or of the widest availability. Japan made bad cigarettes before the war, and rot gut whiskey after. Russian cigarettes were impossible to keep lit, and could stink up an outhouse. So Johnny Walker, Jack Daniels and Marlboro put a shine on their work boots at a time when America was slipping into something a little more comfortable, like a Pajamagram footie-hoodie and cabernet sauvignon.

As a general law of human dynamics, smoking is a sign of what men and women do when under stress, but also a sign that life is getting better. It’s the pause that refreshes if you’re wearing work boots. It’s a momentary reward, just for working hard. But not just out on the girders, While in law school my wife worked for an internist who smoked 2-3 cigarettes a day, and only after treating an especially tough patient.

There have always been social attempts to segregate smoking, often based on no more than good manners. My father smoked at the dinner table so it would be a long time before I learned that it is really an impolite thing to do (the tobacco-nazis also said he was killing his children which was a lie). In mid-winter, 20-below, on trains, Russians would still stand in the breezeway between cars to enjoy a smoke. I was never that temperant.

In the 1990s I did a lot of international shipping,so I took note of the break rooms where one or two of the 15-man dock crew would eat, while the remaining dozen were banished to the back dock, outside, in good weather and foul, where they could smoke and gulp down a sandwich.

Jump to Bulgaria, a nation of smokers, who tried to impress the EU (who would later invite them it join) by providing smoking and non-smoking areas in its restaurants. A popular Serbian eatery in Sofia had a first floor non-smoking dining room and a smoking dining room on the second level, and in ten visits over 7 years, I have never seen more than five or six patrons dining on the ground floor, while the upper floor often had waits of an hour or more, with much conviviality.  As Mark Twain once said, “Heaven for climate, Hell for society.”

And right up there with working in high steel, witness our lunch crew perched out on that girder, nothing can be more stressful than the few minutes that seem like hours, and hours that seem like days in a combat zone.

I remember as a kid the film in Movietone News of wounded soldiers being loaded onto stretchers, with heads bandaged, and someone handing them a lit Camel. (Men never seemed to be all that particular about putting something in their mouths that had already been in someone else’s mouth. But that’s another story. Or may it’s not.)

But as a kid I never thought of cigarettes having any therapeutic effect at all.

In fact, as a kid I missed the entire purpose of tobacco, since for me it was only a forbidden pleasure, which was purpose enough.

Did you know that in the 1950s many doctors prescribed smoking, yes prescribed, especially to high-strung ladies, for an ailment you almost never hear about anymore, neurosis?

Why you never hear about neurosis anymore is that America is almost entirely neurotic, especially the Left. (I have this on good authority.) The Left no more looks at neurosis as a condition than breathing as one. Better we look at breast cancer as a disease, killing the unborn a choice, and homosexuality a preference as innocuous as choosing Bibb over Romaine.

But about neurotics, is there a connection to smoking?

At one time neurotics existed only in the wild, seen only in captivity after being  medicated with Virginia Slims, color-tipped Capris, and Canadian blended whiskey (ecch!)  from which whiskey sours and girl-drinks like that were concocted.

But today neurotics are incubated in greenhouses under controlled conditions with progressive injections of a kind of leftist steroid, so as to provide that extra shrill octave in the voices we’ve all come to know and love, and that furrowed eyebrow and evil glisten that goes into making the insufferable and disapprovingly bitchy Democrat.

Speaking of Hillary, I often wonder how much nicer our country would be if just more people had smoked as youths, or even still do.

Imagine Nancy Pelosi taking a big drag on a filter-tipped Picayune. Then she might look almost as nice as Bette Davis in Baby Jane and sound twice as mellow as Selma Diamond, instead of the really ugly crone she is now. Two giant steps forward toward civilization, in my view.

Where did we turn wrong?

Since I’m part of that generation, I find it instructive to consider just how many of my generation were able to quit smoking.  And by quit, I mean cold turkey; no sissy patches, no gum, no medically-supervised plans paid for by insurance.

As Mark Twain once said, “Quittin’ smoking’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.” And it took me about five quits before one finally took, but I never ceased to marvel that in  my generation, considered the most weak-kneed, spineless generation in American history,  almost 90% of us would smoke at one time, and over half of us would quit.

That’s a phenomenal percentage if you stop to think about it, and something of an irony, since I’m sure already more from my generation have probably died of some neurosis-borne episode than from any lung-based illness. (Don’t teat fits cause stroke? Where’s the university study on this?)

What this single fact, that over half of history’s most self-indulgent generation can quit smoking, tells us is that the “addictive” factors of cigarettes can’t possibly be as bad as modern tobacco Nazis declare. Remember when they wanted to indict tobacco execs for perjury for saying they didn’t believe tobacco to be addictive?

Hard drug addiction is very difficult to give up and almost never without medical intervention. But chronic bitchiness is impossible…without God’s intervention. But tobacco? Easy.

So why would the weakest generation in Christendom want to prohibit their children from a thing they did with glee and could buy in a machine (for 35 cents!) on every street corner? Why would they want to make it appear repulsive…then steer their kids toward far more dangerous and debilitating alternatives, such as easy sex without consequence or responsibility, drugs, or even self-adoration?

I’m sure there’s a Darwinian answer in there somewhere, but another time.

It makes no sense, as I have two Gen X’ers and both possess far more intestinal fortitude than I ever had. They both engaged in sports that involved strenuous practices twice a day for approximately four hours, eleven months out of the year, things I would have run away from home to avoid. My logic is that if half of my sorry generation could quit, surely to goodness Gen X’ers could quit closer to 80%.

If there was ever a safe generation to try smoking I think it would have been the Gen X’ers (who would be 35-45 right now) for they could try it and get whatever forbidden pleasure they could from it, then quit…but only after they’d kicked the neurosis disposition. A two-fer. (Think of a cat being neutered or spayed. Tobacco has that same effect on both the “shrill whiny” gene in the same way.)

There are lessons here, for witnessing smoking in this new light had caused me to pause and reflect on my own life of smoking, habitually from 18 to about 42, and off and on before that since 12. For none of it had anything to do with work boots or stress.

The curative powers of Sneaking

About 25 years ago I wrote an essay, in long hand, by the same title as this, and all I did for 3000 words was tell tales of my adventures in smoking. More specifically, sneaking to smoke.

I had a great life as a kid, with mountains to climb and caves to explore, but by and far the best adventures I had were indulging in forbidden pleasures and trying to not get caught at it.

More of those adventures that I care to calculate had to do with cigarettes; e.g., how to raise the necessary 35c for a pack (a guy I hitched a ride with to school always charged a nickle apiece for a Winston and even I could do the math), where to buy them (just like modern Indians and Arabs at 7-11, there were always men who do anything for a quarter and a dime…and we blessed their House weekly), where to hide them (behind loose bricks in buildings),  how to bum one in a pinch, and how to spot one on the ground and see if there was still 3-4 good pulls left, or the filter wasn’t too chewed on (that’s where I drew the line).

And there was always the Great Game of stealth. Furtive glances over the shoulder. And security. (Someone actually raided the loose brick a friend of mine and I shared.) Even lighting one up was an adventure, as every house in my town was a sniper’s nest, with eyes peering out of every kitchen window into the back alley, just looking for smoke signals rising up above the honeysuckle bush along the back fence, my mother’s number on her homemade Rolodex.

When I think of all the times I’ve hunkered down behind an outhouse, trying to light a soggy Pall Mall with paper matches on a windy day, I get downright teary-eyed.

All that ended suddenly, when I was 18. I once told a friend that the best cigarette I’d ever smoked was the last one I smoked before my dad saw me smoke. With a snap of the finger, the thrill was gone and it was all downhill from there on, although it would be another 20+ years before I’d find the bottom of that hill.

That’s 9000 packs and over 180,000 cigarettes. They were 35c (filter-tips) when I started and $1.50 when I quit.

Oh, I had a few good cigarettes along the way, but two-three out of the pack was about it. That first coffee in the morning was one, but I didn’t take up coffee until I was in the Army. Pizza and a pitcher of beer and good friends was another, but how many of those were there? …and as you know, nowhere in America can four pards just sit around a noisy saloon, over pizza and beer, telling lies without cigs hanging from their lips.

Then of course there was the post-connubial smoke… if memory serves.

Most ex-smokers become like reformed whores, self-righteous as hell. True Nazis. But I love the aroma, and have never bought the hogwash of random second-hand smoke. So I still try to get downwind of anyone I see smoking just so I can be transported back for a few moments. Then I thank them profusely. You can even make friends that way, for smokers also like to think of themselves as something other than social pariahs. They appreciate my kindness as a blind man would a dollar bill in his tin cup; someone who understands and doesn’t judge.

Work Boots and Class

In today’s world work boots aren’t even optional anymore. I know sneaking still plays a vital role in the lives of kids, but you have to go to the corner 7-11 or gas station to find them, for I’ve found most kids are kept on a very short leash these days. Someone, Mom usually, has to ferry them somewhere, everywhere, soccer practice, a piano recital, a school function, even if the school is only half a mile away. I drive through suburban neighborhoods but rarely see kids out playing, alone or in groups. I think those are now organized. Maybe chaperoned. But at the gas station where I fill up there is always three or four boys who arrive on their skate boards, with funny hats, then congregate for a Monster soda (I think its speed), and the occasional smoke, which are now $4 a pack. This particular gas station has been busted by the tobacco police five times since I’ve been going there, so I assume there’s a connection.

I also get the sense these kids don’t have the sort of parental controls (not be confused with “concerns”) as those suburban kids do. Their parents probably both work. And one probably wears work boots, the other a waitresses dress, or maybe store clerk’s vest.

And I suddenly think, who’re really the lucky ones here? Almost half of everything good thing I ever did in my life was in defiance of my mother. Not that she wasn’t right, mind you, but that I had to go out there and find it out the hard way. So I’ve been eternally grateful to the Phillip Morris, Liggett & Myers, Brown and Williamson companies, even though I haven’t gotten near one of their products in nearly thirty years.

I wished more kids smoked but only if they have to sneak to do it. For then they likely wouldn’t be sneaking to buy condoms, or alcohol, or drugs. We all can think of a dozen things worse than smoking in terms of long term harm. Fathering or mothering a child, or worse, paying not to have to, carries far more long-term baggage than the kid who smokes and then quits after 10 years. Or how about becoming an incubator-bitch Democrat? Or a RINO?

So, yes, I wish more Republicans already in Congress had sneaked to smoke as kids. Somehow you can just tell that most didn’t. The only hope I ever held out for Boehner was that he smoked but he has proved smoking isn’t a cure-all for certain diseases of the spine..

Smoking’ is probably the one sin a person can try for awhile, then walk away from and be left better off than had he never tried it at all.

Smoking goes with the work boots, that’s a law, and it’s the work boots we must, as a people, keep holy in our society. I can see the connection. As the American House comes tumbling down, as it appears to be doing, we cannot save it, or rebuild it, without first knowing its blueprint, and knowing that work boots are part of its reconstruction.