Have you had to navigate clouds of secondhand WEED smoke on city streets? Been forced to endure sitting next to a VAPESTER and his fog MACHINE? DWIGHT GARNER wonders if maybe, just maybe, smoking was better.
“I do not make much sense without tobacco.”
—John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever
My mother was a pack-a-day smoker for much of her life, and as a child I hated it. Our house reeked. The car was worse. She’d hotbox my siblings and me by neglecting to roll down the windows. Once or twice, by accident, she brushed me with a lit cigarette. As Henry Fonda put it about one of Hollywood’s most furious smokers, “I’ve been close to Bette Davis for thirty-eight years—and I have the cigarette burns to prove it.” We’d get revenge on my mother, when we were teenagers, by slipping those little slivers of exploding loads into the tips of her Merits. My mom is the sweetest woman in the world and does not have a big temper. But when one of her cigarettes would detonate in her face, bang, leaving her looking like Wile E. Coyote on the wrong end of a spherical Acme bomb, she’d lose it. We’d run away at hilarious, cranked-up, silent-movie speed.
This story is from the Summer 2019 edition of Esquire.
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This story is from the Summer 2019 edition of Esquire.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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