Try Doing This With A Patch!

That’s the headline in a new ad showing a woman holding a “new, high-tech atomizer that converts water to a smoke-like vapor, generating a cigarette-like look and feel without the thousands of chemicals and the nasty smell of cigarettes.

For the love of God, can America’s tobacco addicts not find another way to engage their hands and mouths other than sucking on a battery-powered fake cigarette? Of course, my indignation and disdain is of a degree that only ex-smokers may rightfully claim. Count me in, 1972-1986.

Oh to smoke! There was no better outward indicator of being a grownup when I was a child. My first attempts at buying cigarettes were during neighborhood campouts in the fourth grade. We’d ride our bikes to the Pure station on Ocoee Street and I’d stage a little one-act drama beside the vending machine.

“What kind of cigarettes did your Dad say he wanted?”

“Kents.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Kents.”

Insert coins (probably about 55 cents). Pack secured. Pedal away. Puff away. Feel awful.

A smoker’s first clue that smoking is bad for you should be how he or she felt after their first time. That campout wasn’t my first time. My first time was when Evelyn Adams came to pick up my Mom for a golf outing. She flicked her lipstick-tinged Parliament (with the recessed filter) onto the concrete driveway as she put her turquoise T-Bird into gear and drove off.

As the lady golfers drove ‘round the corner, I picked up the half-smoked fag and did what I had seen grown-ups do. Yes, I inhaled. Of course I had a coughing jag, but that didn’t stop me. I inhaled again. And then I began to experiment, holding it in different hands and in different ways. Too bad I didn’t have a mirror in which to admire my smoking prowess or a pair of sunglasses to model as I smoked! 

Any pretense that I possessed any maturity or sophistication vanished when the world spun so violently that I had to put myself in a horizontal position for at least 45 minutes. I felt so bad I didn’t even ask Arlena what we were having for dessert that night.