Where there’s smoke…
Age 8, Mom 28
While the kids across the pond in London were winding down their last few shows seeing the Sex Pistols, my Baptist family shielded me from the evils of punk rock in the year 1978. In America, Thin Lizzy may have been a household name for some, but for ours Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton reigned. Sadly for my mother, Eddie Van Halen – who was just debuting – would enter my repertoire a few years later.
We were, however, keenly aware of the Dallas Cowboys making it to the Superbowl as were most of the rest of Houston, Dallas, Cut n’ Shoot, Paris, and all other Texas towns in between – not to mention the nation.
The tragic story of Jonestown made its way to the headlines, but my traditional family and church were nothing like them, so not to worry.
For the time being, the center of my world was my church and family. For a portion of each summer, I would spend a few weeks with my East Texas loved ones.
During this summer, Papa bought Granny a great, big ole Pontiac with power windows. When I told her it was nice, she told me she had wanted a Trans Am. My cousins and I sat on the back porch with her and shelled purple hulled peas straight from the garden daily for dinner.
Although my cousins and a few neighborhood friends had a few things to do, I guess we got bored soon enough. One afternoon, we hatched a plan.
We lay in wait for Granny to neglect her square, vanilla, leather box of a purse then lifted three Marlboro Red cigarettes from her matching cigarette case – one for each of us.
In the heat of the East Texas summer, in the scorched grass we crouched like barn cats behind the old, wooden shed. We had stolen some matches, too. We choked and laughed. My friend with her stringy, blonde hair, tiny, sturdy body and hard, worn face that already looked middle aged even though she was only seven, showed us how the tar from the cigarette stained a white Kleenex when she blew a smoky breath into it. It made a nasty orangey brownish spot right in the center. Her lime green shorts were dirty, too short and too worn in the seat, her sleeveless yellow and white striped cotton top fit just barely, but it wasn’t cute. It wasn’t fresh or something a mom who wanted her daughter to have darling clothes would buy.
So we smoked the cigarettes, and that was exciting. But, as B.B. King said, soon enough “the thrill [was] gone.”
Now Granny and Papa smoked so much that the whole “living room” smelled like smoke, and I such good memories combined with the smell of all that smoke that for many years whenever I smelled smoke I felt sentimental about it. Not only that, but Granny chewed tobacco. Beechnut, to be exact.
We got a good idea. We would steal some of Granny’s chewing tobacco, dry it out for about 24 hours, and then smoke it. We snaked some of the tobacco and some paper towels, found a proper spot in the back bedroom, and spread it out the way little girls dry out flowers to save. We checked on it every few hours to see that it was drying properly and how close we were to being able to smoke it.
About four in the next afternoon it was ready and so were we! But wait! What would we roll it in to smoke? We needed some kind of paper. Granny wasn’t too concerned about having a lot of art supplies on hand for us kids, but we had a lot of chicken liver dressing and shelled a bunch of purple hulled peas on the back porch. Well, anyway for heaven’s sake, there was no paper in the entire dang house except for Granny’s Redbook magazine. It would have to do.
I was a long way from being the coolest one in the bunch so they had to show me how to roll. And by God, we smoked that dried chewing tobacco in chemically- and ink-treated magazine paper. My friend could really blow some dark tar stains without a filter. Something in me shifted. This time, it felt dirtier. Planned out. More dangerous.
I returned home to Momma. I was sure she would figure me out. I was wracked with guilt and could not believe we had gotten away with it that long, but I tried to tell myself to keep it together.
One day passed. I held it in, but I was sure that my guilt could actually be seen. It was somehow seeping out like black sludge from under my feet. I managed to fall asleep. Another day began.
My smiling mom glided into my room, beautiful brown hair, cute shorts outfit, and asked me with her sweet face if I had fun at Granny’s, and I could not keep holding the guilt in. It was too much against her glory. I let the words sink into my mire.
I hoped she wouldn’t hate me or punish me but I was ready regardless.
What she did was sit with me, listened fully, took me seriously, looked at me full in the face and said, “You did the right thing by telling the truth. And since you did, I will not punish you for this. Last, you must not do this again.”
Indelible. From that moment on I knew I would tell my story, tell the truth – regardless of the consequences – and hope for the best.
