Where there's smoke...

When I was eight, some friends and I lay in wait for Granny to neglect her square, vanilla leather box of a purse. We lifted three Marlboro Red cigarettes from her matching cigarette case.

In the heat of the East Texas summer, in the scorched grass we crouched like barn cats behind the old, wooden shed.

My 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.

We had stolen some matches, too. We choked and laughed. The 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 cigarrette stained a white Kleenex when she blew a smokey breath into it, making 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. She very well may have been barefoot.

So we smoke the cigarettes, and that’s exciting. But, as B.B. King says, soon enough “the thrill is gone.”

We try phone pranking for a while, just calling random numbers from the yellow pages and dialing them from Granny’s rotary phone, asking questions like, “Is there a John in the house? No? When then how do you go to the toilet?” laughing, hanging up, and rolling with hysterics. but that gets old. Plus we get in trouble for it.

So we get a good idea. We will steal some of Granny’s chewing tobacco, dry it out for about 24 hours, and then smoke it. So we snake some of the tobacco and some paper towels, find a proper spot in the back bedroom, and spread it out the way little girls dry out flowers to save. We check on it every few hours to see that it is drying properly and how close we are to being able to smoke it.

About four in the next afternoon it is ready and so are we! But wait! What will we roll it in to smoke? We need some kind of paper. Well, for heaven’s sake, there is no paper in the entire dang house except for Granny’s Redbook magazine. It will have to do.

So we tear out a few pieces of magazine paper.

I am not the coolest one in the bunch so they have to show me how to roll. And by God, we smoke that dried chewing tobacco in chemically- and ink-treated magazine paper.

The friend can really blow some dark tar stains without a filter.


Something in me shifts. This time, it feels dirtier. Planned out. More dangerous.

I return home to Mom. I am sure someone will figure me out. I am wracked with guilt. I can’t believe we’ve gotten away with it this long. But I try to tell myself to keep it together.

One day passes. I hold it in, but I am sure that my guilt can actually be seen. It is somehow seeping out like black sludge from under my feet. I manage to fall asleep. Another day begins.

My smiling mom glides into my room, beautiful brown hair, cute shorts outfit, and asks me with her sweet face if I had fun at Granny’s with my step-sister, and I cannot keep holding the guilt in. It’s too much against her glory. I let the words sink into my mire.

I hope she won’t hate me or punish me but I am ready regardless.

What she does is to sit with me, listen fully, take me seriously, and look at me full in the face and say, “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 always tell my story, tell the truth – regardless of the consequences – and hope for the best.