Thank You for Smoking (9 page)

The Captain's health was in some question. Rumors abounded. He had collapsed at the Bohemian Grove in California, and had been taken to the hospital in nearby Santa Rosa, where he was rushed into surgery. The young cardiology resident, having been told who his patient was, told the groggy Captain, as he was wheeling him into the OR, that the doctors' nickname for this particular operating room was "Marlboro Country," this being where they usually did the lung cancer surgery. The Captain, convinced he was in the hands of an assassin, tried frantically to signal someone, but the Valium drip had rendered him incapable of coherent speech, and so he was left to flail helplessly and mutely as he was wheeled into the gleaming steel prairies of Marlboro Country. It did not help when he woke up in the recovery room to the news that an anticipated double-bypass had instead required a quadruple-bypass, and that, to boot, an additional discovery of mitral deterioration had required the insertion of a fetal pig's valve into his heart. The Captain, it was said, had left the hospital a rattled man, and had made arrangements that in the event of any further medical problems, he was to be immediately medevacked to Winston-Salem's own Bowman-Gray Medical Center, which had been built entirely with tobacco money. Here he would be safe from further surgical sabotage at the hands of the
St. Elsewhere
generation.

Nick arrived for lunch at the Tobacco Club a half hour early. It was a massive Greek Revival affair that had been built by the tobacco barons in the 1890s so that they would have a place to get away from their wives. Nick was shown into a small, well-appointed waiting room. The walls were decorated with expensively framed original artwork for various brands of American cigarettes long since gone up in smoke. There was Crocodile, Turkey Red, Duke of Durham, Red Kamel, Mecca, Oasis, Murad—sweet revenge on the old beheader— Yankee Girl, Ramrod ("Mild as a Summer Breeze!"), Cookie Jar ("Mellow, Modern, Mild"), Sweet Caporal, Dog's Head, Hed Kleer ("The Original Eucalyptus Smoke"). What history was here!

Nick sat and smoked in a heavy leather armchair and listened to the tick-tock of the giant grandfather clock.

At one minute to noon the crystal glass swing doors opened and a man of obvious importance walked in, creating a bow-wave of commotion. He was a trim, elegant man in his late sixties, with a David Niven mustache and wavy white hair that suggested a brief, long-ago flirtation with bohemianism. He was not a tall man, but the erect way he carried himself seemed to add several inches. He was gorgeously tailored in a tropical-weight, double-breasted, dark blue pinstripe suit that looked as though it had been sewn onto him at one of those London places like Huntsman or Gieves & Hawkes where you need a social reference from three dukes and a viscount just to get in the door. Pinned to the lapel, Nick noted, was a brightly colored military rosette. The man radiated authority. Porters rushed to relieve him of his hat and silver-tipped cane—did it conceal a sword?—with such solicitude as to suggest that these objects were insupportable burdens. Another porter materialized with a small whisk and began gently to brush the shoulders of the suit. Dis
encumbered and dusted, this gentl
eman looked in the direction of the waiting room as a porter inclined to whisper into his ear and to point in Nick's direction.

He turned and strode, smiling, toward Nick with outstretched hand.

"Mister
Naylor,"
he said with delight and a sense of moment, "I am Doak Boykin and I am
extremely
pleased to meet you."

Faced with such grandeur, Nick mumbled, "Hello, Mr. Boykin."

"Please," the old man said, "call me Captain." Taking Nick's elbow he steered him to the table in the corner.

"Punctuality," he grinned, "is the courtesy of
kings.
Not many northerners appreciate that." One servant pulled his chair out for him as another swiftly removed the starched white napkin from its place setting and in one graceful motion snapped it open and eased it down onto the Captain's lap.

"Will you join me in a refreshment?" He did not wait for Nick's response. Nothing was said to the waiter, who merely nodded while another momentarily appeared with a tray with two silver cups beaded with condensation and overflowing with crushed ice and fresh sprigs of mint.

"Mud," the Captain said. He sipped, closed his eyes, and let out a little
ah.

"Do you know the secret to a
really
good julep? Crush the mint down onto the ice with your thumb and grind it in. Releases the menthol." He chuckled softly. "Do you know who taught me that?" Nick did not, but he supposed some descendant of Robert E. Lee. "Ferdinand Marcos, president of the Philippines."

Nick waited for elaboration; none came. Another prerogative of the really rich.

"What year were you born, Mister Naylor?" Should he tell him, Call me Nick?

"Nineteen fifty-two, sir."

The Captain smiled and shook his head. "Nineteen fifty-two! Good Lord. Nineteen fifty-two." He took another sip of his julep, crunched down on a chunk of ice, bared his teeth, which were white. "I was in K
orea shooting Chinese in ninete
en-fifty-two."

"Really," Nick said, unable to think what else to say.

"Today, the Chinese are my best customers. There's the twentieth century for you."

"Seventy percent of adult Chinese males smoke," Nick observed.

"That is correct," the Captain said. "Next time we won't have to
shoot
so many of'em, will we?"

He sat back in his chair, chuckling. "Will you join me in another?" Another tray appeared with more drinks. What was the protocol? Should Nick drain his first one? He did, spilling ice chunks onto his lap.

"Nineteen fifty-two was a significant year for our business," the Captain continued. "Do you remember what Mr. Churchill said?" The Captain did a growly imitation: " 'It is not the end, or even the beginning of the end. But I believe that it may be the end of the beginning.' Nineteen fifty-two being of course the year the
Reader's Digest
published that article about the health . . . aspect." Tobacco executives avoided certain words, like "cancer." "That was, you might say, the end of our beginning."

Lunch was served, much to Nick's relief as he was now woozy with mentholated bourbon. The Captain talked about what the new leadership in Korea meant for the industry. They began with chilled spiced shrimp and moved on to filet mignon and baked potatoes with globs of sour cream. The Captain told the maitre d' that he must never reveal to Mrs. Boykin what he had eaten or, he warned direly, "she'll skin both of us alive." Rich men delight in displaying an exaggerated fear of their wives. They think it humanizes them.

"Yes
sir,
Captain!" the waiter said, enjoying his part in the conspiracy of silence.

"May I?" Nick said, taking out his pack when the plates were cleared.

"Please, thank you. I'm always so
grateful
when members of the younger generation smoke." He seemed wistful. "I would join you, but since my recent . . . experience Mrs. Boykin has become quite vehement on the subject, so I will forgo and forbear, for the sake of domestic tranquillity. My eldest daughter asked me the other day what, at my age, I enjoy, and I told her, 'Voting Republican and being left alone by your mother.' "

Coffee was served. Other club members stopped by their table to pay court to the Captain, who graciously introduced Nick to them.

"The
Nick Naylor?" one said, grasping Nick's hand. "Well, I
am
pleased to meet you, sir. Fine job, fine job!" They made quite a fuss over him. It was all very gratifying. Yes, indeed, this was most pleasant. Nick could see living in Winston-Salem, lunching at the Tobacco Club, not having to apologize or justify his existence all the time. "Tobacco takes care of its own," went the saying. Yes it did, it certainly did.

"I'd say you've made a splendid impression, Nick," the Captain glowed as the last of Nick's admirers had receded. "May I call you Nick? I do not usually engage in diminutives, but in this case I would like to. You remind me just a little bit of myself when I was your age."

"Please," Nick said, embarrassed, "by all means." "You were a television reporter, before?"

Nick flushed. Well, there was no escaping it. It would be in his obituary.
It was Naylor who, as a local Washington TV reporter, announced on live television that the President had choked on a piece of meat at a military base and died, causing the stock market to drop 180 points and lose $3 billion worth of value before the White House produced the President, alive.
The best he could hope for was to accomplish something else in life that would relegate that to the second paragraph.

"That was a long time ago," Nick said.

The Captain held up his hand. "You don't have to explain it to me. In your shoes I probably would have done the same thing. One does have to
seize
the day. JJ told me all about it. That's why he hired you. Knew exa
ctly
what he was doing."

"He did?"

"Damn right. Whatever else
JJ
was, and I regret that I had to let him go, he was a student of the human condition. He said to me, 'That boy is going to work his
behind
off putting this thing behind him, making a new name for himself.' "

"Other than the Three Billion Dollar Man."

"He said something else. He said, 'That boy is going to be one
angry
young man.' I didn't realize just how angry until I watched you yesterday on that colored woman's show, Obrah. Son, you were
magnificent."

"Thank you."

"I was angry, too, when I got back from Korea. Do you know
why,
Mister Naylor?" "No sir."

"Because I resolved that I would never—ever—again be put in a situation where I had to submit to the authority of
incompetent men.
I started in the flues and within five years I was a vice president, the youngest vice president in corporate tobacco history. That, sir, is what anger can do for you. Join me in a brandy, won't you."

Once again the drinks materialized out of air, borne on a silver tray. What a club! And the waiters didn't introduce themselves to you by their first name. They were everything waiters should be: subservient, efficient, taciturn.

"Do you
enjoy
your work, Nick?"

"Yes," Nick said. "It's challenging. As we say around the office, 'If you can do tobacco, you can do anything.' "

The Captain snorted into his snifter. "You know, your generation of tobacco men—and women, I'm always forgetting to add 'and women'—think they have it harder than any generation who came before. You think it
all
began in nineteen fifty-two. Well, puh!"

Puh?

"It's been going on for almost five hundred years. Does the name Rodrigo de Jerez mean anything to you?" Nick shook his head. "No, I suppose it doesn't. I suppose they don't teach history in the schools anymore, just attitude. Well, for your information, sir, Rodrigo de Jerez went ashore with Christopher Columbus. And he watched the natives 'drink smoke,' as he put it, with their pipes. He brought tobacco back to the Old World with him. Sang its praises high to the frescoed ceilings. Do you know what happened to him? The Spanish Inquisition put him in jail for it. They said it was a 'devilish habit.' You think you have it bad having to deal with the Federal Trade Commission? How would you like to have to state your case before the Spanish Inquisition?" "Well . . ."

"You bet you would not. Remember that name, Rodrigo de Jerez. You're walking in his footsteps. He was the first tobacco spokesman. I suppose he, too, found it 'challenging.' "

"Uh. . . ."

"Does the name Edwin Proon mean anything to you?" "Prune?"

"God in heaven, the billions of dollars we
throw
at the public schools. Edwin Proon lived in the Massachusetts Colony in the early 1600s when the Puritan fathers were going around nailing up the first no-smoking signs in the New World. You think you're the first to have to deal with building restrictions and public ordinances? No sir, I do not reckon that you are. Edwin Proon was fighting that battle long ago. They passed a law saying you couldn't smoke in public and 'public' meant anywhere more than one person was present. They put
him
in the stocks. And when they caught him smoking in the stocks they clamped an iron hood over his face. Do you suppose Edwin Proon found it 'challenging'?"

Fasten your seat belts, Nick thought, we have four hundred more years to go. In detail, the Captain reminded him that America had waged outright war against the "pernicious practice"—in the 1790s, the 1850s, the 1880s. He reminded him that Horace Greeley had called a cigar "a fire at one end and a fool at the other," that Thomas Edison had refused to hire smokers, that in this very century, Americans—and not just women—had actually been arrested for the act of lighting a cigarette. On and on it went until little beads of perspiration appeared on the Captain's forehead, like julep sweat. Finally he stopped and patted his brow with his handkerchief.