December 2005 Cover
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Again!
By
Mitzel
My voice now sounds like something in between the mature Marianne Faithful and the late Tallulah Bankhead in her last public appearance. It is deep, raspy and not very flexible. It has become this way largely as a result of my addiction to cigarettes, a habit I am now in the
process of quitting. It isn't easy. I've quit before, often for many years, but some triggering event has always taken me back to the weed. I am now in what the medics call the "mucous phase" of tobacco addiction, which doesn't get me asked out to dinner.
Behaviors are very much a part of the time in which they were patterned. I was 16 years old-- and already smoking-- when the Surgeon General of the United States published his findings linking tobacco use to cancer. Prior to this event, cigarette smoking was portrayed
as a glamorous behavior. Cigarettes were advertised on television and in the magazines. I recall a TV show from the 1950s (one of the variety shows) which featured a promotion for cigarettes. As its closing gesture, an announcement was made that all patients at a designated
Veteran's Hospital would each receive a free carton of cigarettes.
Cigarettes were standard props in the movies, most seductively in
Now, Voyager, in which Bette Davis smokes up a storm. Charlotte's sharing those cigarettes with Jerry was clearly a substitute for sexual intercourse. You could smoke in subway stations, in restaurants,
even in certain parts of movie theaters. Chet Huntley actually smoked while delivering the news on NBC (in its original fifteen minute format). Edward R. Murrow constantly smoked on his TV show
See It Now. On the other hand, cigarette companies sponsored so many shows on the
screen; maybe this was an early glimpse of product placement. The men's room in the old Boston Public Library could, on occasion, get quite cruisey and many of the boys would pass the idle hours puffing away. The late Boyd McDonald once famously noted that New York in the 1950s
was the capital of smoking, drinking, and cocksucking. (And poor Boyd took up the habit early, stayed with it, and it was instrumental in his death.) I think one of the contributing factors to the ambience of any gay bar were the wisps of cigarette smoke spiraling into the dark air. (In
some gay bars, there were in fact too many Bette Davises! Or, in one instance in my bar-crawl days, an Agnes Gooch!)
These days, at least in my state, you can't smoke in any gay bar or any bar or restaurant at all, but you can marry! While visiting my mother in Ohio a few months back, we went to an Olive Garden restaurant-- one of the higher-end
bistros in town-- and I was asked
"Smoking or Non-Smoking." I felt as though I had entered a time warp. We then walked past two tables of adults, munching their pizzas, drinking their beers, and smoking their cigarettes! No one was pestering them.
Contrast this with what happened to me just the other day. I was on my way to my local Post Office, which takes me through the outside concourse at Boston's South Station (Amtrak and commuter rails). I was smoking a cigarette. As I walked past the trains, a young
Asian or Asian-American man started hectoring me, screaming at me for smoking, making threatening gestures at me, jumping up and down while tagging alongside me. I assume half of the people in this country are insane in any phase of the moon, and this one had latched on to me.
I smoked my cigarette to the end and then extinguished it. My tormenter walked away (to assault another smoker? I had no idea).
Funny how stigma for behaviors rotates around. Just as smoking got demonized in the late 60s and early 70s (when the TV and radio ads were pulled), homosexuality got "normalized," whatever that means. Around the same time, I think the shrinks pathologized obesity
and perhaps a slate of other things. They must have, I guess, a selection on their menu and I know I have been hard on the headshrinkers in my writing career, but there are people out there with real problems and maybe some of the docs offer good advice. When Allen Ginsberg
went to see his shrink in the 1940s, to discuss his homosexuality, his doc recommended that AG get comfortable with his sexuality and "become the best homosexual that you can be," which, I think, Ginsberg did, becoming a mover in changing the landscape. It might be enough to
make one become a student of Michel Foucault-- again! Testifying to the durability of cyclical fads.
It is usual, as you get older, to let things fall off your dance card. Friends die or move away. Fanciful pursuits when young lose their luster. Things once collected seem less important, and when you move you are forced to clean things out. Recently, I made the effort to
get rid of my collection of LPs. Since I no longer have a turntable, why keep vinyl? My neighbor told me I could get a good turntable at a good price. I looked at him and said: "I'm 58 years old. Do you think I want to listen to the Pet Shop Boys ever again?" That one was easy. The
others are harder, as they should be.
Including the count-down to that last cigarette. I will miss Puff that magic dragon.
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