Thank You for Smoking

10

A Thoroughly Modern Merchant of Death: Nick Naylor, Tobacco's Chief "Smokesman".

An Evil Yuppie or Merely a Mass Enabler to 55 Million Smokers? Claims He Is 'Proudest' of ATS's Anti-Underage Smoking Program

BY HEATHER HOLLOWAY MOON CORRESPONDENT

Robby Jay and Polly were waiting for him at their usual table by the fake fire at Bert's. Bobby Jay was wearing a smirk the size of the Trump Tower. Polly appeared not to have drawn a conclusion yet about the full-page story in the Moon's "Lifestyles" section, but she looked at Nick as he sat down — late — with more than usual curiosity. "You look tired," she said pointedly.

"Rough morning," Nick said. "Advertising-ban strategy session, sick-building-syndrome position paper to get out, radio debate with Craighead. Get this — Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid is going to start using the phrase 'tobacco and other drugs' in all its literature. So now we're just like heroin. Or alcohol," he tweaked her.

Nick ordered a vodka negroni. It was nice, these Mod Squad lunches. You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

"What's with him?" Nick said. Bobby Jay was poring over Heather's article, running his hook down the columns of ink as though he was looking for something crucial.

"I can't quite figure out if I won my hundred bucks," Bobby Jay said. " 'Merchant of Death,' huh? Well I guess she got that right."

"You didn't… " Polly said with a look of latent ferocity. "Of course not. What do you take me for?"

"I'm not," she said, tapping loose her cigarette ash, "entirely sure." Bobby Jay read aloud from the Moon:

" 'Morality is not the issue here,' Naylor told the Moon. 'Tobacco is a hundred percent legal product that nearly sixty million American adults enjoy, just as they do coffee, chocolate, chewing gum, or any number of other oral refreshments.' "

" 'Oral refreshments'?" Polly snorted. "That's new."

Nick winked. "Sounds like a breath mint, doesn't it?"

Bobby Jay continued:

"Even his adversaries, and there are many of them, admit that Naylor is a formidable opponent. 'He's very, very slick,' said Gordon R. Craighead, head of Health and Human Services' Office of Substance Abuse Prevention, the tobacco lobby's principal federal opponent, 'and very, very smart, and that makes him very, very dangerous. This is an industry that kills about half a million Americans a year, and this nicely dressed, smooth-talking, BMW-driving Joseph Goebbels manages to make it sound like we're against free speech.' "

"The BMW-driving bit really hurt," Nick grinned.

Fortunately, Dr. Wheat had had a cancellation and was able to see Nick after lunch. Though his delicious evenings with Heather went jar toward stress reduction, and were a darn sight more fun than Prozac, the Larry King phone threat, plus having bodyguards, had gotten to him.

Nick had been going to Dr. Wheat for about a year. Dr. Wheat had a lot of clients in high-stress jobs. Occasionally, Nick's neck had a tendency to kink so that he couldn't swivel his head, and since part of his job involved being a "talking head" on television, it behooved him to have a head that swiveled. He'd tried neuromuscular massage, yoga, acupuncture, electronic relaxation machines that emitted bleeping noises and had pulsating red lights that supposedly persuaded your brain that you were relaxed, when in fact you were extremely alarmed; also Valium, Halcion, Atarax, and other state-of-the-art calmer-downers, some more controlled than others. Finally someone — the chief spokesman for the Savings and Loan Association, who had herself been coping with stress — suggested that he go see her D.O., or osteopath, who, she assured Nick, were real doctors. So Nick went and Dr. Wheat, a pleasant young man — Nick noted with some chagrin that he was now not only older than most policemen, but also than many doctors — felt his neck, tsk-tsked, and performed a series of high-velocity, low-impact maneuvers on him, each of which resulted in a terrible crrrack of various bones, but which afterward allowed him to rotate his head almost like the girl in The Exorcist. Nick had become quite a fan of OMT, or osteopathic manipulative technique; in fact, he had even done some pro bono work for their trade association. It was he who had come up with the successful slogan for their ads: "D.O.s Are People Doctors."

Dr. Wheat felt Nick's trapezius muscles (anterior and posterior), the suboccipitals, and his sternocleidomastoid. By now he knew these muscles as well as suburban Arlington, which is on the whole much more complicated than the human anatomy.

"Boy," he said — he was very chipper, Dr. Wheat, mid-western and good-natured—"if I didn't know better, I'd say rigor mortis had set in. What have you been doing to yourself?" He did a few HVLIs, but was not satisfied with the result, and disappearing, returned pushing a disturbing-looking device on wheels. It looked like something that the Iraqi secret police would use on someone caught writing saddam sucks on a public wall; it had straps and electrodes. Dr. Wheat rubbed jelly on parts of Nick's chest, attached the electrodes, and said, "You may feel a slight burning."

It felt like he was being struck on the back with wooden mallets. He realized that he was in fact arching off the table with every jolt of current like a frog in a high school biology class experiment.

"H-how m-many v-volts?"

"We're at three-thirty already. Very impressive. I don't like to go much higher than four hundred. The smell of burning flesh alarms the other patients." Dr. Wheat was prone to black humor. He explained that this was DC current that was coursing through Nick's body, that being preferable to AC, which would have the effect of stopping his heart and cooking him. After fifteen minutes, he turned it off and tried to rotate Nick's neck, pronouncing himself still unsatisfied with the result.

"Have you ever considered a less stressful line of work?" he said, opening a cabinet and taking out a bottle of liquid and a hypodermic needle. "Like air traffic controller?"

"And abandon the fifty-five million people who are counting on me," said Nick, checking his chest for burn marks. "What is that?"

"This," Dr. Wheat said, filling the syringe, "is for the stubborn cases." He sank the needle into Nick's shoulder by the neck. It was not a good sensation going in, but… oooooooh what a delicious feeling suffused through all those hypercontracted muscle bands. Suddenly it felt as if his head were borne on clouds.

"Whoa," he said, rotating like a gyrocopter, "what is that?"

"Novocaine. We need to break a cycle here."

"Could I get a prescription for that?"

"I don't think so. I'm going to give you some Soma tablets. Four a day, no driving, and let's see you in two days."

Nick felt pretty great, humming down Route 50 toward Washington, trying to see if he could lose his bodyguards. Little game he'd developed, and good sport. He zoomed over the Roosevelt Bridge and turned hard right onto Rock Creek, left onto the Whitehurst and up Foxhall to Saint Euthanasius for his appointment with the Reverend Griggs.

His bodyguards pulled up in a pissed-off screech of tires as he was walking into the administration building, and came running over sweatily.

"Hi guys." The guys didn't look happy.

"Nicky, I really wish you wouldn't do that, or we're going to have one of us in the car with you."

"Re-lax, Mike." It's soo easy with one cc of novocaine in your traps.

They waited inside for the Rev, who came after a few minutes and started at finding so much suited gristle in his quiet waiting room. "Ah yes," he caught on, "these must be the gentlemen referred to in the newspaper article today. Terrible business." Nick told the boys that he was unlikely to be assaulted in the offices of the Rev and left them to peruse copies of Anglican Digest and Modern Headmaster while he went off to conduct whatever business it was the Rev had in mind.

"Thank you so much for coming," he said, ushering him toward a leather chair. His study looked as though it had been decorated in 1535: floor-to-ceiling Tudor wainscoting, mullioned windows, a threadbare Persian rug, and the faint smell of a hundred years of spilled dry sherry.

They had a little preliminary chin-wag about the recent controversial nomination of a female suffragan bishop. Being a lapsed Catholic, Nick had only a tenuous grasp of hierarchical Episcopalian nomenclature. In fact, he had no clue as to what a suffragan bishop was, except that it sounded like a bishop in distress. Eventually he grasped that it just meant the number-two bish. Since Joey's entire future lay in the hands of the Reverend Griggs, Nick feigned keen interest in the controversy, until even the Reverend Griggs seemed to lose interest and with a soft clearing of his long throat came to the much-awaited point.

"As you know, we hold an auction every year, to raise money for the scholarship students. I was wondering if your association might possibly be interested in participating? This recession has put everyone in a pinch. Even our more—" he smiled " — pecunious parentry."

Geez, Louise. For this Nick had been churning all week? So the Reverend Griggs could hit him up for some underwriting? And yet the Soma and the novocaine had him in a complaisant frame of mind. He reflected warmly and fuzzily that things really had not changed much since 1604. That was the year that James I, king of England, published (anonymously, pamphleteering not being seemly in monarchs) a "Counterblaste to Tobacco." He noted that two Indians from the Virginia colony had been brought to the Sceptered Isle in 1584 to demonstrate this newfangled thing called smoking. By the standards set by Dances With Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, James not been very pc.

"What honor or policie," thundered His Royal Highness, "can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manner of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indian, especially in so vile and stinking a custome?" He allowed as how it had first been used as an antidote to the dreaded "pockes" — which had ruined the complexion of his relative Elizabeth I — but wrote that doctors now considered it a filthy, disgusting habit, providing in a way the first surgeon general's report, and a full 360 years before Luther Terry's in 1964.

As for himself, wrote His Grace, smoking was "a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible, Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse."

By 1612, however, James I was having second thoughts. His exchequer was bursting at the bolts with the import duties on tobacco from the Virginia colony in the James River Valley. In fact, nothing further was heard from His Majesty ever again on the loathesome custome. And thus it has remained, in a way, even to the present day, as the U.S. government goes about like Captain Renaud in Rick's Cafe shouting, "I'm shocked — shocked!" while its trade representatives squeeze foreign governments — particularly Asian ones — to relax their own warning labels and tariffs and let in U.S. weed.

"Mind if I smoke?"

The Rev looked momentarily stricken. "No. Please, yes, by all means."

Nick lit up a Camel, but refrained from blowing one of his nice tight smoke rings, despite what a nice halo it would have made around the Rev's head. "Ashtray?"

"Of course, let's see," the Rev fumbled, looking helplessly around the study. "We must have an ashtray, somewhere." But there was nothing, and with Nick's cigarette already lit, the fuse was, so to speak, burning. Nick took deep drags, hastening the process.

"Margaret," the Rev said desperately into the phone, "do we have an ashtray anywhere? Anything, yes." He sat down.

"We're finding one."

Nick took in another deep drag. The cigarette hovered over the Persian rug. The door opened, Margaret bearing a chipped tea plate embossed with the coat of arms of Saint Euthanasius. "This was all I could find," she said in a voice somewhere between embarrassment and resentment that she had been called upon to play enabler to the blacke stinking fume.

"Yes, thank you, Margaret," said the Rev, nearly grabbing the plate and handing it over to Nick mere seconds before the ash fell onto the school motto: Esto Excellens Inter Se. ("Be Excellent to Each Other.")

"Mainly," Nick said, "we sponsor sports events. But we might be able to work something out." "Wonderful," the Rev said.

"I'll have to run it by our Community Activities people. But we speak the same language."

"Marvelous," said the Rev, twisting in his Queen Anne chair. "I wonder, would it be necessary to… promulgate the… exact provenance of the underwriting?"

" 'Underwriting by the Academy of Tobacco Studies' on the programs?" Nick exhaled. "That is pretty standard."

"Yes, certainly. Yes. I was only wondering if perhaps there was some other… corporate entity that we could acknowledge. Generously, of course."

"Hm," Nick said. "Well, there is the Tobacco Research Council."

"Yes," the Rev said with disappointment, "I suppose." The TRC had been in the news recently because of the Benavides liability suit. It had come out that the TRC had been set up by the tobacco companies in the fifties as a front group, at a time when American smokers realized they were coughing more and enjoying it less, the idea being to persuade everyone that the tobacco industry, by gum, wanted to get to the bottom of these mysterious "health" issues, too. The TRC's first white paper blamed the rise of lung cancer and emphysema on a global surge in pollens. All this, apparently, the Rev knew.

"Are there by chance any other groups?"

Nick clasped his hands together and made a steeple. "We are affiliated with the Coalition for Health."

"Ah!" the Rev said, clapping his hands. "Perfect!"

The Rev walked Nick to his car. Nick asked, "By the way, how's Joey doing?"

"Joey?"

"My son. He's in your seventh grade."

"Ah! Extremely well," the Rev said. "Bright lad."

"So everything's okay?"

"Spiffing. Well then," he shook Nick's hand, "thank you for coming. And I'll look forward to hearing from" — he winked, the dog-collared son of a bitch actually winked—"the Coalition for Health."