LIMERANCES
Zac June 7th, 2009
“And thereby hangs a tale.”
I Write Like…Who???
July 17th, 2010Having read about the new website “I Write Like” (http://iwl.me/), which matches samples of one’s own prose with those of famous authors, I decided to have the site analyze some of the longer entries from my “memoir in flux,” and here are the results.
My recollection of the one time I met Arthur Miller was likened to the prose of Vladimir Nabokov. This was very flattering indeed. I’ve read and admired everything Nabokov has ever written, most especially the novel Lolita; and, of course, his wondrous autobiography, Speak, Memory!
My account of the brief encounter I had with Kurt Vonnegut was said to be reminiscent of none other than…Kurt Vonnegut! I’m not sure what to think about this comparison, since I am definitely not a Vonnegut fan, except perhaps for a couple of short pieces in Welcome to the Monkey House.
My story about Robert Anderson’s reply to a letter I wrote him when I was a teenager in the Philippines, asking him about possible interpretations of his play Tea and Sympathy, was tagged as something William Gibson might have written. Only problem is, there are at least two William Gibsons who are writers. There’s William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist; and there’s William Gibson, the playwright who wrote The Miracle Worker. Surely, it must be the latter, because I’ve seen many of his plays, and because I know the former only by reputation.
One of my many entries about Sarah Palin was decoded and identified with Dan Brown, whom I’ve never read. I did see the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, which bored me to death, so I’m baffled by the link. But, now that I’m thinking about it, I do see some similarity between Sarah Palin’s self-satisfied smirk of a smile with that of Mona Lisa. I may be the only person in the world who thinks that Ms. Lisa looks like a balding, overweight man in drag. I’m sure this is what Sarah Palin will look like after the 2012 election.
My retelling of what happened the night I got the long-distance telephone call from Manila that my father had died, was, to my surprise, compared to the work of Stephen King. In truth, though, my father did have a dog once who had rabies and was Cujo-like before it had to be put down. And, I do like Stand by Me–the novel, the movie adaptation with River Phoenix, and also the song written and originally performed by Ben E. King.
I tried three more entries from my website—one about my mother’s laughter, and two about my various encounters with William S. Burroughs. Remarkably, all three entries identified me as another David Foster Wallace. Unfortunately, I had no idea who David Foster Wallace was, nor what he might have written. So I looked him up on the internet.
It turns out that David Foster Wallace was a novelist, short story writer, and essayist who was also a creative writing professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. The Los Angeles Times named him “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years,” and his 1996 novel Infinite Jest was included by Time magazine in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923-2006).
This is great. It’ll give me a good excuse to catch up on contemporary fiction. I’ve been immersed too long in theatre and dramatic literature.
By way of trivia, I also learned that David Foster Wallace was close to his two dogs, Bella and Warner, and that he had talked frequently about opening a dog shelter. His friends said that “he had a special predilection for dogs who had been abused and were unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them”
It gets better and better. I really like this guy. I’m going to buy and read all his books, see if we really view life and approach writing the same way. And then, suddenly, his name rang a bell.
According to a September 14, 2008 article in The New York Times, David Foster Wallace “died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46. A spokeswoman for the Claremont police said Mr. Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Mr. Wallace’s father, James Donald Wallace, said in an interview on Sunday that his son had been severely depressed for a number of months.”
Oh, God. Now I’m depressed.
My Father’s Silence
June 20th, 2010I wrote a play in 1988 about my mother. Although my father is talked about a great deal in Mother Tongue, he never actually appears in the play because I always thought he deserves a play of his own and that, one day, I would give him his due. I still want to, but every time I think about him now, all I hear is his silence.
In December of 1969, seventeen months after I left the Philippines for the United States, my father died. I wrote about those first seventeen months away from home in a short story called “Flight.” The story was published in 1970 and has been included in a number of anthologies, but I must admit that I haven’t read it, not since I wrote it, until just moments ago.
Here are bits and pieces from “Flight.” It begins with my family seeing me off at the Manila International Airport.
I kissed my mother goodbye and told her to stop crying….Then I turned to my father. There were so many things which I had wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. They never do, when you most need them. And then they sound false. Luckily, my father understood….He grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously. The strength of his grip surprised me. I realized with a start that I had never shaken his hand before! I withdrew my hand quickly, but he grabbed it again. And this time he pressed his calendar-watch and amethyst ring into the palm of my hand. The actual physical contact was brief, but his touching me like that brought back a load of childhood memories, many of them unpleasant as well as embarrassing.
Again I did not know what to say. I could not imagine my father without his old calendar-watch and amethyst ring. He had worn both for as long as I could remember and now he was giving them to me!
The calendar-watch had hands which glowed in the dark, so you could tell the time all the time. It made no difference whether you were in your bedroom at 12:00 midnight or inside a darkened movie house at 12:00 noon—you could still tell the exact time because of those big luminous hands. As for the ring, it seemed almost too large and ostentatious for anyone’s hand except my father’s. The enormous purple birthstone was flanked on both sides by tiny white diamonds, and the whole ring sparkled with life every time light fell on it.
I fastened my father’s old calendar-watch on my right wrist and slipped his ring onto the ring finger of my left hand. I wanted to embrace him, to tell him that I loved him, but I checked both impulses as I disappeared into the departing lounge that hot and humid day at the Manila International Airport. I vaguely heard my father’s voice ringing after me. ”Don’t forget to reset the calendar date on the watch when you get to America! Be sure to turn the hands back. You gain a full day when you cross the International Date Line!” Those were his parting words.
They were also the last words he ever said to me. My mother called me the night of December 6, 1969 to tell me that my father had died. He had not been well for a couple of years, and now he was gone. It was Sunday afternoon halfway across the world. My father had died ten minutes past midnight on Sunday. Mother said many of the people from the church were at the house. They were a great comfort to her. No, she didn’t want me to come home for the funeral. She said my father would have wanted me to stay in school because it was the week of final exams, so I can graduate after just one more semester. “You can come home in May, after you graduate.”
I went to the kitchen and poured myself a Scotch-and-water. Back in the living room, I remembered with a start that, seventeen months ago, my father and I had been drinking Scotch-and-water at the bar in the airport. It was the first time we had ever drunk together. I thought it ironic that the first time also turned out to be the last.
The living room was uncomfortably still. Left to myself, I decided that I wanted noise, clatter, music, life. I looked through my records—flipping through Liszt, Chopin, Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart—rejecting one and all until I chanced upon the “Farewell, Angelina” album by Joan Baez.
Joan Baez. Her voice has an airy quality about it which reminds me of lofty rooms and high ceilings, rainy mornings and windy afternoons, snowy evenings and cold December nights.
“You must leave now—
Take what you need you think will last;
But whatever you wish to keep,
You’d better grab it fast.”
I poured myself another drink in the kitchen and turned off the lights in the living room when I came back. The house plunged into eerie darkness. I looked at my watch. Its hands glowed luminously in the dark. It was only 11:30 P.M.
Then it dawned on me.
I realized with a start that I had been staring at my father’s old calendar-watch. I was wearing the watch he had pressed into my hand the last time I saw him! What had I done with his amethyst ring? Why wasn’t I wearing that, too? Again I stared at the watch, my eyes following the voyage of the second-hand as it overtook the minute-hand and then the hour-hand.
I remembered my father’s parting words at the airport: ”Don’t forget to reset the calendar date on the watch when you get to America! Be sure to turn the hands back! You gain a full day when you cross the International Date Line!”
Saturday night was nearly over in Lawrence. Then I realized with another start that, soon, it would be midnight. Soon it would be Sunday. Soon the luminous hands of my father’s old calendar-watch would indicate that it was ten minutes past midnight, in mid-America. Technically speaking, right here, right now, my father was still alive, and he was going to die all over again, for my benefit–in Kansas!
“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out! The saints are coming through.
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”
I swallowed the rest of my drink and held back my tears.
Forty-one years later, I still haven’t wept for my father. Perhaps because I wasn’t with him when he died, perhaps because I did not go home for the funeral so I never actually saw him dead, for whatever reason, there has never been any closure for me when it comes to me and my father. In my mind, he’s still very much alive, although these days I no longer remember what his voice sounds like. He never spoke much, to begin with. And now all I hear is his silence.
Today is Father’s Day. Bless me, father, for I have been remiss.
My Mother’s Laughter
May 9th, 2010Although I emigrated to the United States in 1968, my mother did not come to visit me in Kansas until August of 1976, after she had already been in America for four months. The reason why she decided to make the long journey from the Philippines was because my play Conpersonas was being performed in April of that year at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and also because (I think) she finally realized I was never going to be a doctor or a businessman, so she might as well see what I was really up to.
I was still in Kansas when my mother’s early-morning flight on Philippine Air Lines landed at Dulles International Airport in Washington. I was arriving later the same day, but I had made arrangements for someone to meet her at Dulles, and to check her into the room which had been reserved for her at the Watergate Hotel, right next door to the Kennedy Center. I was about to leave the house for my own flight to D.C. when the telephone rang. It was her.
“Why weren’t you at the airport to meet me?” my mother asked hysterically. She had been flying for nearly 16 hours, had been in transit for over 30 hours, probably hadn’t slept a wink, and had probably been terrified of going through U.S. Immigration and Customs all by herself. ”What kind of a son are you?”
“Mom,” I reasoned with her, trying my best to explain that I had no control over airline schedules, but that I would be at the Watergate in time to have dinner with her.
“Hurry! I’m hungry!” she wailed.
“Order something from Room Service.”
“It’s okay. I’ll wait for you. But hurry.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Take a taxi. It will be faster.”
To this day, I don’t know if my mother was trying to be funny with that remark, or whether she really had no idea that, unlike the places in Manila that she frequently visited and patronized, Lawrence, KS was not a short cab ride away from downtown Washington D.C.
But, back to the momentous event at the Kennedy Center. If nothing else, I think my Chinese mother was truly impressed by the fact that my play in English was being performed by Caucasians, in front of mostly Caucasians, at the Kennedy Center. Although Conpersonas was a serious drama about identical twin brothers who commit suicide within hours of one another, my mother sat through the entire performance at the Eisenhower Theater with an enormous grin on her face. She might as well have been watching My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music. She had been introduced from the stage earlier in the evening, so people knew where she was sitting. If anyone in the audience had seen her beaming happily as the two unhappy brothers in the play shot and killed themselves, they might have jumped to wrong conclusions as to why I had left the Philippines, why I had safely chosen to keep my mother 7,000 miles away from me.
In any case, to my great surprise, after the hoopla of Conpersonas at the Kennedy Center was over, instead of returning with me to Lawrence, KS, where I had already been teaching as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the English Department at the University of Kansas, my mother decided to spend some time with her friend Helen from the Philippines, whom she hadn’t seen for some time, who was now living in Brooklyn. ”Helen never graduated from college,” my mother confided, “but already she is running her own business in Chinatown!” My mother thought it might be fun to live with Helen for a while, perhaps even work for her for a while.
Hard as I tried, I could not picture my mother working in a sweatshop alongside all the illegal immigrants from China and Hong Kong packed to overflowing on the second floor of an old building in Chinatown that probably should have been condemned years ago . And I was terrified that she might get mugged in the subways. But there was no dissuading her. In the Philippines, my mother was accustomed to having servants attending to her every need, chauffeurs driving her everywhere. But now she was determined to be independent, to earn her own keep in America, just like an American, walking the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, daring anyone to mug her, in the subway or anywhere else. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. ”Go back to Kansas. I’ll be fine in New York with Helen. She is like a daughter to me. She will treat me like her own mother. If I get mugged, it will be God’s will, because I would not be here in America had you not invited me to come and see your play about those two brothers who killed themselves at the Kennedy Center.”
And so, with a heavy heart, I deposited my mother with Helen in Brooklyn. But, before I left, I cautioned my mother never to look anyone in the eye when she’s out and about, never to argue with anyone who accosts her and, most importantly, to carry at least $20 at all times on her person, so she can give it to anyone who wants to rob her, to keep muggers from harming her because she wasted their time when they could have been mugging other rich old ladies. My mother looked at me oddly, as though I were in cahoots with her would-be muggers, but I wouldn’t leave until she promised. And so she did.
Months went by. I called my mother two or three times a week from Kansas, and was delighted to hear that she loved New York, that she was “Miss Popularity” in the sorority of sweatshop sisters, and that she had yet to be mugged. According to my mother, Helen’s “factory” was turning out high-end clothing for fancy department stores like Bloomingdale’s, and it was her job to inspect the lingerie which were coming off “the assembly line.” She was Inspector #17, and she tucked a slip of paper into every piece of lingerie after she was done inspecting it, signifying that the garment had been inspected by Inspector #17.
I used to daydream about anyone who might have bought any lingerie at Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue and 59th St. in New York City between early May and mid-August of 1976. Chances are my mother had her finger on the unmentionables of unsuspecting shoppers like Kim Novak or Jane Fonda long before they slipped them on (or off) to charm their beastly bedmates.
When being Inspector #17 finally lost its glamour in that non-air-conditioned loft in Chinatown in the heat of August in New York, my mother decided it was time to visit me in Lawrence, KS. Her arrival had been much anticipated by all my friends and colleagues at the University of Kansas. She was going to stay for a couple of weeks, so I prepared a bedroom for her on the upper level of the house, with a bathroom all to herself. I was giving a cocktail party for her. Lovely finger sandwiches were being prepared by a woman who was nearly blind, who lived in North Lawrence. The only way I could ever find her house was by the three-foot tall statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary she had out on her lawn. A bartender had been hired to mix and serve drinks, and to help clean up the place afterwards. Invitations had been sent out to 75 people, and everyone had accepted.
When the appointed day arrived, my mother emerged from her bedroom, resplendent in one of the many bejewelled evening gowns she had brought with her from Manila, one of which she had worn the evening of my play at the Kennedy Center, but the others she had had no occasion to wear in Brooklyn or the sweatshops in Chinatown. She was a big hit at the party, a merry widow too young to have a son like me. Everyone loved her. No one suspected her secret life as Inspector #17.
The morning after the night before, sometime around 6:30 A.M., I heard my mother scratching on my bedroom door. ”Paul! Paul!” she whispered.
“What? What time is it? Why aren’t you still in bed sleeping?”
“Paul! Paul!” she repeated, more urgently. ”Did you take the toothpaste from my bathroom upstairs?”
“What’re you talking about? Why should I take your toothpaste? Go back to bed, please.”
She went away, but only briefly. Moments later, she was again outside my room, scratching on the door. ”Paul! Paul!” again she whispered.
“What is it now?”
“Did you take the Revlon Blush-On from the bathroom upstairs?”
“What Revlon Blush-On? What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“My Revlon Blush-On. You know, for my make-up. I cannot go out without my Revlon Blush-On.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. What on earth would I do with your Revlon Blush-On?”
There was no going back to sleep, so we searched through all the drawers in her bathroom upstairs. The guests at the party had been using that bathroom all night. All her travellers checks were still there, as were some of her more common everyday jewelry. Nothing was missing except her toothpaste and her Revlon Blush-On. It was a big mystery. My mother burst out laughing. She laughed so hard the tears rolled down her cheeks. She laughed so hard, her knees were weak, and she had to sit on the toilet. I’ve never heard her laugh like that, ever.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“I lived for four months in New York, and nothing happened to me,” she howled. ”Everyday, I put $20 in my purse like you told me, to give to muggers, and no one ever mugged me. But I come to Lawrence, Kansas to meet your friends, and someone goes into the bathroom during the party and steals my toothpaste and my Revlon Blush-On!”
A couple of days later, when I was telling this story to some friends from the Theatre Department who had not been able to attend the party because they were in rehearsal with a play, one of them snapped to attention
“Wait a minute,” she exclaimed. ”at one of our parties, the morning after, we discovered that someone had taken the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo!”
Others began to remember losing similar sorts of things from their bathrooms after parties of one sort or another. Nothing valuable. Always small, inconsequential items. A bathroom freak was among us! An academic klepto! We began to compare the guest list at these parties, and it did not take long before we thought we had our man…or woman. No way of proving it, of course, but when I described the woman in question to my mother, she lit up immediately. She remembered the woman, a recent arrival from Poland.
“Why, yes,” my mother laughed. ”That woman asked me how I managed to keep my skin so soft, and I told her that the only make-up I use is Revlon Blush-On!”
Mystery solved.
After that first visit in August of 1976, my mother has been back to see me in Kansas three or four more times, and each time she doubles up laughing whenever I tell people about how she once dazzled an “admirer” in Lawrence with her pearly white Asian teeth and her blushing pink cheeks.
My mother is now 86 years old, living in Manila with my married sister, her husband and their three children. It has been thirteen years since she has visited me in Kansas. If she is reading this now, I doubt if the story will make her double up and laugh, like she used to. I don’t know if she will remember the story at all.
My mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s. My sister says that, these days, our mother just sits there all day, not recognizing anyone, but she smiles whenever she feels a friendly presence nearby. I hope she is smiling right now because it’s Mother’s Day. She has had many sorrows in her remarkable life, which I’ve written about in my play Mother Tongue, so perhaps it is a blessing that she no longer remembers the wars in China and the Philippines that she has lived through, the children she bore who should not have died so young. Although my sister, my brothers and I now choose to remember only the happy times we’ve had in each other’s company, someday we too will forget that we were ever even happy together.
Chinglish, Japlish, Kapish?
May 3rd, 2010An article by Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times gives some wonderfully wacky illustrations of English as it is written and spoken today in China—e.g., the Dongda Anus Hospital for what should be the Dongda Proctology Hospital, restaurants offering “fried enema” instead of “fried sausage,” and signs in parks which urge visitors to treat grass humanely, with such admonisments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.” Lawncare today, perhaps human rights tomorrow. But, I digress.
Visiting Hong Kong some years ago, I was amused to see the following sign posted by the stairwell of a fancy department store: “Foreign Ladies Have Fits Upstairs.” And in Japan back in the early 1970s, when tourists were urged not to eat fresh fruits or raw vegetables because Japanese farmers were still using night soil to fertilize their fields, the Tokyo Hilton had elegant little placards on the tables in their dining facilities, which proclaimed that “all the fruits and vegetables served in this restaurant have been washed in water personally passed by the chef.” And my favorite story of all is the one that a friend recounts about the early wake-up call he left at his Tokyo hotel. When the wake-up call came as requested, at four in the morning, the ominous voice at the other end of the telephone line said, “Sir, your hour has come!”
But, why pick on the Chinese or the Japanese for trying to learn the logic and nuances of the English language? When I first started to teach Freshman and Sophomore English at the University of Kansas in the 1970s, a group of us instructors had great fun compiling the gems we found in the essays written by our students. I still remember some of them.
“Inductive reasoning is done inside the brain, while deductive reasoning is done outside the brain.”
“The wild, wild west was a gun-flinging society.”
“I want to mar a woman just like my father marred.”
“I’m the first person in my family to go to collage.”
“In the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Laura’s leg keeps coming up between her and other people.”
Growing up Chinese in the Philippines in the 40s and 50s, learning to speak and write English first with the Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila, and then with the Christian Brothers at De La Salle College, I never dreamed that I would spend most of my adult life in an institution of higher learning in Kansas, teaching native speakers of English how to speak and write their own language properly. These days, with all our students texting and tweeting, throwing out the once-sacred rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation, I’m starting to think of Chinglish and Japlish as the Queen’s English. Capisce? Or is that Kapish?
Miss Utah Made Me Do It!
April 8th, 2010I was smoking up to sixty cigarettes a day when I finally quit in 1994. And now, sixteen years later, when the nurse weighed me at the doctor’s office prior to my annual physical, there was no avoiding the fact that I’ve packed on sixty pounds since my last cigarette. So how did this happen? Let me start at the beginning. It all began with Miss Utah.
You may find this hard to believe but, back in the Philippines, when I was just sixteen years old, I was already hosting my own television show on Channel 10, the government-run station. Our weekly hour-long variety show was on the air for a couple of months in 1960. It was called “Get Together” by our unimaginative producer because he claimed this was what the show was, a get together. Needless to say, I rarely had any say about who the guests were. I would show up every Saturday at the studio (which we called “the barn”) a couple of hours before taping the show, and that’s when I’d find out whom we were featuring at the “get together” that week. Because it was a variety show, the guest list tended to lean more toward the entertainment industry, mostly movie stars, especially if they were Hollywood celebrities visiting Manila for one dubious reason or another.
Back then, a name we were all familiar with was Steve Parker, who was married to Shirley MacLaine but who, for some reason, did not live with her. Alas, rumor had it that Steve preferred to sow his wild oats with a wide array of attractive Asian lasses. Although the unconventional long-distance marriage between Shirley MacLaine and Steve Parker survived for several decades, they finally got divorced in 1982 and, to no one’s surprise, he immediately got hitched to a Japanese woman in Hawaii. But, back to Miss Utah.
In 1960, besides being famous for being unfaithful to Shirley MacLaine, Steve Parker was also an enterprising entrepreneur. One of his enterprises was a spectacular stage show which he produced annually, a lavish extravaganza featuring beauty queens from all the beauty pageants—Miss America, Miss Universe, Miss International, Miss Cosmos, Miss Galaxy—who were willing to tour Southeast Asia with him; parading in their swimsuits and evening gowns; showing off their unique musical, declamatory or baton-twirling talents; rousing and arousing the natives with their energetic high-kicking dance routines.
I have no idea how our producer managed to get Steve Parker to bring his bevy of buxom beauties to “the barn” but, there they were, bigger than life, that fateful Saturday afternoon in 1960, when I was expected to “Get Together” and chat intelligently with them. What I didn’t expect was to be chatted up.
It happened during a short lull in the taping of the show, when the beauty queens were changing into their much-anticipated swim wear. First one out of the dressing room was the statuesque Miss Utah from the Miss America Beauty Pageant, wearing a blindingly white one-piece bathing suit with a red sash across her chest to match her flaming red hair, and white stiletto heels which made her seem even taller than the Tower of Babel, given how she reduced all the men in “the barn” to Jell-O and gibberish.
To this day, I have no idea why Miss Utah chose me, but I can still hear the clickety-clack of her stiletto heels on the linoleum floor as she headed in my direction. Once she had me cornered, she slipped her left arm into my right arm. She didn’t seem to mind the fact that one of her breasts was resting firmly on the crook of my elbow. ”Can I have a cigarette?” she asked huskily, sounding like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, or maybe Julie London in those early Marlboro commercials which aired in moviehouses in Manila prior to the trailers and the main feature.
Probably no one else but me remembers this, but when Marlboro was first introduced, its target audience was women, not men. Long before the world was introduced to the rugged Marlboro Man, we were all treated to a black-and-white commercial of sultry songstress Julie London having some kind of dalliance with a man in a dimly-lit restaurant. Slowly, seductively, she pulls out a Marlboro, he lights it for her, and then she blows smoke in his eyes as she starts to sing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” in that breathless, whispery, smoky voice of hers. In my boyhood, Julie London was the insurmountable Marlboro Woman, the pulchritudinous personification of “filter…flavor…flip-top box!”
And now, standing in “the barn” in her stiletto heels next to me, Julie London had metamorphosed into Miss Utah. “Can I have a cigarette?” she repeated pointedly. All eyes in the room were suddenly on me. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop, but it was my pen and clipboard. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, “I just had my last one. I’m out.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. She let go of my blushing elbow and clickety-clacked across the room to one of the cameramen. I saw him offering her a cigarette, and then she clickety-clacked back to me. She didn’t take my arm this time, but spoke in the same life-altering baritone as before. ”Do you have a light?”
I could hear the technicians in the room starting to snicker because they all knew about my pristine respiratory organs, my virgin lungs. ”I lied earlier,” I blurted out the truth. “I don’t smoke. I don’t have a light. I’m sorry.”
“I see,” she smiled sympathetically. ”Well, when you’re old enough to smoke, be sure to look me up in Utah.” And then she clickety-clacked away again, to the same cameraman, taking his arm and sticking his elbow into her ample endowments. He completed the ritual by flicking his Ronson and lighting her fire.
Before the day was over, on the heels of my humiliation in the hands of Miss Utah, I rushed out and bought my first pack of Newport mentholated cigarettes.
Shortly after that, I worked as an advertising copywriter for J. Walter Thompson Co. One of our clients was Liggett & Myers, makers of premium L&M, Lark and Chesterfield cigarettes, which were given free to JWT employees, so we all smoked like chimneys. Later, when Marlboro dumped Julie London and created the Marlboro Man, in commercials which showed him herding all those wild mustangs to the thumping theme from The Magnificent Seven, I shifted to Marlboros.
Flash forward to 1994. By then, I was teaching in the English Department at the University of Kansas. I was also running English Alternative Theatre, my own theatre company. Two years earlier, I had bought a truck on installment, to haul furniture and set pieces for the theatre company. As for my nasty nicotine habit, well…you know how theatre people are. I was smoking two packs of Marlboros a day, three if I was in rehearsal with a play, which was just about all the time.
In the spring of 1994, a good friend asked me what I was doing that summer. He had rented a large house for two months in Lurs, a picturesque village which dates back to the 10th century, perched on a narrow butte overlooking the Durance valley, one of the best wine-growing regions in France. He said the house itself was surrounded by magnificent olive groves. Would I care to spend the summer in France with grapes and olives and people who don’t speak English? There was only one catch. He was allergic to cigarette smoke. I would not be allowed to smoke in the house, and certainly not in his presence.
By then, I had been smoking for 32 years. Unbeknownst to him, I had in fact been thinking about quitting—not because of all the dire warnings from the Surgeon General, not because my dog coughs every time I light up near him, but because the University of Kansas had recently banned smoking in all the buildings on campus. I had just spent a miserable winter putting on my bulky jacket, cap, scarf and gloves every 15 minutes in order to commiserate outdoors with other victims of the ban. Oh, how we smoked and fumed at the injustice of it all!
Thinking my silence was a sign that I was about to turn down his kind invitation to spend the summer in France, my friend made me another offer. Because he really cared about my health, he said that, if I gave up cigarettes, he would be happy to pay off the rest of the payments on my red Toyota truck. Is it a deal?
There was no way I could quit cold turkey, so I proposed a compromise. I would bring two cartons of Marlboros with me, and when that was gone, I’d be done for good. To my surprise, he agreed.
We left for Lurs in early June, and I stuck to my plan. I would cut back to two packs a day for the first week, then a pack a day for the second week, then ten cigarettes a day for the third week, then five, then three, then two, and then…finally…on the Fourth of July, I would have my last cigarette and declare my INDEPENDENCE from Marlboro Country! This I did in 1994, and I haven’t had a cigarette since.
But, as I said earlier, I’ve also put on 60 pounds in the intervening years. When I had my last physical, I told the doctor I didn’t feel any healthier for having given up cigarettes. Did I just swap possible lung cancer for probable diabetes? The doctor patted my arm, the same arm which had been intimate with Miss Utah four decades ago, and said: “If you had the will power to quit smoking, you’ll have the will power to lose weight.”
And so I’m working on it. I’m looking for pictures of Twiggy and Mahatma Gandhi to put on my refrigerator door.
While on the internet recently, just out of curiosity, I Googled some of the people I’ve mentioned in this “limerance.” According to Wikipedia, Steve Parker, Shirley MacLaine’s ex, was in Honolulu on May 13, 2001 when he expired of lung cancer. Julie London was in poor health because of her long-term cigarette habit until her death on October 18, 2000, in Encino, California, at age 74. Wayne McLaren, the actor who portrayed the Marlboro Man in print and television cigarette advertising, succumbed to lung cancer at age 51 on July 22, 1992.
As for Miss Utah…whoever she is, wherever she is…I hope that she hasn’t kicked the bucket…that she’s kicked the habit…that she is now so fat she’s no longer able to bend down and slip on those stiletto heels to go clickety-clacking with impunity…but that somewhere in back of her closet she still has that blindingly white one-piece bathing suit…that she takes it out occasionally to look at it…and perhaps remember how she once shamed a boy in Manila to “manhood.”
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- Comments(6)
I agree with the doctor. If you were strong enough to quit the habit you will also lose the weight. Funny how things in our past come back to haunt us. I gave up the idea of being a singer because I was humiliated…at least I thought I was….for choosing to sing a religious song that was much to difficult for me and the class. I often look back on that and wonder had I made a different choice would I now be a retired Opera Diva? Hmmmmmmm.
Too funny, and so interesting. My only experience with beauty queens was with ones local to my hometown. Mother and Daughter Miss Solomon Valley/s (no dates given!) were royally pissed when Granddaughter would not compete. Granddaughter was my age, and she had other virtues (what those were, the world is still waiting to find out).
Now I know why I have difficulty losing weight! I never smoked!!
My friend Sinan Unel actually found an old video of Julie London in one of the early Marlboro commercials. It’s priceless. Thanks, Sinan. Here’s the link:
http://www.tobaccovideos.com/commercials/004marlboro.html
The best part is when she flicks her ashes against the butt of the hunk’s cigarette. No, actually, she “rubs” her ashes against his ashes.
Love this, Paul!