Member-only story
Let’s Make Guns Uncool
It worked for tobacco and drunk driving
My aunt Donna was the closest I ever had to a mother, and one of the coolest, best people in my life. She made me smile one day when she told me about her trip to a “dude ranch” in Wyoming. While there, she rode horses along with “Darrell,” the real-life Marlboro Man.
“Really?” I asked. “It was the real Marlboro Man?”
Yes, it was.
My entire family smoked tobacco when I was growing up. My uncle the famous urologist and surgeon smoked low-tar cigarettes down to the filter, refusing to tap off the ash until the shaky column grew nearly as long as the cigarette itself.
In his gravelly patrician voice, Uncle Norm would explain the finer details of Wisconsin sausage-making, pausing for emphasis between each sage-like pronouncement regarding meat grinding and casing-stuffing. Meanwhile, I’d hear nothing: all I could see was the three-inch column of ash. All I could think was, “When will it fall on the floor? Will it burn a hole in my aunt’s pristine white shag carpet . . . how big will the hole be?”
My aunt smoked. My cousins all smoked. My dad smoked. My stepmom smoked.
My mother had smoked: she died of pancreatic cancer when I was three months old.
Only my brother didn’t smoke tobacco.
My beloved art teacher Paul Darrow smoked. My boss at the LA Times, Art Seidenbaum, smoked (Parliament). My friend Glenn Wright at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at MSU smoked: unfiltered Lucky Strikes. We smoked together, standing outside the critique room at Holmes Hall. John Chandler, the president of my women’s college, smoked. We smoked together, standing on the portico outside his elegant on-campus home.
I was an art student. It was impossible to do Art School Confidential in the 80s and not
smoke.
I smoked from age 13 to age 52. I quit while I was pregnant with my children, only picking it up again when they were getting to old to breastfeed.
