One of our most intractable problems as nine year old children was obtaining cigarettes. It wasn’t hard to steal a few individual cigarettes from our dad but we didn’t like his Lucky Strike brand and we didn’t just want a few cigarettes but whole packs because having whole packs added significant flavor to the whole operation. Opening a pack of cigarettes was like feeling pure sin in your hands and since our senses of smell were acute due to our age we not only smelled the tobacco but the tin foil, cellophane, paper, and filter material. What a treat to just decide out of the blue one day along with your pals, “Let’s buy a pack of cigarettes.” The first thing we had to figure out was whether we were going to go the fake note from our mom route or the more gutsy “I’ll just have a pack of Winstons with this four pounds of candy.” I don’t know why we had to think about it because the note from our mom technique absolutely never worked due to atrocious spelling and the retarded looking print not to mention the absurd content. We just couldn’t get a look of authority in our notes but for some unfathomable reason we had to try it nearly every time we bought cigarettes. How could we even imagine it would work? Usually a couple of us would be outside the little store looking through the window at our pal who would be standing at the counter. He’d hand up the note to old Mrs. Speaks who’d pull down her glasses, read the note, raise her glasses back into her hair and kick the kid out. Behind the store in the alley we’d examine the note for clues as to why it failed. A typical note would be:
Deer Misses Spekes,
I am stuk at home with a brokin foot. Donny is alowed to bye a few packs of cigeretes for me. I wold not be lettin him bye any cigeretes sinse I am a good mom. But sinse my foot is brokin I really must.
Sinserly,
Misses French
PS I am donnys mom.
Of course, we couldn’t see a thing wrong with it. So we’d go to another little store in a slightly rougher part of town. One of us would go in and just walk up to the counter and ask for a pack of Marlboros and there was a fifty fifty chance we’d get them. Once we had the cigarettes we’d go up onto the hill behind our neighborhood and start smoking. What fun seeing how much we could make ourselves look like grown ups by using various puffing techniques and cigarette holding methods. We’d smoke one after another while burning small fires made of twigs and throwing bugs into the flames. When we were done smoking we’d dig a hole in which to put the packs of cigarettes. It was the perfect way to spend a few hours with your pals. Well one day we’d obtained two packs of Parliaments which were a new brand to us. We marched up onto the hill, dug our hole, fired up some cigarettes and some small twig fires. Everything was going well until we saw Ricky Shell’s mom coming up the hill straight for us. It’s pretty amazing how oblivious we could be when we were busy smoking and burning things. She was on top of us before we knew it. She must have seen a flurry of cigarettes flying through the air all at once as we tried to get the incriminating evidence away from us. But of course smoke was still coming out of our faces except for Dave Wright who tried to hold it in until he almost passed out. Mrs. Shell was a really mean Catholic with a bunch of children and we were all afraid of her because she was just always mad at all of us children. It’s funny now. Looking back on it she had a pretty good reason to be mad but at the time we just didn’t understand what was wrong with her. She had short dark hair and a fat butt. She was fast and strong from chasing and beating children all the time. Well this time I think she had trouble deciding which one of us to beat first because she wound up missing all of us. She was like a wild bear but instead of being offended by someone molesting her cubs she wanted to molest them herself. We headed off in all directions leaving our cigarettes, our matches, our burning twig fires, and our open cigarette stashing hole. Thank goodness there weren’t digital cameras back in that era. Imagine the pictures she could have taken for our parents! What were we thinking when we ran off into the woods on the hill? Did we think we were never going home? Did we think that Mrs Shell would be more calmed down after stomping out ten or twelve brush fires in her white sneakers? Well we were sort of all hiding behind various trees a few hundred feet away from Mrs. Shell. We watched her stomping out the fires. Donny French came over to my tree and said that we really might need to run away for real. We were always plotting various running away scenarios for obvious reasons. We were standing there with our children’s brains slowly but inexorably rationalizing the immediate future when Mrs. Shell suddenly bolted up towards the tree that supposedly hid Ricky Shell. She had him by the collar in a split second and was dragging him off down the hill while he cried and hollered. It reminded me of a badger catching a dumb baby chicken or something. A few hours later we went down to our respective houses for dinner and a beating. Mrs. Shell had told on all of us. We never ever talked about it but I know we were totally awed by the fact that when they applied themselves ever so slightly the adults were able to pounce on us with precision as if we were shitty little huts in China and they were modern fighter jets. But somehow that awe always receded in well less than 24 hours. Probably more like less than two hours. The only thing we changed was our brand. I think the next ones were Kools.
