Thank You for Smoking (8 page)

Nick raised his hand. Oprah and his fellow panelists looked at him uncertainly. "Is it all right," he said, "if I smoke?" The audience gasped. Even Oprah was taken aback. "You want to
smoke?"

"Well, it's traditional at firing squads to offer the condemned a last cigarette."

There was a stunned silence for a few seconds, and then someone in the audience laughed. Then other people laughed. Pretty soon the whole audience was laughing.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think that's funny," Mrs. Maclean said.

"No," said the National Teachers' Association lady. "I don't either. I think it's in extremely poor taste."

"I have to agree," Goode said. "I don't see the humor in it. And I suspect Mr. Williger doesn't either." But Cancer Kid was laughing. God
bless
him, he was laughing! Nick was seized with love. He wanted to adopt this young man, take him back to Washington, cure him of his cancer, give him a high-paying job, a car—a luxury car—a house, a pool, a big one so he could keep up with his swimming. Nick would buy him a wig, too, and get him eyebrow hair transplants. Anything he wanted. He felt so badly about the cancer. Maybe, with radiation
...

Forget the kid! He's history! Press the attack! Attack! Attack!

"Oh why don't you leave him alone," Nick wheeled on Goode. "And stop trying to tell him how he ought to feel." He turned to Oprah. "If I may say so, Oprah, that is typical of the attitude of the federal government. 'We know how you should feel.' It's this same attitude that brought us Prohibition, Vietnam, and fifty years of living on the brink of nuclear destruction." Where was
this
going? And how had nuclear deterrence gotten in?
Never mind! Attack!
"If Mr. Goode wants to score cheap points off this young man's suffering just so he can get his budget increased so he can tell more people what to do, well I just think that's really, really sad. But for a member of the federal government to come on this show and lecture about cancer, when that same government for nearly fifty years has been producing atomic bombs, twenty-five thousand of them, as long as we're throwing numbers around, Mis-ter Sta-tistics, bombs capable of giving every single person on this planet, man, woman, and child, cancers so awful, so gha
stly
and untreatable, so, so, so
incurable,
that medical science doesn't even have a name for them yet. . . is"—
Quick, get to the point! What is the point?
—". . . is just beneath contempt. And frankly, Oprah, I'd like to know how a man like . . .
this
comes to occupy a position of such power within the federal bureaucracy. The answer is—he doesn't
have
to get elected. Oh no.
He
doesn't have to participate in democracy. He's
above
all that. Elections? Consent of the governed? Pah! Of the very people who pay his salary? Oh no. Not for Ron Goode.
He
just wants to cash in on people like poor Robin Williger. Well, let me tell you something, Oprah, and let me share something with the fine, concerned people in the audience today. It's not pleasant, but you, and they, need to hear it. The Ron Goodes of this world
want
the Robin Willigers to die. Awful, but true. I'm sorry, but it's a fact. And do you know why? I'll tell you why. So that their
. . . budgets"
—he spat out the distasteful word—"will go up. This is nothing less than trafficking in human misery, and you, sir, ought to be
ashamed
of yourself."

Ron Goode never recovered. For the next hour, he could only scream at Nick, in violation of every McLuhanesque injunction against putting out heat in a cool medium. Even Oprah strained to calm him down.

For his part, Nick assumed a serene mask of righteous serenity and merely nodded or shook his head, more in sadness than in anger, as if to say that his outburst only validated everything he had said. "All well and fine, Ron, but you haven't answered the question," or, "Come on, Ron, why don't you stop pretending you didn't hear me," or, "And what about all those people you irradiated during those nuclear test blasts in New Mexico? Want to talk about
their
cancers?"

During one of the commercials Ron Goode had to be physically restrained by a technician.

The head of NOMAS and the representative of the teachers' organization did what they could to come to the aid of their federal benefactor, but every time they ventured a comment, Nick cut them off with "Look, we're all on the same side, here," a statement so dazzling that it left them mute. When they finally rejoined that they could not find one square inch of common gr
ound between their humanitarian
ism and the fiendish endeavors of the tobacco industry, Nick saw his opening and pounced. No one, he said, was more concerned about the problem of underage smoking than the tobacco companies. Not, of course, that there was a shred of scientific evidence linking smoking with disease, but the companies, being socially responsible members of the community, certainly did not condone underage smoking—or drinking and driving, for that matter—for the simple reason that it was
against the law.
Here was the ideal moment to unveil their new anti-underage smoking campaign.

"As a matter of fact, we're about to launch a five-million-dollar campaign aimed at persuading kids not to smoke," Nick said, "so I think
our
money is on the table."

6

Ni
ck heard the urgent chirruping on his cellular telephone inside his briefcase when he retrieved it from the greenroom in Oprah's studio, but ignored it. He continued to ignore it on the drive to the airport. The cab driver, half-curious, half-annoyed, finally asked him if he was going to answer it. It pleased Nick to know that BR was going through significant agonies on the other end, so he did not pick up. In the waiting lounge at O'Hare, he did, more because people were staring than because he wanted to put BR out of his misery.

"Five million dollars?"
It was BR, all right. Nick put his blood pressure at about 180 over 120. "Are you out of your
mind?"

"Probably. It's been a very stressful period for me. But I'm feeling much better now."

"Where in the name of God are we supposed to get five million for, for anti-smoking ads?"

"It's not all that much when you think about it. RJR is spending seventy-five million a year on those stupid dick-nosed camels. You'll probably get a lot of good press out of this."

BR was fulminating, making legal threats, saying they were going to put out the story that he was having a nervous breakdown. On and on. It was very satisfying. In the middle of it, Nick heard BR say to someone, "Who? Oh, Jesus." Then he said to Nick, "It's the Captain on line two."

"Give him my regards."

"Stay on the line." Nick stayed on, not because BR had asked him,
but to see what the reaction would be from the most powerful man in
Tobacco to the news that an upstart executive VP had just committed his industry to spending some serious money to alienate potential customers.

He waited for over ten minutes. They called his flight, but the people at the gate wouldn't let him on while he was using his cellular telephone.

BR came back on. His voice had changed from open bellowing to ice water squirted through clenched teeth. "He wants to see you." "He does?" Nick said. "What about?"

"How the hell should I know," said BR, hanging up with an emphatic
klump.

There were no direct flights to Winston-Salem from Chicago, so he had to fly to Raleigh. On the way there the woman sitting next to him, heavyset, in her late fifties, with hair of a color not found in nature, kept staring at him as he read, out of habit, from his clipping file, an article in
Science
magazine entitl
ed "Scientific Standards in Epidemiologic Studies of the Menace of Daily Life."

"I
know
you,"
she said accusingly, as if her inability to identify Nick were his fault.

"You do?"

"Uh-huuh.
You're on the television."

Nick heard a stirring from the seat behind. What's this? Celebrity in their midst? "Who is it?" "I knew I'd seen him." "It's whatsis-name, from
America's Funniest Home Videos."
"What would he be doing going to Raleigh? Anyway, he'd be sitting in First Class." "I'm telling you
..."

This happened to Nick fairly often.

"Yes," he said quietl
y to the lady.

"I knew it!" She slapped the issue
of
Lear's
magazine onto her lap.
"Studs."

"Yes. That's right."

"Oh! You must have been so humiliated when she said that you kissed like a fish."

"I was," Nick said. "It was hard."

Taking pity on Nick, she shared her own disappointments in love, in particular those pertaining to her second marriage which was apparently failing. Nick was not good at disengaging himself in these situations. After an hour of sympathetic listening, his neck muscles had hypercontracted into steely knots of tension. He would need a session with Dr. Wheat when he got back. He found himself yearning for a terrorist incident. Fortunately, what the pilot announced as a "severe thunderstorm system" moved in and things got so turbulent inside the cabin that the woman forgot her problems of heart, and left deep fingernail impressions on Nick's left forearm. By the time he checked into the hotel it had been a long day and he was too tired to do anything but drink two beers and eat about four hundred dollars' worth of nuts and pretzels from the minibar.

His room service breakfast arrived and with it the morning paper, the
Winston-Salem Tar-Intelligencer.
He flipped it open and to his surprise saw his picture on the front page, in color, beneath the fold. The headline read:

F
ighting
B
ack:
T
obacco
S
pokeman
R
ips
G
overnment "
H
ealth"
O
f
ficial
F
or
M
anipulating
H
uman
T
ragedy

The article fairly glowed with praise for his "courage" and "willingness to cut through the cant." They'd even managed to get a sympathetic quote from Robin Williger in which he absolved Nick of personal responsibility for his cancer and said that people ought to take more responsibility for their own lives.

The phone rang, and a businesslike woman's voice announced, "Mr. Naylor? Please hold for Mr. Doak Boykin."

The Captain. Nick sat up. But how did they know where he was staying? There were many hotels
in Winston-Salem. He waited. Fi
nally a thin voice came on the line.

"Mister Naylor?"

"Yes sir," Nick said tentatively.

"Ah just wanted personally to say,
thank you."

"You did?"

"I thought that government fellow was going to have himself a myocardial infarction right there on national television. Splendidly done, sir, splendid. Are you here in town, do I gather?"

It was a sign of the really powerful that they had no idea where they had reached you on the phone. "Would you lunch with me? They do a tolerable lunch at the Club. Is noon convenient? Wonderful," he said, as if Nick, many levels below him on their food chain, had just given him a reason to go on living. They fought a war over slavery, and yet they were so courteous, southerners.

He bought
USA
Today
in the lobby on his way out. He found it in the "Money" section, front page, below the fold:

Tobacco Companies Plan to Spend $5 Million

ON ANTI-SM
OKING CAMPAIGN, SPOKESMAN SAYS

He read. BR flailed in a vortex of neither-confirming-nor-denying. While many details remained to be worked out, yes, the Academy had always been "in the front" of concern about underage smoking and was prepared to spend "significant sums" on a public-service campaign. Yadda, yadda. Jeannette
was quoted saying that Mr. Nay
lor, who had made the remarkable assertion on the
Oprah Winfrey
show, was unavailable for comment: "We're not sure exactly where he is at this point in time." She made it sound like he was in a bar somewhere.

In the cab on the way to the Tobacco Club, Nick reviewed what he knew about Doak Boykin, which wasn't much. Doak—he was said to have changed the spelling from the more plebeian Doke— Boykin was one of the last great men of tobacco, a legend. Self-made, he had started from nothing and end
ed with everything. Except, evi
de
ntly
, a son. He had seven daughters: Andy, Tommie, Bobbie, Chris, Donnie, Scotty, and Dave, upon whom the burden of her father's frustrated desire for a male heir had perhaps fallen hardest. It was Doak Boykin who had introduced the whole concept of filters after the first articles started to appear in
Reader's Digest
with titles like "Cancer by the Carton." (The asbestos filter was a particular brainstorm of his, which was now causing Smoot, Hawking many thousands of billable hours in the Liability courts.) As the articles proliferated and the industry found itself in need of a little more presence in Washington, he had founded the Academy of Tobacco Studies to serve, as its charter stated, as "a clearinghouse of scientific information and an impartial and always honest mediator between the concerns and needs of the American public and the tobacco companies."