Trying Cigarettes

Trying Cigarettes

If anyone can really be "way out" in third grade, Bob Millen was the closest candidate of all my school classmates at Hokah Elementary.  He cajoled me into learning how to properly light a match, tried to get me to smoke, related to me naughty things about girls, and would have properly led me astray, had I not lived in the country and he in Hokah.

Bob was as street-wise as could be expected in a town of two hundred people, and for some strange reason, accepted me as a friend quite early.  He was scrappy and would hardly take guff from anyone, although he was not a bully.  We didn't really have any bullies; we were all quite good friends.

I remember, early on, when I was a new kid in school, Bob Millen grabbing me and pulling me to the ground to wrestle.  Although I was the slightest kid in school, I was wiry and we rolled around a bit and I actually had the top for a  brief time before I started crying.  Bob helped me to my feet and explained to me that I had him.

We were friends from that time on.

Bob Millen was, according to self-report, constantly under threat of being sent to a place called Red Wing, by his parents.  We all know Red Wing to be the boys reformatory in Minnesota and I have, as an adult, actually seen the ghastly place.  It is the place Bob Dylan sings about getting out of.  At the time, though, I knew nothing of it or even that boys could be sent to a reformatory.

Bob talked of it as though he had been there, or at least seen it, perhaps in some sort of "scared straight" effort.  He genuinely seemed to mitigate his delinquent efforts as though in fear of being sent there.

There was a little community hall in town that had a basketball court inside.  Occasionally there would be some kind of activity in there and the older boys would get a game going.  I even tried it.  I was fast and could dash about with the ball but had no idea how to pass, shoot, or defend the goal, so I gave that up rather quickly.

Bob took me out in the alley behind the building and produced a book of matches.  I cringed because the last time I had lit a match was as a two year old on my tricycle in the dirt street in Sparta.  Bob showed me how to push the match against the scraper pad on the outside of the book, paying special attention to pulling my finger away as the match lit, so as not to get burned.

So that was the trick!

After I had reluctantly succeeded in lighting a few matches, he produced a pack of cigarettes.  They were named "Spuds" and he said that the gas station attendant down by the Horseshoe Tavern, about a block from the Catholic school, was willing to sell them to him.  They cost something like a dime a pack.

I really had no interest in smoking, but Millen (we called one another by last names because it was so cool) insisted I try.

"Take a drag," he offered, lighting one up and handing it to me.  I hesitated, a look of dread on my little face.

He took the cigarette back and put it to his lips, taking a puff and blowing out the smoke, looking kind of like a ten-year-old James Dean.

He handed it back to me and I sort of placed it near my mouth and pretended to take a puff.  Even at that range, the smell of the thing was enough to make me cough.

"Inhale!"  Millen commanded.  "And don't get it all wet!  Put it just at the edge of your lips."

I put the cigarette between my fingers and placed my hand over my mouth and drew a mouthful of smoke.  Then, with great drama, I closed my throat and drew a deep breath of clean air in slowly through my nose, expelling it through my mouth and carrying off the putrid smoke as though I had inhaled it.  I coughed just the same.

Millen dissolved into laughter.

I had to repeat the charade a few more times until, between us, we had smoked and wasted the entire cigarette so we could move on to other things.

We were so cool.  But in terms of social maturity levels, Bob was like an uncle, just back from the army, taking his young nephew around and showing him the ropes.

For all his pluck, Millen, nor any of us, engaged in much offensive behavior in school.  Our teachers were, to us, old ladies regardless of their age, and they were stern.  Larry and Tommy Langen told me that the teachers at the Catholic school were even more so.

Our teachers had the ace in the hole over us, the power of the recess.  We lived for recess because there was the swamp, the grass hills to slide down, the giant pine tree and all the games and activities we dreamed up.  It was a chance to burn off energy and we coveted it.

One day, a new student arrived who made even Bob Millen look like a cherub.  He was lean and fairly tall with long, black, greasy hair and a duck-tail in the back.  His eyes were cunning and he had a permanent sneer on his face.  We frankly didn't know what to do because this guy was going to seriously challenge the pecking order of Hokah Elementary and he looked pretty much like a gangster.  He was also from New York.

We didn't know where New York was, other than on a map, but we had seen enough television shows to associate it with crime, corruption, and killers.

He wore a light leather jacket which he kept on even in the classroom.  The collar was turned up around his duck-tail.

"Where does he live?" I whispered to Don Botcher.

"Down somewhere by the Horseshoe Tavern, I think," he whispered back.

Someone was going to have to take this guy on and it certainly wasn't going to be me.  I just sat there at my desk, mortified.  I wondered if Bob Millen was up to it.  Perhaps this new kid was back from someplace similar to Red Wing.

I chanced a brief smile and hello and was rebuffed by a look of disgust and superior bewilderment that seemed to say are you, cockroach, of the opinion that you can speak to me?

Many of us thought that he probably had switchblade knife in his pocket if not a gun.  His presence was becoming a calamity and he hadn't even been in school two hours!  We all felt like we were on the edge of a precipice and were about to have our little world swept away right out from under us.

But like many things in life, a benign tincture of time solved the problem, and not that much of a tincture at that!  By afternoon, the new kid solved our problem all by himself.

While we were all sitting in our seats gawking and stealing sidelong glances at the new kid, the teacher decided that he was not engaging in anything meaningful at his desk and asked him to get something out and start working.

He cocked his head a bit, sensing that now was the time to establish who was in charge, and mumbled something like piss off.

Our teacher did a double take and said, "did you say something?"

Now the rubber met the road.  The new kid was in for a nickel, so me might as well be in for a dime.

"Piss off," he said, a bit louder, so that we potential underlings could hear it, but perhaps the teacher wouldn't.

We could have told him that wasn't going to happen.

"Stay in your seats," she told us and stepped out of the room.

Moments later she returned with Mr. Wagner, our principal.  Mr. Wagner was a retired naval officer and the Pacific Conflict had ended just a few years earlier.

Mr. Wagner walked up to the new kid, grabbed him by the collar of his leather coat and lifted him out of his seat, dragging him behind and out the classroom door.

I can't help but think that nowadays, the mother, perhaps drunk, would later storm into the classroom and read the teacher up one side and down the other, threatening a lawsuit, then be placated by the diminutive principal as the new kid re-inhabited his seat.  I have seen it happen.

But, alas for that particular new kid, this was 1956.

We never saw the new kid again.  Ever.