The Magical Leaf

It’s one of those things in this region that holds on. You not only see people using it in its various forms, but also growing it, even in small, hillside or backyard patches. The farms near my home in any direction, dug into the rocky mountain soil, coax vegetable and grain crops each year, but a surprising number of them grow the devil’s lettuce. A country drive at this time of year will take one past leafy fields so pretty and so poetic, they make even a tee-tobacco-er want to stop and get out and gather an armful.

This dedication to tobacco is not only understandable to me, but also positively charming. I know a fellow who grows a plot of it measuring about six feet wide by twenty feet long, just a few plants. But he tends it and cuts it and dries it and prepares it and smokes it in a pipe he made in the traditional Appalachian fashion from a corncob. When I asked him why he grows such a tiny crop of it every year, he stared at his hands for a moment.

“Spite, I guess,” he said.

And I knew exactly what he meant.

Smoking is now less socially acceptable than belching or breaking wind in public. And in my younger years, I would never have believed that I would ever write such a sentence. The few holdouts who gather outside the back doors of their jobsites (or more commonly, with the new draconian regulations everywhere, hide in their automobiles) are genuine misfits. I find it endlessly fascinating that a cigarette, that former symbol of rebellion and rough coolness, is considered worse than bubonic plague by those who style themselves as today’s rebels and cool cats.

There is a streak of deep and genuine cussedness in people like the fellow who yearly grows his little crop of ‘baccy, as locals call it. Because the government or the vinegar-drinking scolds disapprove, they by-God will do whatever is being condemned. I know many folks who deliberately use words that have been declared absolutely verboten by today’s gatekeepers simply because they refuse to be told what they can and cannot say, do, consume…or think. And they say and do these things knowing full well the penalties they may incur. How can I not like and admire people like these?

My own relationship with tobacco is long and weird and twitchy. My mother smoked almost all her life, no more than five or six a day, but even the threat of imprisonment in a gulag wouldn’t have deterred her from her little vice, she being cut from the same homespun cloth as the people mentioned above. My father, what little I was around him, smoked, as did all my aunts and uncles. The lone holdout was my maternal grandmother, whose only flirtation with tobacco was when she was pregnant with one of her children. Seems she got a craving, a really bad craving, to smoke a cigarette. She held to the mystical and vanished Southern belief that if a pregnant woman craved something and that the craving was not satisfied, the child in her womb would grow up to be mastered by said something. Her husband, my grandfather, got out his bag of ‘baccy and his rolling papers and fashioned her a cigarette, and she smoked the entire thing. Then she vomited all over the kitchen. About a week after that, she also developed a strong hankering for a drink of whiskey. My grandfather, a teetotaler, kept a bottle of sour mash in the barn and would mix it with lemon and honey and use it as cough syrup for the family (my grandmother administered this same curative to me many a time when I was a boy). He fetched the bottle and poured my grandmother a dollop in a glass. She downed it and asked for another, which he gave her. My grandmother said, “I feel a little sleepy.” She stood up and threw up all over her shoes. To this day, when I crave heroin or crystal meth or a trip to Las Vegas, the only thing that stops me is the fear of all that vomiting. It’s hereditary, you know.

I think back to my childhood and realize that all my friends’ parents smoked, too. We must have been a smoke-reeking little pack, my friends and me. But no one noticed, because all the teachers smoked, too. In the teachers lounge, no less. The mind reels to think of how the teachers and other sniffs would react if some little towhead boy today waltzed into a classroom smelling of Marlboros. Just imagining the phone calls makes me want to vomit.

We had a next door neighbor when I was a small boy, name of Mr. Wolfe. Like my grandfather, Mr. Wolfe hand-rolled his cigarettes. But the way he did it was really, really impressive. He would take a rolling paper in his long, cypress stump fingers and sprinkle Bugler tobacco into it. After putting away the bag, he would use just the fingers and thumb of the hand in which he held the fixin’s and manipulate it until he had rolled a cigarette as smooth and tight as a pencil. He would tuck it into the corner of his mouth, pop a kitchen match with one of those abrasive thumbs, touch it to the cigarette, and smoke about half of it on the first inhale. He’d blow blue smoke out of those love-child-of-Judd Nelson-and-Dionne Warwick nostrils and sigh with pleasure, then smoke the rest of it down to the nub with one or two more drags. He’d stub it out in his palm, which I have every reason to believe was as callused as the rest of him, and flick the tiny remnant into his wife’s flower bed. When I was a teenager and learning to enjoy the pleasures of an occasional toke of Acapulco Gold or Panama Red, I would think back to Mr. Wolfe and wish that I could conjure up his rolling abilities. The joints I rolled always looked like a wrapped piece of penny candy — a big lump in the middle with earlike twists on the ends. Mr. Wolfe was the first human being I ever saw dead. He hit the floor one frosty morning while sitting at the table and waiting on Mrs. Wolfe to bring salt for his eggs. We heard the thump of his body on the raised hardwood floor from our little house next door. My aunt happened to be visiting that weekend, and I ran with her next door and found Mrs. Wolfe wailing over her husband’s body. I helped Aunt Carolyn move him over to one side, and I remember his staring eyes. He was about 90 years old, and I can attest that tobacco was not his downfall.

My sister never touched tobacco in any form as far as I know. I flirted with cigarettes at about 16-17 when I played in a garage band. I thought a Camel dangling off my lower lip made me look like Jimmy Page. It probably made me look like a quadriplegic trying to sip a milkshake unassisted. When I was a senior in high school, a friend convinced me that Copenhagen snuff was a delicious way to perk up one’s day, and I dropped a walnut-sized wad of it in my lip and settled back to become mature. In five minutes, the room began to spin. In five-point-five minutes, I stood up, then fell to my knees, and then did an excellent impersonation of my pregnant maternal grandmother. And I can report that I never again touched smokeless tobacco, and that the scent of Wintergreen lifesavers for a time held the power to make my hide try to swap places on my skinny body.

Ah, and then there was sweet snuff. Time was, older women in the South favored this little pick-me-up as much as many men did. Depending on the brand, the snuff came in either a heavy brown glass jar with a paper cap, or in a small aluminum screw-top can that resembled a film canister. My great aunt Neeley, as tough an old woman as any who ever wrung a chicken’s neck while smoothing my cowlick down, favored the sweet snuff. She was a lively combination of no-nonsense and deep appreciation of a good joke. I once made her laugh so hard she urinated on herself when I tied her apron strings to the corner post of the porch while she was sitting with her back against it, shelling peas. She tried several times to stand, and when she realized that I’d played a trick on her, the laughter rolled out of her and the pee rolled down onto the porch boards and we had us a good ol’ time. And Aunt Neeley was a dead shot with the snuff. I came bawling around the corner of the house one blistering summer day, crying out because a hornet had hit me — unprovoked, mind you — right where my shoe met my ankle. She cocked an eye at the swelling site, said, “Hold still, boy,” and squirted a needle-thin stream of snuff juice right onto the sting. It hurt like fire for one second, then immediately felt numb and cool and pleasant. I have sat in endless, arid church meetings and coveted her marksmanship many a time.

I smoked a few cigars back in the Nineties when it was a thing, though I not only didn’t inhale but also didn’t enjoy it, being painfully aware of what a pretentious pose it was. My time in the Presbyterian church taught me a special loathing for chatty jaw-clenching nasal-talking foodie males who enjoy sitting in public places, drinking expensive Scotch, and waving cigars (with labels on display!) around like batons. This era taught me that most Presbyterians are tone-deaf to the spiritual world, because apparently none of them shared my ability to hear one Dr. Freud just a-laffing and a-laffing at their showy antics.

And now the poor vapey people are under attack, and their odd chemical romance is likely to be outlawed at some point, and it’s all so tedious and predictable and tiresome. If I weren’t so cheap, I would be tempted to take up smoking just so I could earn my cussedness credentials among my neighbors.

But at five dollars a pack? No. It won’t do. That’s more expensive than the bottom-of-the-baggy Mexican pot we used to smoke in the late Seventies. Five dollars a pack? Makes me want to vomit all over my shoes.

~ S.K. Orr