My mother was a pack-a-day smoker for much of her life, and as a child I hated it. Our house reeked. The car was worse. She'd hotbox my siblings and me by neglecting to roll down the windows. Once or twice, by accident, she brushed me with a lit cigarette. As Henry Fonda put it about one of Hollywood's most furious smokers, "I've been close to Bette Davis for thirty-eight years—and I have the cigarette burns to prove it." We'd get revenge on my mother, when we were teenagers, by slipping those little slivers of exploding loads into the tips of her Merits. My mom is the sweetest woman in the world and does not have a big temper. But when one of her cigarettes would detonate in her face, bang, leaving her looking like Wile E. Coyote on the wrong end of a spherical Acme bomb, she'd lose it. We'd run away at hilarious, cranked-up, silent-movie speed. |
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