Leona asked, “So did Michael and Violet stay together?”
“Oh, yes, yes. They are still together today. Violet used her inheritance to buy a house for the two of them at The Palmetto Club outside of town. They live right on the sixteenth green. Michael had to learn how to play golf from scratch, and he is still trying to get good enough to beat Violet. Michael is so competitive. I just haven’t had the heart to tell him that if he starts beating Violet, he will pay the price long after they finish the back nine.
“You know, Leona, the greatest lesson that Marie and I learned from watching Michael go through losing the love of his life, mourning for years on end, and ultimately finding great love again, is that we human beings never lose our capacity to love or to be loved.”
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The Ku Klux Klan was generally credited as being the most powerful White Supremacist organization in the United States. The Klan started in the late 1800s and by the 1990s their constituents numbered in the thousands, a great decline from their height of power when they numbered hundreds of thousands. As the Klan’s population dwindled, new Aryan Nation organizations arose to take their place, the most popular being the neo-Nazi National Alliance and the Skin Heads.
As with all other movements in the United States, the atrocities committed by the White Supremacist groups upon African Americans and people of Jewish faith was what drew the attention of the public. Heterosexuals were equally as loathed and targeted by these hate groups but because our numbers in the population of the USA were so much smaller than the other minority groups, no particular attention was given to the cruel attacks on straight people from these groups.
In our country, there is often a single event or an incident that draws the limelight from the media to a real-life example of the horrors that minorities must endure. For heterosexuals, this event occurred in the 1990s when a twenty one year old, Caucasian, heterosexual man was tied to a fence in the North by a homosexual man, who beat the straight man to death, leaving him on the fence to die. The gay man who committed the crime admitted that the motivation to his brutal attack was due to the victim’s heterosexual orientation.
The death of this young, straight man due to a hate crime was the driving force behind the United States’ enactment of laws to protect heterosexuals against hate crimes, to give straight men and women the same protection that was already offered to every other minority group in the country. The country made progress toward enacting laws dealing with hate crimes in the 1990s, but the existence of laws does not necessarily make people comply with them. Today, there are still nineteen states in our country that do not offer hate crimes laws, a reflection of the rank in importance of the minorities requiring this protection. Although the violent crime rates in many areas of the United States continues to drop, anti-heterosexual crime continues to be on the rise, and the viciousness of these beatings of straight people is shocking.
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The 1990s brought in the health conscious era. The damaging effects of cigarette smoking were no longer the stuff of conjecture, thanks to all of the poor little lab rats that ran around with tumors growing on their backs from repeated exposure to noxious smoke. The warning labels on cigarette packs changed from “smoking is dangerous to your health,” to “smoking causes cancer.” It does not get anymore direct than that.
Marie had developed a minor case of asthma, even though she quit smoking after college. She never complained about my incessant toking on Lucky Strikes, but I noticed that she seemed to have more breathing problems on the weekends than during the week, fingering me as the culprit. When she was at work all day, she was not exposed to cigarettes, but when at home, she was around my cigarette smoke for two days straight. Right around the time that I had made this scientific observation, Marie too had drawn the same conclusion. She gently asked me to start smoking outside, and it seemed like the supportive thing to do as her spouse.
I became a regular on the front porch of our house, which subjected me to what I labeled as forced socialization with the neighbors. We lived in a good neighborhood, and the people were nice enough, I just was not the most social kind of fellow. I have never been much for small talk and the redundant conversations about the weather were annoying to me.
When the weather turned cold and wet, I once attempted smoking in the tiny bathroom with the overhead fan going full blast, standing next to the open window, and exhaling at full wind to project the smoke out. Within the hour, Marie went in there and I heard her wheezing after she came out. She did not say anything to me as she was not the type to complain, but I suspected that she knew that I had been up to no good.
Being banished to the outdoors was all the incentive that I needed to make my first attempt at quitting smoking. It took me five failed attempts before I got it right. Michael had quit smoking a year before my first attempt and he served as my smoking cessation coach. The things I did along the way in slavery to my addiction make the stories of junkies lining the park benches in Amsterdam, Holland, with needles hanging out of their arms seem minor.
On my first attempt at quitting smoking, I decided to stop after finishing the last cigarette in the pack. When I awakened at six o’clock in the morning, I was in the car within five minutes, frantically driving to the corner store, laying on the horn at the poor drivers in front of me, who had the audacity to drive the speed limit. The clerk at the store looked at me as if I was a lunatic.
My second attempt brought a new approach to quitting. I decided to chew tobacco instead of smoking, which eliminated the problem of cigarette smoke in the house. I really thought that I was on to something that time. I even enjoyed the whole ritual of chewing, gathering up the tiny wad of tobacco from the cute little tin, experiencing the moist and spongy feel of the tobacco on my fingertips, and walking around like an exaggerated butch version of myself. I had never been taught how to spit, and my first days at chewing ended with dark brown spots on my shirt from the times that I dribbled on myself.
On our weekend jaunt around the neighborhood, going to garage sales, I found an antique spittoon, and I thought that it would be a great alternative to using the coffee cup that I had been dragging from room to room around the house. With great excitement, I proudly set my new spittoon next to my oversized chair in the living room. Within days, there were brown stains in a perfect circle around the circumference of the spittoon, embedded in our beige carpet. Marie was a good sport about treating the stains on my shirts in my first few days of chewing and not saying a word. Nevertheless, when she went to water the plant next to the window by my chair, she threw a fit.
“That’s it Marcus! It’s your damn tobacco or me!”
With options like that, I came to the realization that smoking was the better alternative to chewing, and back I went to the store for my Lucky Strikes. “I’ll show her,” I thought to myself; a really mature attitude.
Attempts three and four evidenced my progressive deepening into the throws of addiction. The compromise to my dignity goes without saying. I had learned on the previous failed rounds that even if I walked the remaining pack of cigarettes all the way out to the garbage can on the curb for the next day’s pick up, before sunrise, I was halfway submerged in the garbage can, flashlight in hand, and then scurrying back to the front porch to light up again. I was shameless.
My fifth and final failed attempt at smoking cessation brought me to a new level of indignity. On that attempt, I had decided that I would douse the pack of cigarettes in water before tossing them in the waste can, which would eliminate my temptation to fish them out. The reason that I went to such great lengths to retrieve my pitched pack of smokes was the rationalization that I would have just one more cigarette before quitting for good. Somehow, driving to the store to buy a whole new pack seemed like more of a commitment than I was willing to undertake. It was this depth of denial that again, drove me out to the garbage can on a blustery day.
On that attempt, I had managed to make it through the entire day without lighting up. I was really doing okay until I arrived at home. Pulling into the driveway and seeing the garbage can triggered a new level of craving for nicotine within me. I headed to the garbage can and this time, I stained my good suit while sifting through the garbage.
It was with great sadness that I pulled the cigarette pack from the container, only to see drips of water coming from the bottom of the pack. It was at this juncture that I performed an act of what can only be called, temporary insanity. Marie was due home within a half hour and time was tight. My plan was to dry out the cigarettes from the saturated pack, and smoke one in plenty of time to avoid the shame I would experience upon Marie’s detection of the cigarette odor in my hair.
I wrestled with the key, shaky from the onset of a full-blown craving. I went directly into the kitchen and tried to pull one of the remaining cigarettes out from the pack. Blast if it did not fall to pieces with the slightest bit of pressure! Quickly, I devised a new plan.
I went to the junk drawer and retrieved the scissors. I worked away at the cigarette pack with the precision of a skilled surgeon. I delicately split open the cigarette pack, revealing two remaining cigarettes, brown from the saturation of water. I felt the mush of the sides of the cigarettes as I delicately placed them onto a baking sheet that we used for making cookies. Time was ticking by that point and there was no time left to slowly dry out the smokes on a mere two hundred degree setting. I cranked the oven knob up to five hundred degrees, placed the baking sheet into the oven and peered through the little glass window to assure that all was well.
As I bent over to do so, I saw the large stain on my suit, which surely would give me away if sighted by Marie. I ran in full sprint to the bedroom, hurriedly getting out of my suit, throwing it into the corner of the closet, and I rushed to put on my casual clothes. In the midst of trying to get my second leg into my trousers, a waft of cigarette smoke permeated the bedroom. I knew that things had gone awry at that point and in pure instinct, I took off toward the kitchen, wiping out on the floor due to my feet becoming entangled in my pants. I picked myself up and rushed to zip up my trousers.
As I ran into the kitchen, I saw the blue and white plume of smoke coming out of the oven door. I frantically pulled open the oven, sending a mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke into the kitchen, only to find my precious two remaining cigarettes burned to a crisp, just two pitiful little black toothpicks laying in the middle of the baking sheet.
I doused the baking sheet in running water, causing a sizzling sound and new plumes of smoke as the water hit the blazing hot metal. I jogged out the back door, leaving it open to allow the cigarette smoke to escape from the kitchen, and bolted to the garbage can. The baking sheet would never be the same again, and our cookies would forever have a smoked taste to them, which is nice in ribs, but not in cookies.
Just as I reached the garbage can, in pulled Marie, looking strangely at me. I froze like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car. It was as though I was suspended in time, in mid-stride, with my arm extended out toward the garbage can, clutching the dark gray and black baking sheet in my hand.
Marie got out of the car and looked at the wide-open kitchen door with smoke pouring out of the top edge. She turned back toward me, and I was by then holding my head in shame with the baking sheet at my side. Marie blinked.
Marie turned, went into the house, changed clothes, and started making dinner with not so much as a word about the new low to which my addiction had driven me. She made friendly small talk as we ate dinner and Marie seemed completely unmoved by the whole incident. I suspected it was reverse psychology on her part.
The next time I experienced a craving for a cigarette, and every time thereafter, I reminded myself of that incident, which was enough to make me quit smoking, one day a time. I now have genuine empathy for the junkies of the world.