Tobacco Road, Crack Alley, and the Path to the Celestial City

 

My father worked for decades in a shipyard, just a short drive away from a fabulous, world-famous casino started by the Pequot tribe. I like to call that King Philip’s revenge. He was to have two grandchildren who were part Pequot, whom he didn’t get to know, because he was killed by Madison Avenue driven consumption of a Native American product called tobacco. I call that one Chief Powhatan’s Revenge...

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I was lucky on two counts when the call came: 1) my bags were already packed and under my desk; and 2) the call came before I left work. I was separated from my wife then, and every Friday night, I’d bolt to the Port Authority bus station and hop on a coach which would take me upstate to visit my kids. By upstate I don’t mean Sing-Sing. Plenty of time for that later. At the moment, their mom was in grad school at Cornell so I would get on this bus that would take me through the beautiful Catskill mountains, Rip Van Winkle territory, Thomas Cole territory, James Fenimore Cooper territory (which really means Mahican territory), and then Northwest to the college town of Ithaca, at the base of the Finger Lakes where I would spend the weekend. Every weekend.

And you know, in those days, we were supposed to always be packed, anyway. It was two years after September 11, and those were the days of Go Bags. You were supposed to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice with all the underwear and road maps and duct tape you might require as you fled New York City. Nowadays I think the authorities would take one look at all that stuff in a bag and think you had a Murder Kit there, but back then they were telling you to pack this stuff. But like I say, my valise, my grip, my portmanteau was not for outrunning Armageddon, or kidnapping women at truckstops, it was just for visitation. Visiting children upstate thankfully not in prison.

And so when the call came that my father was shortly to be drawing his last breath, I was prepared. Not for that, but I was prepared in a more general way, for any type of emergency. All I needed to do this time was grab my bags -- and go in a different direction.

My father had been drawing his last breaths for about six months by that time, so I didn’t know how seriously to take this news. He was a bit of a drama queen. Minor things were always exaggerated to a heroic scale. I got in the habit of taking everything he said cum granis salis. But this time he was right. His lung cancer was advanced. The end was imminent. I remained skeptical right up until I got to his deathbed, which was surrounded by relatives, and saw him.

It wasn’t pretty. Every breath took Herculean effort. He couldn’t talk or even open his eyes. He had to summon every ounce of strength every few seconds to accomplish a shuddering, whistly whiny wheeze. It was agony to witness his agony. The cause was lung cancer: as advertised. He wasn’t the first in my family to die of the demon weed. My dad’s mother, an old hillbilly woman from the Smokey Mountain country had actually CHEWED tobacco, or chaw, as it was called, and spit it into coffee cans. She died of mouth cancer, an equally horrible way to go because the towards the end you can’t even eat. Can’t breathe, can’t eat. What a product of perfect selfishness tobacco is.

In a way, the English and the Native Americans had collaborated to kill my father. The natives had discovered the mildly intoxicating effects of tobacco and first cultivated the plant, but it had been the English of Virginia and North Carolina who had mass produced it and created a market for it and invented insidiously efficient new delivery systems. The names of the brands tell the story: Raleigh, Viceroy, Kent, Marlborough, Winston, Pall Mall. These name are the most prominently British products in all of American culture, then cancer-like, the products they're associated with eclipsed their origins. When you hear those names now, do you picture the London skyline, Big Ben? 

To the Native Americans tobacco had been a sacrament; the Europeans managed to convert it into an obscenity. The indigenous people would pass a pipe around during a tribal meeting. Each person would take ONE hit and pass it around, and that one hit was considered and had significance. The smoke was believed to contain their prayers or aspirations or thoughts or decisions, which would drift off to be heard by the spirits. Not dissimilar from the ancient Latin conception, where breath and spirit were the same word, so that inspiration and respiration come from the same root. Tobacco was also used as medicine, believed to cure everything from stomach woes to toothache. When John Rolfe and others were trying to create a European market, they too made medicinal claims for tobacco, and such claims on behalf of tobacco were made well into the 20th century. Calm, relaxation, a sense of well-being. For a while in the 1920s there were even Listerine cigarettes for curing bad breath. Gee, I wonder why that’s no longer on the market?

But ultimately, I think it’s less the principle of falsehood, than the industrialized scale of it that has done the widespread damage. If consumed in the quantities and with the frequency that the Native Americans brought to it, smoking tobacco was on balance pretty harmless and even benign. Then the Europeans got a hold of it and turned it into a menace to the human race. Why share a pipe? Here: take the whole thing! Look, we’ll roll it in paper. Why refill a pipe? That could take four seconds of valuable smoking time! The way you people are doing it is very inefficient! Soon each individual is smoking enough for 100 regional tribal meetings a day. It’s not just profane and irreligious but obscene in its selfishness. The industrial revolution didn’t stop at lengthening our lives. It has turned us all into Neros and Henry VIIIs. And what should be medicine becomes poison.  We do that with everything in this country. Anyone who’s ever witnessed SantaCon can tell you that. One Santa Claus: magical. 10,000 Santa Clauses running amok through the streets of New York: cancerous. Or consider all of the foodstuffs we subsidize. Like Corn. Corn comes from the Americas. Everyone knows that story about the Natives teaching the Pilgrims to grow corn so they wouldn’t starve. That’s kind of at the core of the Thanksgiving myth. Now, there’s corn syrup in EVERYTHING and America is the most obese nation on the earth. If corn syrup had come to the surface of the earth as glops from outer space like the goo in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then suddenly everyone doubled in weight, you’d consider it a real life horror movie. The alien menace must be thwarted. When the menace is US, we’re like “Okay, whatevs!”

 

Tobacco may well be the most widespread, most pernicious swindle in history (next to the various forms of totalitarianism; let’s be real). Let’s say it’s the biggest CAPITALIST swindle. The Virginia company founded Jamestown, discovered no gold, struggled for a while, and then simply created a market for a product that had NO value (other than “satisfaction”, which is a euphemism for “the absence of withdrawal symptoms”.)  At their founding, Virginia and North Carolina were actually LITERALLY narco states. We’re filled with revulsion at drug cartels in Central America. I’m at a loss to know how the earliest Southern States of the U.S. were any different, other than the fact that their drug was legal. Tobacco growers created millions of addicts, and to grow their insidious product, they relied on slavery and indentured labor. People were actually forced upon pain of death to labor their entire lives so that rich men could get richer by killing other people. That is literally what happened. Later, cotton became the main cash crop, and slavery grew worse and worse (a topic for another project and another day). But you must admit that there is a stark difference here. Massachusetts was founded as a City on a Hill. Virginia was founded as a Swamp of Despond. Those two strains have been doing battle for the soul of this nation ever since. By the 20th century the North was fully complicit as Madison Avenue hawked this pernicious product to the world.

 

At any rate, many of my father’s earliest American ancestors were complicit in this evil cultivation across the generations. Growers, plantation owners, overseers, merchants. But Chief Powhatan got his licks in. My father started smoking when he was eight years old; he stopped breathing when he was 68. I was there at the end, when his entire form froze, and his soul left his body, leaving him in a nightmarish pose, with his eyes rolled back into his head and his mouth agape in a yawn of terror, like the victim of a vengeful spirit. I’ll never unsee it. 

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One night, not long before his death, we were sitting at the kitchen table and my father said, “do you think your sister could be on this cocaine? And I thought that was just hysterical. You know how parents are. They see on the news that something bad happened in Brooklyn and then they phone you in an entiurely different Brooklyn neighborhood and say “Are you alright? I see where a pizza parlor blew up in a place called East Flat-Haven!” Because endless Law and Order marathons gave them this erroneous idea that New York was a combat zone, a place where you go to the bodega, the laundromat, or the takeout joint and you find a body behind the dumpster. So I laughed and I said “No way!“ My sister was the conservative one. Of late she was the one who organized the family gatherings. In fact, my last family Thanksgiving, spent with my own family, was cooked and organized by her. My parents' vague reports that she was acting strange, keyed up, and hanging around with sketchy people sounded like alarmism. They knew little of the world. But so did I. and it turned out that I was naïve. 

She left her husband and kids, was seeing this other guy, and they were into all kinds of shit. One day they met me in the city, a journey she rarely made. So I met them or the front stairs of the American Museum of Natural History, which is across the street from the New York Historical Society, where I worked. And my sister said “You look good” which is the same thing my mother said at my fathers deathbed and for the same reason. I’d just come from work and was standing there in a suit and a topcoat, instead of dressed like a bum which was what they were accustomed to. We met near the statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his trusty red and black assistants (since removed) which in retrospect seems significant, for my sister's paramour was part Pequot and part black or so he claimed. I'm not the one who was skeptical about his identity. The Pequots were, it turns out, because he was energetically trying to be recognized as a member of the tribe at the time. There was a legacy and a fortune there and ownership of a casino and some of his cousins belonged and so he was just positive that he was going to get this money. And when he got that money he was gonna do this and he was gonna do that and he’s saying this (I guess) to impress me and I wanted to say "No! Stop that, its not necessary, its embarrassing and I'm just some cracker, I'm an imposter who doesn't belong here myself, and I hate materialism, if you want to impress me stop talking about this payday, this bonanza". But I held my tongue and was icily polite and distant but friendly in the way of my people. As we looked at the dinosaur bones and the Hall of Evolution until they had to make their train and then off they went.

The pair proved to be like bleach and ammonia -- together they were like poison. They both developed rap sheets as long as my arm, and did time in jail. Years went by when I never spoke to my sister, never knew where she was, if she was alive, dead, in jail or how to get a hold of her and wouldn’t have anyway because she was beyond help and I had no help to give . I was barely hanging by a thread myself sometimes, the proverbial spider web, to use Jonathan Edwards' metaphor. But I missed knowing the two beautiful babies she and her boyfriend had made and lost during those years of tumult. They are among the closest blood relatives to me on the earth, born, like me, out of wedlock. They've grown up, and I haven't seen them, I don't know them and they don't know me. But I want to.And I sense a bond with them, though it's only a theory. I imagine that like me, they have big chips on their shoulders and much to prove. There might be ways I could relate to them like no one else can. Maybe, maybe not, But I dedicate this work to them, just in case.