Smoking a Black & Mild and expecting a pleasurable experience is like asking a woman to kick you in the nuts in the hope of an orgasm. The packaging boasts that it both tastes and smells great, with neither of these claims being at all grounded in reality. A Middleton Black & Mild fills my mouth with the feeling that only piss-poor pipe tobacco from the bottom of the barrel can give, and is not so much mild as it is incendiary. With every puff my cheeks bulge out like they had just been swabbed with a Q-tip soaked in Tabasco and exhalation is the only pleasurable part of the process. But even then you are left with a wretched aftertaste of charred paper and cancer. A man can almost feel the lesions forming inside his mouth with each drag. As for the olfactory portion of the program, their smell is overpowering and spreads like nuclear fallout; the syrupy maple-coated chemical clouds billow out and envelop anything it comes in contact with. It’s as if someone took your face and slammed it into a steaming bowl of Maple Syrup & Brown Sugar Quaker Oatmeal.
So, why then am I smoking this repugnant stick? Well, in this one-horse-that-should’ve-been-turned-into-glue-years-ago-town there is only one place within walking distance to buy cigarettes, which is the Granville CVS Pharmacy. It used to be a soda fountain and druggist, but apparently all things quaint must go, even in a town like Granville, whose sole export is small town charm. This particular CVS has an impressively destitute cigarette selection and very rarely carries my brand, Marlboro Menthol Lights. Quite often I am forced to buy Salem’s or on this particular day, Newports, a cigarette so harsh that it frequently makes its user cough up blood, your humble narrator included. This CVS also doesn’t carry any rolling papers of any kind, so the only way to smoke herb if you don’t have a piece of some kind is to buy what is classified as a “cigarillo,” the group to which the Middleton Black & Mild belongs.
In an effort not to claw my throat apart before nightfall with my Newport’s I decided to try and smoke a Black & Mild because it was advertised as being “soothing.” Then again, cigarette ads used to come with doctor’s recommendations and bull about T-Zones (“Your T-Zone: T for taste…T for throat…”), so putting faith in any claim made by a tobacco manufacturer is just plain ig’nant. I was also smoking the Black & Mild because it was time-consuming and I couldn’t spend any more time in my janitor’s closet of a dorm room waiting for evening to come. It was an unofficial rule among my friends at Denison University that no serious partying or “pre-gaming” start before 6:00 at night. If you did anything before then it was just a joint here or a beer there to keep you level, but I didn’t have any joints or beers so I was stuck smoking a crappy midget cigar and waiting for six o’ clock to come.
It was only 5:00 when I gave up on the Black & Mild and went back inside to see if my friend Josh had anything to drink. Normally, whenever you knocked on the door to his massive six-man dorm room there were at least two people sunk into the couch playing Guitar Hero or watching Lost re-runs. But today there was nobody inside when I knocked on the door, letting myself in to make sure someone wasn’t on their laptop in the bedroom. When it was fairly clear that no one was in I went over to the fridge, grabbed two Pabst Blue Ribbon’s, and left a couple dollars in the UNICEF box on top of their dresser into which they put all of their booze money. I walked upstairs with the beers blatantly tucked underneath my turtleneck sweater and slid into my room. My dorm was so small that the only place to put my TV was in the dead center of the room so that I had to gingerly step over it to reach the reclining chair beside my bed. I popped the tab on the first PBR and started watching Cool Hand Luke, trying to make myself feel more like Paul Newman. I too could eat fifty eggs, that is, if I liked eggs.
After downing my first beer I undressed myself and hid the second one underneath my bath towel so that I could drink it in the communal shower. I could think of nothing better than drinking an ice-cold beer while hot water cascaded over my shoulders and steam rose up my nose. I made sure to take the corner shower stall because it was the only one with an intact shower curtain and I didn’t want my resident advisor to catch me drinking in the bathroom. When I was cleansed and buzzed I crushed the empty can and walked back to my room to get ready for my night out. I was not dressing for style, but for utility as there were no safe places to smoke weed inside on campus and because the temperature was dipping down to about 45º that night. I put on my ratty grey pajama pants on over my boxers and under my jeans in lieu of long johns and wore two sweaters underneath my charcoal, full-length Brooks Brothers coat that was a hand-me-down from one of my two obscenely tall cousins. I was ready to be both toasty and toasted.
The campus of Denison was designed to try and transpose the elegance and history of a established New England university into the flatness of central Ohio. I can just see some architect visiting William & Mary or Mt. Holyoake, scribbling down dimensions and thematic flourishes to bring back to his bosses in the Midwest. I lived on the west side of campus in a dormitory that sat atop of one of the university’s two cafeterias. One evening, blitzed out of our skulls, my best friend Alec and wandered our way down a seemingly dead-end dorm room staircase only to find the door to the cafeteria kitchen unlocked. Having found the drunkards equivalent of Wonkaland, we rummaged through the pantries and walk in freezer until we had found what we craved, which turned out to be a 3 pound jar of Peter Pan peanut Butter and a 48 count box of Honey Wheat bagels. Don’t even ask me if I feel guilty about taking the food because the university was already screwing us over by making us pay about four thousand bucks a year for canned drek from Sysco Food Sevices. I would’ve taken more, but my mini-fridge could barely hold forty-some-odd bagels as it was and anything beyond that would have been wasteful. Now, I know what you’re thinking and, yes, I did eat every last one of those freakin’ bagels, even after they had gone so stale that I had to gnaw on them like a teething ring. The concept of “waste not, want not” takes on a new meaning when you’re dining on pilfered goods.
Before I left for my bacchanalian evening, I stopped by the back entrance of the cafeteria to smoke a cigarette with the cafeteria ladies and gentlemen who were getting their eight minutes of satisfaction, sitting on overturned milk crates on a tiny concrete platform overlooking the town. I smoked with the cafeteria workers because, for reasons unbeknownst to me, not a single person in my hundred-person dorm was a smoker. I’m telling you, America’s youth has gone downhill. All of these “Truth” ads and Surgeon General’s warnings and bans on smoking indoors have brainwashed them against the simple fact that there is nothing cooler and more American than smoking cigarettes. Whatever happened to peer pressure or wanting to be like James Dean? Well, I guess that’s the problem right there. Kids today wouldn’t know Rebel Without a Cause if they were forced to watch it like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, with eyes wrenched open and subliminal messaging barraging them from all sides. You can’t even find Lucky Strikes any more. No more L.S.M.F.T. No more “It’s Toasted.” No more Marlboro man or Joe Camel. Hell, they won’t even let cigarette companies advertise their carcinogenous products on the hoods of NASCAR cars anymore. That’s the problem with this damned country: They’ll let Crown Royal, Jack Daniels and Budweiser on the side of a supercharged Ford Fusion, but they won’t let Winston or Doral come on board. Alcohol can bring a family or a man asunder, but I ain’t ever heard of a man hitting rock bottom because he was a pack a day smoker. All cigarettes do is stop you from spending the last ten years of your life languishing in a nursing home sucking Salisbury steak through a tube and watching the soaps everyday.
Once I had finished my cigarette I began my trek over to the southeast end of campus, following the orange brick pathway across bridges and past Swasey Chapel, making sure to step on the large concrete Denison seal in the center of the walkway to discourage superstition. I figure that stepping on the seal, which is supposed to curse you and cause to flame out or flunk out of Denison, couldn’t harm my karma now since I had urinated on it the week prior, an act which I don’t really see as vandalism. All of the ammonia in my piss might’ve washed off all of the snow-salt and mud caking the seal, probably doing it a bit of good. After Swasey is the main academic quad, which is dark and silent on an early Friday evening, the sounds of pretentious professors and pretensions of academic enrichment squashed for the weekend. I galumphed down the crumbling staircase from the top of the hill towards the dorms at the south, taking the steps two by two and leading with my crotch for leisure.
The doors of all the dorms on campus require specific sliding key cards to get into, but the side entrance to Stone Hall is in such disrepair that all you need to do is give the handle a hearty pull and it’ll open on its own. I met up with Kieran and Davis by the pool table in the rec room of the dorm. Kieran was a pompous little misogynist prick that was all the more full of himself after spending the past summer in Amsterdam. He would flip back his grungy blond hair away from his acne-filled face to regale us with tales of life on the continent; how everything was so civilized in Amsterdam and how you could buy weed brownies and smoke bowls at hash bars there and how America would be like that “any day now.” He was under the misapprehension that going to Europe had made him cultured, but all it had really done was prove that he was a creature of habit whose only discernable talent was an ability to do copious amounts of drugs. Kieran also insisted that Amsterdam women were looser than the puritanical bitches (his words, not mine) in the states and that he had spent the summer wallowing a series of well perfumed bosoms. I don’t care how sexually liberated Dutch women are, there’s no way that any of them, much less a veritable harem as he described, would bed a scrawny potser who would only look statuesque standing next to Danny Devito.
Davis didn’t talk much, which in this circle of friends was a tremendous plus for me. His pale skin from years of British inbreeding was almost translucent and the veins on his spindly arms looked like a sliver of a page from a Rand McNally Atlas. Davis sported the spiked and frosted tip hairstyle so popular in the late nineties and this, along with his baggy jeans that hung around the bottom rim of his butt gave off the impression that he hadn’t changed his look since middle school. He was sporting a gigantic backpack filled with weed, shrooms, three pipes, a bong, and an anatomy and physiology textbook for conventions sake.
