Old Flames Die Hard: McAllen smoking ban is a real drag

The problem with citywide bans is they lack imagination.

Just think about it:

A McAllen without shoppers from Monterrey.

A McAllen where it’s illegal to put one of those stick figure pig-tailed cheerleader decals on your rear car window.

A McAllen where building a strip mall could get you 10 to 20.

So many possibilities!

Bans on smoking are particularly irritating. Like that tattletale in junior high, they’re out to make life a little more asphyxiating just to score a couple of brownie points.

They’ve become a Texas trend, lowering the quality of life in Dallas, Houston, Laredo, and El Paso within the past few years. Even Abilene voted to give people yet another reason not to go there.

Et tu, McAllen?

Maybe the bans are following me. I spent four years cultivating my love of Marlboro Lights in Austin before coming back home in 2004. After years of trying to get a smoking ban passed there, the miserable health-nut crowd was finally able to extinguish the capital’s live-and-let-live reputation in 2005.

Not long after the Austin ban went into effect, I headed up for a weekend of cheap beer and nostalgia, only to find my favorite dives missing all their ash trays. Without the haze of cigarette smoke, so luminous and intoxicating, those beloved barrooms looked naked and ordinary, the cellulite beneath the satin. Gone were the tobacco mist-shrouded voyages to drunken bliss. Seen clearly, my former haunts were about as bewitching as a visit to the Sprint Store.

The very thought of high visibility inside the Gaslight Lounge or Graham Central Station fills my heart with terror. And restaurants? When is a cigarette ever better than right after a heavy, high-carb meal? It’s the course we in the lower middle class call dessert.

Take Luby’s. What would the world’s best cafeteria be without its tastefully segregated smoking section, marked off by that old-timey saloon sign and packed full of white widowers with frumpy raven hair and lips like Hot Tamales, smoking happily as they chew their chicken fried steaks?

So, yeah, I can still smoke all I want lying in bed or vacuuming or walking my dog at 1 a.m. But it’s the mentality that bugs me.

What would the Founders say? Tom Jefferson smoked a pack just watching the sun rise over his million-acre tobacco plantation. The first sketches of Mickey Mouse are covered in a fine layer of ash from Walt Disney’s Camel Reds. All our contemporary role models (Britney, Paris, Lindsey) come with Capri Lights. So why the backlash?

The McAllen smoking ban is like an insult to the family name. I stand at the front of a long line of proud, independent-minded, chain-smoking women, the male heir to a cherished tradition. My mom has consumed more cigarettes in her lifetime than she has calories.

Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra-Lights are as much a part of her as skimpy outfits and malapropisms. Her commitment to being herself was undeterred even by pregnancy — something I look fondly upon.

“See? Look at me — I turned out fine!”

Of course, Grandma Bebe isn’t so rosy. Even though she’d been diagnosed with emphysema for at least six months prior, my mom and I found out for the first time this past February on one of our rare, brief visits.

Frail and brittle-voiced, she broke the news in the same fatalistic, matter-of-fact way she talks about most other things.

“My lungs are failing, but that’s just what emphysema does. You know.”

I felt bad that I didn’t.

Bebe’s intense smoking years were over before I was born, and I attributed her illness to pure misfortune.

My mom didn’t offer her theory. She smoked quietly, distantly on the car ride home that day, and hasn’t brought the matter up since.

Bebe would sooner ask me to sponge-bathe her than ask me to quit smoking.

So I admit I’ve tried.

I wore the patch for months before it started burning red squares onto my arm. Quicken tells me I’ve blown $126.69 on tobacco products this year, including Nicorette, which has become a reliable backup on airplanes and at the movies.

So maybe it is a new world.

But what happens to people like Miss Taggart, my U.S. history teacher in high school, whose troubled eyes soften only beneath the warm glow of a Parliament?

What happens to my neighbor, a very old man whose wife and sons died off one by one, but whose pack of Lucky Strikes will never leave him?

What happens to Mom?

And me?

Should I really abandon Phillip Morris, whose coupons and ashtrays are the only birthday presents I still get in the mail? How could I stand without my tiny white crutch?

South Park’s Cartman summed up the anti-smoking crusaders best: “Smoking brings a lot of people just a little bit of joy. And you get to take that away from them. You are so awesome.”

The present and the future on my mind, I’ll sit here quietly, distantly, the day’s last joy burning down to nothing.

——————

Brandon Garcia is the slot editor of The Monitor. Born and raised in McAllen, Garcia graduated from Memorial High School in 2000 and attended the University of Texas at Austin until 2004. He operates Leyenda Production Co. a McAllen-based community theater he co-founded in 2005. He has written, scored and produced three original musical plays. You can reach him at bgarcia@themonitor.com or at (956) 683-4461.