It was one of those windy days that happens in the fall right around the time the leaves begin to change. The trees were beyond the teasing with yellow leaves here and there and were in a full blaze of ribald color as the wind would rip the leaves and send them scurrying down the blacktop roadway. It was a gated community, too, and so all those untidy leaves would be attended to by a cadre of landscapers armed with leaf blowers, who would fight a losing battle against the wind with their petty little machines.
I had to wait for for a while as the guard at the stand had to call in my visit. I could tell that the respondent was giving the guard a hard time, but was surprised when the guard admitted me. As I pulled up to the house the garage door opened. Behind it was an old man. 89 years old, I knew, because I had interviewed him before over the telephone. This was a longitudinal study so I we interviewed the same people multiple times. He was smoking a cigar, which answered one of the questions on my survey.
“Who are you and what the fuck do you want?” He said in a conversational tone. I showed him my badge and gave him my business card. I had interviewed him over the phone a couple of times, but never met him in person. I explained, again, why I was there and what I wanted. He was a retired lawyer and I knew he knew exactly what was going on but he was giving me a hard time to see if I could handle it.
I opened my computer and went through the main questions, which went quickly. I then turned to the supplemental questions, a tag along to this survey that changed every month. This month’s survey was on tobacco usage. I started by asking him if he had ever smoked a hundred cigarettes in his whole life.
“Yes,” he replied. “ I smoked regularly until 8 years ago when I got my hip replaced.” He took a puff on the literal fat stogie in his hand. “A great drug, it is. Tobacco.”
He took another puff and the smoke danced in the wisps of wind that made inside. “I read somewhere about how someone talked about cigarettes giving someone the feeling that they were a god because of the ability to hold fire at their fingertips and breathe in the results of that flame.
“Because fire is really the first capital tool that humans learned to master. Sure we banged rocks together and carved sticks, but fire was the first thing that we used to alter other tools and objects, as well as use it to prepare food and medicine.
He took another puff on the cheroot. “And that’s what this is. Food for the mind. Everyone talks about how bad smoking is but the simple fact remains—smoking makes you smarter. It does so by making your synaptic chains longer and more complex.
“In this case, tobacco is the gateway drug, but it’s a gateway to intelligence.”
I went on and asked him the rest of the questions and he gave answers that required some mental figuring to get an answer my computer would accept as he would have long winded explanations for each answer.
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