#dontsmoke creativewriting personalessay summerjobs 80s 90s cerealmilk
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Cigarettes and Cereal Milk
I was 12 when I started working at the Jersey Shore grocery & deli. It was old school with no air conditioning, some pinball machines and Ms. Pacman with only a counter and stools that would be filled in the morning with old men. They’d sit reading Racing Form and the Bergen Record - slugging down their coffees, smoking their cigars or cigarettes and eating the State Delicacy of Pork Roll, Egg and Cheese on a hard roll.
Ran by a fiery Italian couple from Brooklyn (or the Bronx?) and partially by their two adult children, I was initially hired to work Saturdays and Sundays to stock and stuff the then-thick Sunday newspapers with inserts: comic pages, circulars, auto, arts and classified sections that made the weekly paper as big as a Bible or the yellow pages phone book.
For me, summer and a job at the deli was jubilant. It was freedom. I’d leave for our 1950′s era seaside bungalow with my family the day school ended and hardly go back “north” (about an hour and change away from our home in North Brunswick) the whole summer. Like clockwork, every Saturday afternoon I would race down our lane of bungalows across Central Avenue to get to work and do the same at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings.
Along with my newspaper responsibilities, I had the pleasure of refilling the coolers with cans of Coke, Tab and Dr. Pepper. I’d wipe down the pinball machines, replenish the Milky Ways, Gobstoppers and Fun Dip. I even got to venture behind the counter to restock the cigarette display cases.
Everybody smoked cigarettes or so it seems. It was the late 80’s and although the Surgeon Generals Warnings were in full effect – nobody seemed to give a shit. Cigarettes at the deli cost $1.50 a pack. I remember when a new tax was introduced that pushed them close to $2 and it was like someone canceled Christmas. Angry brows and hard scoffs abounded.
In those days – cigarette packaging and marketing was an art form. A literal science! The shiny, little packs of smokes were like works of art.
Shiny, snazzy and colorful rows of greens, beiges, reds, blues, pinks, gold, silver, and bronze with dramatic names that sounded like television soap operas or westerns or legal dramas:
Bel Air
Salems
Winstons
Benson & Hedges
Parliaments
Kent
Chesterfields
Capri
Lucky Strikes
Virgina Slims
Camel
Newport
Vantage
True Blue
Carlton
Kool
Lark
Tareyton
Marlboro (duh)
Viceroy
Merit
I was enamored. Ripping open the fresh cartons of vibrant sophistication and stacking them neatly in rows – it was like a tobacco Tetris. Seemingly, everyone smoked. The surfers, the lifeguards, the boomers, the Greatest Generation, the beach badge checkers, the cops, and the kids that also worked at the store…all puffers. My father was also a smoker. A secret smoker. The worst kept secret ever. Despite a massive heart attack that required open heart surgery at the age of 37…he couldn’t shake it. He’d have to slip away to go tend to “yardwork” and come back smelling like an ashtray and the family (me, my brother, sister and mother) would pretend to not notice the waft of smokey perfume that he’d come back into the house with…for decades!
I don’t remember when I picked up the habit definitively but it was between
middle school (8th grade) and high school (9th grade). Eerily, I mimicked the actions of my dad. Stashing packs of cigarettes deep within drawers or in my little lockbox adorned with childish stickers. I’d keep handy a bottle of cologne (probably Drakkar Noir or some ilk of it’s day) and whisk outside the minute the parents left the house and crouch down outside against the side of the house near the BBQ grill to fume a Marlboro.
I was in my early teens but looked like a contradiction…tall, superskinny and blonde but self-consciously young for my age. How did I purchase these vile decks of cancer sticks? It was shamefully easy. In those days, there was no legal age to buy them. During the off-season and away from the seaside store, I could hop on my bike and ride to any number of convenience stores in the area of my “northern” home. For $2 (and change as the prices rose higher), I could satisfy my physical and mental cravings usually without a hitch.
If the purveyor did have some tinge of guilt serving cigarettes to a pubescent-ish Ricky Schroeder lookalike…I had a cover story in my back pocket:
“My grandmother (or aunt or step-sister) hurt her legs and can’t get around real well, kind sir” was a standard lie. If I was really organized, I’d have a friend waiting by their landline telephone to pretend to be said relative and say to the clerk, “She said you can call her.” 99.9% of the time that worked like a charm and only once did a phone call actually get made and “Kim” – an older girl by a couple of years magically performed the part of the ailing kin.
Freshman year of high school, I took the bus – having not yet made friends with anyone with a drivers license. The bus would pick me up on the back street parallel to mine. I’d wake up (usually with a teenage attitude fueled by nicotine withdrawal) and eat some breakfast before the bus. In order NOT to miss my ride, I had the timing down like a Swiss watch maker.
Breakfast consisted of a Benadryl (allergies), a cup of coffee (light and sweet – and yes the Stankovits kids were all early coffee drinkers…) and usually some cereal. We weren’t allowed real sugary cereals so we had to “settle” for Rick Krispies, Chex or Raisin Bran and the occasional Cap’N’Crunch. Depending on the sugar content, I’d pour the milk over the cereal and dollop a spoonful of sugar in the bowl. After the crackles of crispy rice or soggy lumps of bran were consumed, there was the sweet reward of the leftover cereal milk. It was like breakfast’s dessert.
I’d slurp that down and head out the door, towards the end of our dead-end street where there was and still is a section of woods where I could cut through to the next street where the bus would pick me up.
Lighting up, I would get my fix and mentally prepare for the day ahead standing in the woods next to the wooden fence that captured the backyard of the last house on our block. It was meditative. Who the hell knows what I was thinking about…”Algebra quiz! Fall Dance! Fuck, am I queer? I can’t wait to drive and get the hell out of here?!”
The bus would come and I’d hop on with a waft of smokey aroma and cheap cologne enshrining me like Pig Pen from Peanuts. Usually, a pack would last a week or more. I’d check my pack to see how many cigarettes I had left before I had to begin another hunt…hiding away my Marlboros in my duffle bag (those were in style...) until the last school bell rang…ready to repeat another day. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
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