Copenhagen

Sometimes I have a piece that sits around for a while. I wrote this one in the fall back when I was supposed to be writing about Cathy and Lorrie and a half dozen other things. If you follow me online you've probably already read this story. If not, well...hope you don't have a weak stomach.

I’m supposed to be writing about Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” and a size zero blond. I have four documents open on my laptop, almost five thousand total words and none of them work. Oh there’s snippets of brilliance. There’s a couple of good lines, but I can’t lock in the softly lit, nostalgic, vibe that I’ve been searching for. Fortunately, I’ve had this problem before, involving some of the same characters and I know that one day I’ll tap into whatever it is that I need and the words will come pouring out. In the meantime though, I’ve promised to post a piece at least once every two weeks and yet here I sit with nothing and that won’t do.

I still can’t quite bring myself to accept the label “writer.” A writer is published and this little blog don’t count. No. I’m much more comfortable thinking of myself as a story teller and sometimes, when the words aren’t working and a piece just won’t come together I have to remind myself to just tell the damned story. I have to remember to tell it like I’m in the front seat of a pickup on the way to go fishing, or like I’m sitting on the ice chest next to the campfire drinking a cold beer.

So let me tell y’all a story.

In November of 1999 my time in Hawaii was coming to a close and I was rapidly approaching my Permanent Change of Station date. It was time. Most of my friends were gone. My old room mate Daryl was settled down helping some girl raise her kids. Lorrie and Cathy were gone. My girlfriend of the past year had dumped me and I was spending my weekends hanging out with sailors. Things were not going well. But I turned twenty-one on the last week of October and for the first time I could legally buy myself a beer at my favorite cowboy bar.

So late one Saturday night I was sitting alone in the shadow of a neon palm tree at a table in the back corner of “The Paniolo Cafe” on Pearl Harbor. I was drinking a double Jack and Coke. I had my cowboy boots propped up on the dance floor railing, a Stetson pushed back on my head, a steadily growing forest of empty Coors Light long necks on the table in front of me, and a fat wad of Copenhagen snuff crammed between my cheek and gums when, for the first time ever, a girl walked across the room to speak to me.

I grew up in a family of smokers. Both grandfathers and my dad smoked during my lifetime. Papa and Pawpaw both quit but dad didn’t manage. He hid it but he never quite kicked the habit until it was too late and the cancer was already spreading. Despite that, I was raised not to drink or smoke. I was told it was wrong and unhealthy, but I was a rowdy kid with bad examples and an undisclosed family history of addiction so I was doomed. I was sixteen when I lit my first cigarette. I was working my first job, washing dishes at a local pizza place. We were slammed and I was stressed and there was an ashtray at the dish washing station and my manager smoked and well…soon so did I.

At the time a pack of cigarettes cost $1.50 and I could wander into the cigarette shop by the Winn Dixie in Covington or a gas station across the street from Covington High School and buy one no questions asked. I tried Lucky Strike and Camels and Newport Menthols before settling on cowboy killers. While my dad was smoking PallMalls and Winstons I was smoking Marlboro Reds. When I inevitably got busted he stole my carton of cigarettes and smoked the whole thing himself, lighting each one with the zippo he'd also confiscated from me. He was mad that I was smoking, but I think he was secretly madder that I was buying a better brand than he was.

It didn’t stop with cigarettes though. I was a redneck kid with redneck friends and it’s hard to sneak a cigarette in High School but it’s easy to sneak a dip. Shop teacher didn’t even pretend not to notice. Smokeless tobacco ruled the high school bleachers. I started, like all St Tammany Parish kids do, with Skoal Bandits, then graduated to Hawken mint. I dipped Cherry Skoal behind the gym at First Baptist Bogalusa. I dabbled in chewing Redman. Dip made me dizzy. I sometimes swallowed and got sick. I preferred cigarettes.

Then I joined the Army.

You can’t smoke at night in the Army. A lit cigarette can be seen for miles in the darkness and the smell carries hundreds of meters even in the daylight. Every butt has to be carefully field stripped and saved so you don’t leave a trail of obvious trash for the enemy to follow. Tobacco is a stimulant and an appetite suppressant but smoking was forbidden when soldiers needed it most, during late night guard shifts and overnight movements. So almost everyone in the Infantry who smoked also chewed some form of smokeless tobacco. To this day if you get on a plane headed to military towns like Fayatteville, North Carolina or Columbus, Georgia and you pay close attention to the well shaved, short haired, fit, young men on your flight you’ll most likely notice a Skoal can ring in their back pocket, though in today’s modern military it’s more likely to be Zyn than real snuff. A can ring in Jenco jeans wasn’t an uncommon sight around Infantry barracks in the late nineties.

At eighteen I was smoking a pack a day and dipping Skoal Straight in the field but the civilian world and the Army were both changing. Smoking sections disappeared and by the mid nineties indoor smoking was largely banned. Army installations and even some barracks, like the medical company barracks at Tripler Army Medical Center, went smoke free. “No Smoking” signs were becoming more and more common. But Infantrymen being infantrymen we quickly realized that the signs didn’t say “no dipping” and immediately switched to smokeless tobacco. My buddy Evan gave me my first dip of Copenhagen Snuff and after one nauseous and dizzy afternoon I was firmly hooked. Copenhagen gave me energy. Copenhagen kept me awake. Copenhagen kept me from getting hungry. Copenhagen is insanely addictive and turns out I have a genetic predisposition to addictive behavior.

The only time I didn’t have a dip of snuff in my mouth was when I was eating, sleeping, or fucking and I was in the middle of a loooooong dry spell that Saturday night in November 1999 when that girl walked across the room to my table.

I don’t remember much about her except that she was blond, fair skinned and cute in a girl next door/hot Kindergarten teacher way that I’m a sucker for. She wasn’t dressed for a night out on the town. I remember blue jeans and a light shirt unbuttoned over a camisole. She was wearing the wrong kind of shoes for dancing. She wasn’t dressed up or made up but she was soft and pretty in a way that I’m not sure women even understand they’re capable of being. More importantly she smiled at me, and a pretty girl’s smile is a powerful weapon. I was a puddle before she even introduced herself but I straightened my hat and sat up straight and tried to pretend that I wouldn’t have low crawled across the sticky barroom floor just for a kind word and another smile from her.

Then, to my surprise, she asked me if I wanted to dance.

Fuck yea I did! More than anything. So I smiled and said “yes ma’am” and took one last drink.

When you dip snuff for sixteen hours a day you learn quick to tell the difference between your drink cup and your spit cup. I could tell a coca-cola from a twenty ounce bottle of dip spit because the coke is cold to the touch. In the barracks a few wraps of hundred mile an hour tape around a Gatorade bottle hides the contents from nosy officers and makes your spittoon obvious by sight and touch. In the car my cold drink went in the cup holder and my spit cup went between my legs. In the club I’d normally spit into plastic drink cups crammed with napkins or a beer bottle with a peeled label. I have no idea how I fucked it up. I don’t remember how I mixed up my drink with my spit cup. Maybe…certainly…I was drunk. Maybe I was just overwhelmed with the shocking and unique realization that “holy shit this girl really does WANTS to dance with ME.” Maybe it was just karma and I was paying for my many sins but somehow I took a sip from the wrong cup.

I smelled the spit before it hit my lips and I knew I’d fucked up but it was too late. I couldn't convince my body to stop before it was too late. The taste was foul. Copenhagen Snuff isn't a particularly refreshing flavor, even fresh. Tobacco spit is gritty and warm but it was the sliminess of it that turned my stomach and made me want to gag. There was no time to worry about the taste though, I had a serious dilemma. Sitting across from me, waiting patiently, was a cute blond who’d walked across the room to ask me to dance. I had a decision to make and there were only two options. Spit everything back into the cup and run the risk of her seeing and realizing what I’d done or swallow and hope she didn’t notice the mix up.

Y’all want to guess which I chose?

I swallowed.

It proved to be the wrong decision.

I could tell by the way that girls smile faded that she'd seen everything. Her faced turned a pale shade of green and she recoiled from me as if I’d bitten the head off of a bat. “Did you just drink dip spit!?” she demanded as she slowly backed away from the table. I dunno if I tried to lie or if I stammered an excuse. She beat a hasty retreat back across the room, leaving me drunk and alone with a horrible taste in my mouth and an aching belly.

You’d think that would have been lesson.

You’d think striking out so badly then projectile vomiting in a Pearl Harbor parking lot would be motivation to quit but I’m not a smart man. I continued dipping Copenhagen snuff for another decade or so.

The first thing I did when I got off work on September 12, 2001 was drive to the Fort Drum Shopette and buy an extra can of snuff because I knew we were going to deploy eventually. I went to Afghanistan with thirty loose cans of Copenhagen snuff buried in my rucksack. When I was injured in Uzbekistan my troops stole my leatherman, my pocket knife, my Camelback and my desert boots but sent twenty cans of Copenhagen snuff and a toothbrush with me on the medevac. Somehow those cans of snuff survived the trip, making it from Fort Drum to Uzbekistan then Turkey, Germany, and Walter Reed before finding their way to my high school bedroom back home in Louisiana. I should have thrown them out. After weeks in the hospital I was fully detoxed and had no chemical need for nicotine, but I was young, alone, and bored and I couldn’t help but crack one of those cans open and sneak a little dip when my parents weren’t looking. If for no other reason than to feel like I was still my old self after everything I'd been through. I put in a dip after my first date with the girl who’s now my wife, doing it intentionally in front of her just so she knew I had the habit. I dipped so much the night people of Fat City gave me the street name “Dip” while I was working as a Sheriff’s Deputy.

I quit eleven years ago when my wife and I started talking about having a baby. She went to Spain for several months for work and while I had the house to myself I decided it was safe to try and kick the habit. Cold turkey didn't work so I used nicotine patches and wintergreen “herbal” snuff to fight the cravings. The patches gave me nightmares and ironically I got in more trouble for breaking the tobacco policy at work with a lip full of wintergreen flavored cornstarch than I ever got into when my lip was packed with snuff. But eventually I managed to quit gnawing at my inner lip and climbing the walls. I packed on fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks but I stayed quit. For a long time I kept a can of that wintergreen herbal snuff in my back pocket and dipped it as religiously as I dipped tobacco. It’s only been in the last two years that I’ve been able to drop that particular crutch, but over time I reached for it less and less. There’s still a can hidden around here somewhere for when the urges get bad or when I’m going hunting or fishing and want to feel like I haven’t completely given up all my bad habits. I haven’t noticed any health differences, but at least my house isn’t littered with half filled spit cups. Besides, tobacco is so expensive in Massachusetts I couldn’t afford dip and groceries.

Even after all this I still miss it though.

I forgot REK started this song with a joke about his rodeo career that mirrors my own experience. After five bulls I too just stuck with the Copenhagen part of being a cowboy.