What: An empty pack of Campaign 88 Dukakis for President King Size Filters.
Cost/Value: $2.15 retail, roughly twice what a pack of Camels cost. One eBay lot of Dukakis and Bush packs sold for $22.99 a few years ago.
The story, as I recall: I smoked every last one of them.
In 1988, I was wayward in every sense of the term. No permanent address or fixed direction in life, my friends and girlfriends itinerant and unreliable, I was absent from both college and career and ready to join the circus or go be a poet somewhere that would have me.
My only reliable assets were delusions of beatnik grandeur and an uncritical curiosity that should have killed me before my 20th birthday. My role models were Lou Reed and Hunter S. Thompson, both of whom I revered as self-exiled, fellow abominations of middle class America. I, too, felt sick and dirty, more dead than alive, and yearned to escape my bourgeois heritage then grow up to taunt it for making me. Or something.
I wanted to know everything, but was confused how one did that, know everything. Like all my heroes, I devoured books and lyrics and poems and art and films out of psychic self defense. Every new name was a feast for the imagination--Celine, Dos Passos, O'Keeffe, Ginsberg, Godard, Artaud, Coltrane, Van, Patti. There was so much to ingest, yet I was paradoxically terrified of starving.
It should have been clear to me that I swung hard left politically, what with all the liberals and punks and counterculture heroes in my music collection. (I mean, come on! I owned three Billy Bragg albums and a Phil Ochs tape!) But at 19, I was unstaked, so my politics were elusive at best, enigmatic at worst. That year alone saw me renounce my membership in the Republican Party, a youthful indiscretion attributable to an adjacent membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints (some other time, dear, curious reader), in favor of a flirtation with the Socialist Party by way of Fred Hampton, the murdered Black Panther, and John Reed, the harassed chronicler of Red October.
The renunciation occurred inside a North Phoenix DMV teeming with rednecks at a time when gun racks were as common a sight as, well, rednecks in North Phoenix. The clerk who took my voter registration card did so reluctantly after discovering I had written "Communist" in the box for party affiliation, whereupon she announced that SHE was never going to sign it officially, whereupon her supervisor told her she had to because I was free to be a Communist, whereupon several people standing around the counter looked at me and began asking if I'd rather go live in Russia, whereupon I made a commie-shaped hole in the door and escaped before I could find out what it's like to get my ass kicked in a parking lot of a government building. Needless to say I was not then nor was I ever an actual Communist, but I was listening to a lot of punk (by way of the Velvets and Talking Heads and Television) and felt inspired to do something wicked and monstrous to... the US government, I suppose, for being all governmenty and wrong.
The hard shift into liberal politics began with Hunter S. Thompson. Being politically dyslexic, I didn't realize Thompson was Libertarian. His writings were attractive to me initially because of his quasi-association with beatniks, which I gleaned from reading Hell's Angels and, in much more detail, The Great Shark Hunt, the latter on permanent check-out renewal to me from the Phoenix College Library. By the time I finished it, I was certain I was a Democrat because I hated Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, detested the police state that America was becoming, favored free living and doing what I wanted over not favoring those things, and had a general sense that the free-loving hippies, though full of shit generally, were more correct in world-view than the flat-topped Conservative gargoyles lurking in the frames of Ralph Steadman's monstrous illustrations. Truth be told, I found preppy girls slightly cuter than the tangled, bedangled hippie girls I'd come across, but that's another thing altogether. This is about smokes.
The smokes, then.
Late Summer, Arizona State University campus, meeting a friend who had gone through the rigamarole of actually applying and getting financing for a state university and then actually attending. By then, the Democrats had selected Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis as their candidate to run against Vice President George Bush. They were both dweeby but I hadn't lived long enough yet to see politicians as anything but that, so I had no sense that voters occasionally get a candidate they are passionate about, a Kennedy, say, or a Clinton.
On the table for the Democrats, alongside xeroxed policy documents and charity paperbacks for sale, were several packs of Dukakis for President cigarettes. They were ridiculous, tasted and smelled like shit, although nothing like the Dukakis campaign itself, but he was my candidate, so I bought a pack and smoked his cigarettes, not Bush's cigarettes, and wallowed in a cloud of hope for few more months until my first Election Day came around that November. Of course, my guy lost that year and faded into the type of anonymity failed candidates can only dream about these days, and I carried the dread of all Democrats with me as we swirled inexorably towards the Gulf War, which I protested the next year as a newly attitudinal, firmly leftist, campus "radical" at the University of Arizona. By the time Bill Clinton came along, campaign cigarettes were passe and so was George Bush, and I'd discovered that a political conscience was only as good as the country that didn't kill you over it.
Why did I keep it? God knows, other than my love of the absurd. It's a piece of history now.
Item 2: A theatrical program. in which artistes start a theatre troupe!
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