One of my favorite delusions has always been that I would pick up the newspaper one morning and see a big headline, “George Dickel is good for you,” with a subheadline “cigarettes, too.”
It seems that all the things we love are bad for us, and those two substances have always been among my favorites.
Well, I almost got one of my wishes. In one of my health newsletters I saw a review of a book by William Campbell Douglas, “The Health Benefits of Tobacco.”
Naturally, I ordered it immediately. Like boys who looked for the juicy parts of books, I immediately thumbed through it to find what it said about cigarettes. And what it said was that six cigarettes a day of pure tobacco are good for you.
I was driving to Scottsboro that day, so I stopped at a tobacco shop in South Pittsburg and bought me two packs of American Spirit. I had smoked them at one time and knew they were pure tobacco. I smoked my six cigarettes on the trip there and back and had to wait until the next day to have my next “fix of six.”
I sneaked around like an egg-sucking hound, hoping to smoke undetected by family and close friends until I convinced myself I could smoke just six cigarettes a day. The sneaking part was fun. It reminded me that one of the reasons we take up bad habits is the joy of sneaking.
I was happy that I attained my goal. I didn’t smoke more than six cigarettes a single day in my short “new experience” with tobacco. But I noticed at night I would be thinking to myself, “Boy oh boy, I can smoke six more cigarettes tomorrow!” I could see I was getting addicted to six as surely as I had once been addicted to sixty.
There’s something about being addicted that goes counter to my grain. I am not going to spend my life as anyone or anything’s slave.
Now how about George Dickel. I doubt that anyone has ever enjoyed Dickel any more than I did in the years I had a band and played every weekend. I liked it straight, on the rocks, with a little water or a little Coke. Basically I came to realize that drinking was the way a musician defends himself against gourd-pounding drunks. And before the DUI laws, people would get drunk.
I was playing with Al Harvey’s Down Home Edition when I quit. I said, “Al, I want to turn in my two-week notice. I’m gonna quit drinking and I don’t think I can take it sober.” He told me he wasn’t going to accept my notice but would wait to see how it went.
I couldn’t believe how well it went. Me and my long-time intimate friend from Cascade Hollow in Tullahoma parted ways so smoothly and painlessly that I have never missed it. Quitting smoking was a willpower thing but giving up old George didn’t require any willpower at all. It still amazes me how we can think we must have something and then it just falls away when we realize we no longer need it.
Cigarettes are different. As Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s go to know his limitations.” I do and I chose freedom.