Man Oh Man Oh Marlboro Man!
The other day while I was working, this young family came in. The couple was probably in their mid-thirties and had what looked to be an 8 year old son. I couldn’t help but notice their matching Marlboro t-shirts. All I could picture was them sitting around the dinner table together as a family looking through the new Marlboro catalogue, talking about how neat it’ll be to sleep in their new Marlboro non-flammable sleeping bags while camping that weekend. Then the husband will pull out his blue lighter and the wife will pull out her matching pink lighter, they will wrap their cigarette wielding arms around each other and take off a drag of the other’s cancer stick.
The years will pass and they will continue to be as faithful to the Marlboro corporation as they are to each other. The Marlboro merchandise will build up and their son will dream of growing up to be like the Marlboro Man…a strapping young cowboy astride his sturdy horse. Of course, though, he will not grow up to the Marlboro Man, he will grow up to be a nervous chain smoker and coffee addict, kissing ass just to make ends meet.
Then the couple grows old and emphysema becomes as natural a thing as their premature wrinkles. They get matching His & Hers oxygen tanks and the husband wheels his wife around the corner to the Pace Club to buy an economy size package of those trusty Marlboro’s. Then comes the day that the husband lays in bed, feeling like he is at his last. For a split second he starts to regret his 7 pack a day habit, starts thinking about all that money that could have been saved to send his son to a decent college or something equally worthwhile. But instead he curls up in his Marlboro comforter, thinks about the wonderful all-American life he and his family had cigarette in hand, and drifts on to what he had always hoped was a better place.
However, while he laid there, freshly deceased, the lit cigarette fell from his withered, wrinkled hand onto the Marlboro insignia-ed carpet. The entire house filled with smoke and became enveloped in flames. The husband’s dilapidated wife, unable to reach for her electronic voice box could not call for help. So instead she sat awaiting her death complete with a cigarette jammed into the hole the doctors made in her throat.
By Rena (just so you know, I have nothing against people who smoke, this is just a story I made up in my head while I served this young family coffee and two packs of Marlboro’s)
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