The TaxPoodle

I recently rediscovered Barry Manilow. I bought a “greatest hits” compilation of his on iTunes called Ultimate Manilow, and found I knew the words to every song! The arrangements, the melodies, the build to the moment of maximum drama: these were really good songs. I mean really, really good. The sentiment in the lyrics was corny, and seems dishonest given what we know about his sexuality now: Doctor my woman is comin’ back home late today / Could you maybe give me somethin’? / ‘Cause the feeling is gone and I must get it back right away… Sure Barry! You had us all fooled. None of us knew. Just like the entire nation fell for Liberace’s shtick.

I live in a section of town known as “Little Tuscany,” which actually sounds posher and less like a simple geographic description if you think about it! I ran into Barry once at a local grocery store called Jensen’s. He was buying wine. I was buying Mountain Dew. I guess Matt from the “facility” where he lives in Little Tuscany isn’t that posh after all.  

I have a thing for life stories – biographies and autobiographies. It’s my favorite thing to read. After my Manilow iTunes epiphany (hey, these songs are good and I like them) I went to the Kindle store online intending to find a biography to read, but they all were from before Suzanne Somers (also a Palm Springs resident with a compound on The Mesa until she died three years ago) outed him, in 2016. I had and have no interest in reading the heterosexually curated version of his life, so I turned to the Internet to look up more current stories, and found plenty – they all focused on his recent lung cancer diagnosis, surgery, and recovery, and they all mentioned that he had been a smoker from the age of 9 until he was 39.

When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, the doctor said, and I quote, “it says here you smoked two packs a day from the age of 19 until you were 47… what did you expect?”

Smoking is one of humanity’s strangest behaviors. Think about it: at some point in time, somebody looked at a plant, dried it, lit it on fire, inhaled the smoke, coughed like a lawnmower running out of gas, and then said, “You know what? I think I’m onto something here.” This is the premise of an early Bob Newhart comedy bit where Sir Walter Raleigh phones home to England to tell them about the discovery of tobacco in the American colonies. Working in Old Blighty since King Charles III is in the US.

Think about it: people pay money to buy little paper tubes full of leaves, set them on fire, and then breathe in the fumes while standing outside office buildings in all kinds of weather conditions. Rain? Smoke break. Snowstorm? Smoke break. Hurricane… everyone accounted for? “Gary’s out back with his lighter again.”

And us former smokers love to talk about our quitting methodology: patches, gum, hypnosis, and now there are apps. I used patches. One guy I knew tried replacing cigarettes with celery. That lasted four hours. Because celery doesn’t create the same emotional bond. Nobody stands outside in the rain saying, “I need my celery.” Then there’s vaping, smoking’s modern cousin. It’s what methadone is to opiod addicts; it’s used by many as a substitute for smoking, or, a way to quit. Someone looked at cigarettes and said, “What if this glowed blue and smelled like mango?”

At the end of the day, smoking is one of those human contradictions: people know it’s bad for you, expensive, inconvenient, and smells weird, yet it persists because habits are powerful and humans are creatures of ritual. There’s something almost spiritual about it. A tiny fire. A deep inhale. A moment of pause. A dramatic exhale into the universe, like saying, “I have deadlines, bills to pay, and unresolved issues, but for this moment, I am outside, staring at a parking lot. In the rain. Life is good”

Maybe that’s the appeal. Not the smoke itself. The pause. The tiny rebellion against the chaos of life. Of course, it’s an expensive rebellion that makes your jacket smell like burnt toast. And kills you in the end. But still.

Human beings are weird. We climb mountains for fun. Pay for bottles of water. Watch reality TV. Do just about everything imaginable to a spherical object called a ball that in no way sustains us or ensures the survival of our species. And yes, sometimes we light plants on fire and inhale them. And then ask ourselves years later – why?

Because, apparently, evolution gave us intelligence, but not common sense. Literally for years, friends told me smoking was bad. I had a practiced standard response: I’d dramatically feign total surprise, clutch my pearls, and exclaim in a flouncy camp voice, “my god, really?… do other people know about this?” So when Dr. Patel said, “smoking as long as you did, lung cancer can’t come as a total surprise to you,” I laughed at the universe’s ironically almost verbatim way of saying “the faux ‘surprise’ routine of yours… it was never that funny, and I bet you feel like a right twat now.”

The other day I was telling a friend that lately I’d gotten into the Barry Manilow catalog of 51 Top 40 singles, including 13 that hit number one, 28 that appeared within the top ten, and 36 that reached the top twenty. His response was as if I had told him: “When it comes to Hitler, I’m on the fence… I can see the good and the bad.” I don’t care. I’m done with people telling me what’s good to listen to, watch, read, eat. I’m doing me.