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When I was a kid candy cigarettes were popular. The packs they came in looked just like real cigarettes and even had the same name as the popular brands; Lucky Strikes, Kools, Camels, and Marlboro’s. I had a friend Joe who had a 3 pack a day habit. He developed diabetes within 6 months, but it was the cancer that finally got him 2 years later at the ripe old age of 7. Come to find out candy cigarettes are more dangerous and addictive than real smokes.
I visited him in the hospital, the whole second grade class did. The cancer had started in his lips and spread to his entire face. As a result the skin had been removed from his entire face and it covered with a kind of clear saran wrap that allowed doctors to easily monitor the aggressive cancer. Joe just sat there in bed, a small faceless monster chomping candy cigs, high on pain meds. Sometimes I guess he’d get too much morphine in his system and he’d stand in his bed and chant commercials slogans like a rabid tele-evangelist. I can still see the whole second grade class visiting him in the hospital all of us crying or catatonic with fear.
Little Joe standing on his bed, a candy cigarette between each finger, holding his hands high above his head, waving to the sun, chanting over and over, “We love to fly, and it shows! We love to fly and it shows!”
