Camel cigarettes. My uncle Bill smoked them. He had been a sailor in the war, or actually, a Seabee. Seabees were sailors who built things, and Uncle Bill built airstrips in the South Pacific, on the island of Guam. When my aunts explained what he did in the war, using words like “airstrips” and “island of Guam,” I still had no idea. Airstrips, think about it, strips of air? Seabees, strips of air — Guam, like gum but not really.
On Guam Uncle Bill lived in a Quonset Hut — hula girls lived in huts, I thought, maybe Uncle Bill knew hula girls. It was all a mystery. From the war, Uncle Bill brought back a coconut with monkeys drawn on it. My cousin Kathy and I shook that coconut, then took a hammer to it. We banged at each of the coconut’s three little holes, but no go, never mind. Maybe the hula girls in their grass skirts drew those coconut monkeys.
Uncle Bill laughed a lot, his eyes crinkling at me and Kathy. He showed us his muscles like Popeye, he tickled us just enough — he called me Poogie. He was a lot happier than my dad, who had come back home from the war with his brown leather pilot cap and bomber jacket, no coconuts. My mother loved to wear my dad’s big jacket. It was lined with sheep’s wool and that made her sing the Air Force song, “We are poor little lambs who have gone astray —gentleman flyers off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity —baa, baa, baa.” A very sad song.
Not like my uncle Bill and his coconut, his jokey ways, his beers at the kitchen table, his Camels. I liked the cigarette pack with its pale yellow and brownish design, a camel in front, palm trees and pyramids — one big, one little — behind. He’d open the pack carefully, pulling on the little tape like a zipper so the cellophane top would fall away. Then Uncle Bill would pull open half the silver foil on top of the pack. The tops of the cigarettes were brown circles — he would fish one out, bounce the end on the enamel tabletop, and put the cigarette in his mouth. Then he’d take a big kitchen match, and light it with his thumbnail. Snap, the sulfur smell, the flame — his lit cigarette smelled good, not as strong and bitter as Grandpa Tom’s cigar, not as powdery as my dad’s Philip Morris. Uncle Bill would puff smoke out and say, “Ah, I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”
No wonder my cousin Kathy and I wanted to grow up as fast as we could and smoke Camels. We’d beg for candy cigarettes, the ones that came in the red cardboard pack, two rows of fused white candy cylinders with one end tipped in red. We had to be very careful as we broke them apart to get the prize, one whole candy cigarette. We practiced flaunting it between our finger tips, waving it around, sipping at its end, pretending to inhale and blow smoke rings. We wanted to walk a mile for a Camel, too.
