Thank You for Smoking

"He's not my friend, BR. All I did was talk you people out of suing him. I ducked into a closet at the Larry King show to avoid running into him."

"He's been hitting us very hard lately," BR said. "Did you see the things he said about us last week? No, of course not, you were still in Intensive Care. Your pal Oprah had him on with the Silver-O's girl. You should have seen them, both talking through their voice boxes. A duet for two kazoos."

It was one Oprah appearance Nick was glad not to have been invited to share.

"It was pathetic. Her being a woman, I can forgive her. But him. The man has no sense of personal responsibility."

"He's dying, BR. We should probably cut the man some slack. If it was me, I'd slip him some money, help out with the expenses."

BR said, "I'm not sure that's the approach I'd take, but you and the Captain think alike on this one."

"Okay," Nick said to Sven, who was staring back at him on the video-phone, "does it gobble?"

Sven said, "I want to point out at the beginning that thrilled as we are to be on this account, and we're extremely thrilled, everyone here, what you asked us to produce was an ineffective message that will have no impact on the people it is targeted at."

Nick had the feeling he was being taped. It was like having a conversation in the Oval Office with Nixon at the height of Watergate.

"I just want it clear what our role is," Sven said.

Nick said, "Okay, you've established that your role is the tormented artiste. Can we proceed?" Honestly, these creative hothouse orchids. And in Minneapolis, no less. Nick still had frostbite from his visit there six months ago.

"What we did was to take the 'Some People Want You to Smoke. We Don't' concept, which avoided the whole health issue, and instead tapped into the adolescent's innate fear of being manipulated by adults. You didn't like it."

"Right. Because it was effective."

"It's gone. So now we're going to be blunt, we want to speak to them with the voice of despised authority, nag them, tell them to go to their rooms, turn them completely off."

"I like it already," Nick said.

"Okay." Sven said. "Here we go. He pulled the board into video camera range. All it had on it was type. It said, "Everything Your Parents Told You About Smoking Is Right."

"Hmm," Nick said.

"You know what I love about it?" Sven said. "Its dullness." "It

is dull," Nick admitted.

"It's deadly. Kids are going to look at this and go, 'Puuke.' " That would probably be Joey's reaction, Nick mused. "And yet," Sven said, "its brilliance, if I may say so, is in its deconstructability." "How's that?"

"Say the last three words out loud." " 'Smoking Is Right.' "

"Gobbles on the outside, grabs you on the inside. A Trojan turkey."

"I think," Nick said, "that I can sell this to my people."

Nick was looking forward to lunch, an hour or two of normalcy with Polly and Bobby Jay. As a Ph.D. in Spin Control, he could certainly understand why the Captain and BR were eager to suction every golden egg from the goose before it died, but fame has its price. As Fred Allen used to say, a celebrity is someone who works hard in order to become well-known and then has to wear dark glasses in order to avoid being recognized. On his way from the Academy to Bert's, he became aware of people staring at him as he passed, saw people nudge each other, whisper, "Isn't that him?" At the corner of K and Connecticut, while waiting for the light, he heard a woman murmur, "You deserved it."

He whirled but the woman kept going and he didn't feel like running after her to ask her if he'd heard correctly. It sent a chill up his spine. Nick was no wimp, he'd been called "mass murderer" and worse by entire crowds of people, often simultaneously; but that was heckling, and usually by card-carrying gaspers or "health professionals." But when pedestrians, total strangers, started coming up to you — at Washington's busiest intersection, in the middle of the day— and expressing solidarity with people who had kidnapped and tortured you, it could be taken as a sign that somewhere along your career path you had taken a wrong turn.

He ducked into the Trover Shop and bought some cheap sunglasses. He made it the rest of the way up Connecticut and down Rhode Island without anyone else wishing him dead.

Once inside Bert's he felt secure again. Bert came over and hugged him and made a big fuss; the regular waiters came over to shake his hand and congratulate him and tell him how well he looked. He was hearing that a lot these days: "You look good, Nick," despite the fact that he had lost ten pounds and his skin was fish gray.

Bert told him that lunch today was on the house and led him personally to his regular table by the fake fireplace, which was flickering away, casting its comforting acetate flames onto the chimney brick.