Christopher Buckley - Thank You for Smoking

Right. They agreed. Nick would be unyielding on the points, but respectful. He'd push the theme of we're-on-the-same-side-here, to the extent that was possible. Furioso was a tough old buzzardess. BR paid him a compliment. Amazing. He said, "You better put your five-million-dollar baby on display. May turn out to be the best money we ever spent." We! Team Tobacco!

The planets were in harmonious alignment. Polly was having a good day, a really good day. In fact, it was possible that she might never ever have such a day again. For several years now, the Neo-Prohibitionists within the federal government had been using a phrase that drove the liquor, beer, and wine lobbies crazy: "alcohol and other drugs." The Moderation Council had spent millions in trying to get Uncle Sam's roundheads to stop using it in all their communications. To no avail. And now the pope had publicly said that wine should not be considered a drug. True, he was talking about sacramental wine, and wine used in moderation, at the family dinner table, preferably while working up to a little connubial and reproductive sex. Nonetheless, Polly was running with His Holiness's pontification in a big way, issuing a blizzard of paper. Her wine people were beside themselves. Her beer people were passing peach pits. The head of Gutmeister-Melch had spent thirty minutes reaming her out for not having "gotten him" to say the same thing about beer.

"I told him it wasn't us who did it. It was the Italian producers. They saw the plummeting U.S. consumption figures and worked it through one of the cardinals."

"It's hard to see what the pope could say good about beer," Bobby Jay said. "It's not like the Good Lord changed water into beer at Cana. And they weren't hardly drinking beer in the upper room at the Last Supper."

"Then my distilled spirits people called to bitch."

"What do they expect," Nick said, "that he's going to come out for scotch?"

"No, they just — it's a zero-sum game. We're in declining volumetrics, and they're all totally paranoid. They see anything good happen to wine or beer and they think, Less for us. I spend over half my time keeping them from killing each other, when they should be protecting each other's backs."

"Well, cheers anyway," Nick said, raising his glass. "Nicely done, even if you didn't have anything to do with it. Say, do either of you guys know a Heather Holloway, works for the Moon? She wants to do a piece on me."

"Heather Holloway? Oh yeah," Bobby Jay said. "Irish type, reddish hair, big green eyes, great skin. Amazing tits."

"Tits?" Polly said. "Why are her tits relevant?"

"Humh," Bobby Jay said through his food. "World-class honkers on a reporter interviewing a male of the species are relevant, believe you me."

"I thought Jesus freaks didn't talk locker-room."

"I am not a 'Jesus freak.' I do not accost strangers on street corners. I do not play the guitar. I am a born-again Christian. And I shoot," Bobby Jay said, "to kill."

"You're going to end up just like that guy in Waco. Praising the Lord, passing the ammo, and shooting ATF agents. I get very nervous around guns and religion."

Nick said, "Is there anything else you can tell me about her, aside from what size bra she wears?"

Bobby Jay said that Heather Holloway had come to one of SAFETY's press conferences, in which Mr. Drum called for building more jails. It was part of SAFETY's offensive strategy: instead of sitting still and being a punching bag for liberals who didn't want criminals to have guns, they went after liberals for releasing people who had shot people in the first place. Heather had charmed the socks off Drum, and had written a more or less antigun-control piece — the Moon being a conservative paper — but she had taken issue with Drum for insisting that a prior history of mental illness ought not to disqualify a person from buying a handgun. So Drum suspected her of liberal tendencies.

"What's the focus of her piece?" Polly asked. "Tobacco fighting back?"

"She says it's for a series on the New Puritanism. Maybe the Moon's looking for some tobacco advertising."

"You be careful," Bobby Jay said. "Just pretend it's some ugly old harelip interviewing you."

"Bobby, I think I can handle a good-looking girl reporter."

"Seen it happen again and again. They come in, bat their pretty eyes at you, cross their legs a few times, and before you know, it's 'I shouldn't really be telling you this' and 'Would you like to see our confidential files?' Beware of Jezebels with tape recorders."

"Bobby Jay, you've got to lay off the breakfast prayer groups. You're getting kind of weird."

"All I'm saying is that most men, confronted with a babe reporter, talk too much."

"Well thanks for the advice."

"Hundred bucks says you end up spilling the company beans all over the floor so bad you need a Wet-Vac to clean up. You in for a piece of the action, Ms. Steinem?"

"I think Nick can manage."

"A hundred each says he commits at least one major indiscretion." "You're on," Nick said.

"Done," Polly said. "Damnit," she said, "I've got a two-thirty meeting. Prime Time Live is doing a segment on fetal alcohol syndrome next Thursday."

"Um," Nick said, sipping coffee, "that's a tough one."

"We're going to get creamed."

"I saw this piece on CNN about a woman who drank a gallon of vodka every day in her third trimester. Oddly, her child has problems."

"Got any ideas for me?"

Nick thought. "I don't know. Deformed kids are tough. I'm lucky. My product only makes them bald before it kills them." "That's a big help."

"Challenge their data. Demand to see the mothers' medical histories. Her mother's m.h., her mother's mother's m.h. Say, 'Look, where's the science here? This is just anecdotal.' "

"Maybe you could hug the kids," Bobby Jay said, "like Mrs. Bush

and the AIDS baby."

"They're not going to let me hug the kids, for Christsake, Bobby."

"Who's doing the segment? Donaldson or Sawyer?"

"Sawyer, I think. They're being cagey about it, but the producer we're dealing with is one of hers, so I'm pretty sure." "That is tough." "Why?"

'"Cause she's going to hug them. Look, if it looks like, if you see her reaching to hug one, try to get in a hug first."

"God, I'm really not looking forward to this."

"Set up a fund," Bobby Jay suggested. "The Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Foundation. F-A-S-F. Fasfuff."

"Bight, I can just see Arnie Melch's face, or Peck Gibson's or Gino Grenachi's faces, when I tell him I want money for the kids of drunken mothers. And we're going to have the words 'Fetal' and 'Alcohol' in the name. That's a brilliant goddamn idea. But excuse me. I forget I was talking to the master spin doctor of the Carburetor City Church Choir Massacre."

"Why not? It would show compassion, generosity of heart."

"Do you set up funds for people who get shot?" Polly said testily. "No, because you'd go broke."

"Guns don't kill people, Polly."

"Oh, yeah."

"No, he's right," Nick said. "Bullets kill people." "I've got to go," Polly sighed heavily. "Jesus, this is going to be just awful."

Nick walked with her part of the way back to the Moderation Council. It was a beautiful Washington spring day — the hideous Washington summers are Nature's revenge for the loveliness of Washington's springs — and the magnolia tree on the corner of Rhode Island and Seventeenth was blooming. Nick noticed that Polly was wearing white stockings with a bit of silver sparkle in them that gave her long legs a shimmer of frost as they disappeared up into her pleated blue skirt. He found himself looking down at her legs. All that talk about Heather Holloway's tits, Gazelle at the Madison Hotel, the spring weather, it had Nick thinking. The white stockings, boy they were nice, reminded him of the night ten, no, twelve years ago, after he'd first come to Washington, in the summer, and he and Amanda had put away two bottles of crisp, cold Sancerre between them and strolled on down to the Lincoln Memorial. It was one of those steamy Washington July evenings. She was wearing this cotton, floral print dress that with all the humidity clung to her and, well, he couldn't say about Heather Holloway, but Amanda's body had no apologies to make, the way, um, and she was wearing white stockings, thigh-highs, the kind that didn't need garters, but allowed easy access to the dreamy area above, and um, yes, well, Nick had a definite thing about white thigh-highs. They went around to the back of the Lincoln, where it looks out onto Arlington Cemetery, and Amanda was leaning up against one of the massive granite columns, giggling about how the ridges were digging into her back. Nick was down on his knees, which wasn't so comfortable on the marble but he wasn't thinking about his knees, and lifting the floral print dress slowly, slowly, planting kisses until the cool thighs appeared, then a triangle of white— white again! — silk panties and.