Christopher Buckley - Thank You for Smoking

"Yeah," Bobby Jay said, "I do."

"They're supposed to blend. Unlike my former bodyguards with the suits and earphones. 'Attention everyone! We're bodyguards! Come attack our client.' Lot of good they were."

"I thought you kept trying to lose them," Polly said.

"Polly," said Nick condescendingly, in tones suggesting that security matters were beyond women, "good bodyguards don't get lost by the people they're supposed to be protecting." He sighed. "Jesus. Look at me. Bodyguards."

"We're all going to need bodyguards soon," Polly said, "the way things are going. Did you see the coverage the fetal-alcohol people got themselves over the weekend?"

"Pathetic," Bobby Jay said.

"Don't you think the Sun sort of debased itself giving that kind of space to those people? I spoke to Dean Jardel over at S and B. They distribute two-thirds of the liquor in the D.C. area, and he says the Washington Sun is going to find itself without any liquor advertising for the next month."

"I wish we had that kind of leverage," Bobby Jay said, "but they don't take gun ads. Not that you can buy a gun in D.C."

"They made it sound like we encourage pregnant mothers to drink. It was so… pc I wanted to. "

"Frow up."

"I'm surprised I didn't get kidnapped on the way to work this morning."

Nick, taking all this in, brooding over the woman on the street, felt suddenly that his nicotine patch of courage was being co-opted.

"Polly," he broke in, "I don't think people who work for the alcoholic beverage industry have to worry about being kidnapped, just

yet."

Awkward silence. He'd made alcoholic beverage sound like laxative or pet supplies. Polly did a slow burn, blew a deep lungful of smoke out the side of her mouth in a cool, focused way, her eyes never leaving his, tapped her toe against the floor a few times. "Aren't we unholier than thou, today."

"Look," Nick said, "nothing personal, but tobacco generates a little more heat than alcohol."

"Oh?" Polly said. "This is news."

"Whoa," Nick said. "I'll put my numbers up against your numbers any day. My product puts away 475,000 people a year. That's 1,300 a day—"

"Waait a minute," Polly said. "You're the one who's always saying that 475,000 number is bull—"

"Okay, 435,000. Twelve hundred a day. So how many alcohol-related deaths a year? A hundred thousand, tops. Two hundred and seventy something a day. Well wow-wee. Two hundred and seventy. That's probably how many people die every day from slipping on bars of soap in the bathtub. So I don't see terrorists getting excited enough to kidnap anyone from the alcohol industry."

Bobby Jay said, "You two sound like McNamara, all this talk about body counts. Let's just chill out here."

Nick turned to him. "How many gun deaths a year in the U.S.?"

"Thirty thousand," Bobby Jay said, "but that's gross."

"Eighty a day," Nick snorted. "Less than passenger car mortalities."

"It nets out to even less," Bobby Jay said mildly. "Fifty-five percent of those are suicides, and another eight percent are justifiable homicides, so we're really only talking eleven thousand one hundred."

"Thirty a day," Nick said. "Hardly worth counting. No terrorist would bother with either of you."

"Would you like to see some of my hate mail," Polly said, flushing. Nick hadn't seen her look this up since she went on Geraldo with the parents of an entire school bus that had been wiped out by a drunk driver.

"Hate mail? Hate mail?" Nick laughed sarcastically. "All of my mail is hate mail. I don't even open my mail anymore. I just assume it's a letter bomb. My mail goes directly to the FBI lab. Technicians in lead suits steam-open it. Please, don't even try to one-up me on the subject of mail."

"Why don't we put away the gloves and order," Bobby Jay said, "I'm starved."

"Fine," Nick said, grinding his teeth. Expect a little sympathy. wait, she was being sympathetic until you told her she sounded like a get-well card. There was that awful taste in his mouth again, like there was a cigarette butt under his tongue. The doctors had told him that his system was going to be flushing nicotine for the next three months. Food wasn't tasting very good these days, and spices made it taste like Drano.

Nick forced himself to say, "I wasn't trying to be unholier than thou."

"No big deal," Polly said tersely. The two of them concentrated on their menus so that they wouldn't have to look at each other.

It fell to Bobby Jay to make conversation in the form of a monologue. He bemoaned the upcoming anniversary of the assassination of President Finisterre, as these occasions always occasioned an orgy, as he put it, of calls for gun control on the op-ed pages of newspapers, never mind the fact that Finisterre had been blown away with a scope-mounted hunting rifle. "What are they going to do, take away our deer rifles?"

"Not until they pry them from our cold, dead fingers," Nick murmured, settling on pasta in the hopes that it wouldn't taste like stump dissolver. Bobby Jay said SAFETY was planning some proactive publicity in anticipation of the anniversary. They were also trying to get their friendlies in the Congress to get the White House to sign off on a Firearms Safety Awareness Week that would bracket the anniversary day. The White House was so far stonewalling them, but by their doing so, SAFETY was maneuvering them into a box: We asked the White House, begged the White House, to get behind a national, week-long consciousness-raising initiative, and what happened? Nothing. Additionally, Stockton Drum, having been recently accused on Face the Nation of perpetrating "genocide" among black inner-city youth, had given orders that all senior SAFETY staff were to perform one hour a week of public service with black inner-city youth. This way, the next time some prissy-ass liberal accused him of enabling mass murder, he'd be able to cut him off at the balls. Drum's executive order was being met with mixed enthusiasm by most of the staff though with genuine civic-mindedness by some. One staffer had proposed giving free handgun instruction in the inner city. If these kids were going to turn the city streets into free-fire zones, he reasoned, they might as well be taught how to be accurate so that they'd kill fewer innocent bystanders. Bobby Jay had nixed the proposal. "The sad thing," he said, fixing his special knife into his hook as the food arrived, "is that it's probably not such a bad idea."

The iced coffee had arrived. Polly hadn't said much over the food. Nick was feeling worse about how he'd acted and was working up to a rapprochement when Bobby Jay brought up a story in that day's Washington Moon.

"So," Polly said in a studiously casual way, "how's Feather?"

"Feather?"

"Heather."

"Fine," Nick said. "I guess. I don't know. She's trying to get a job on the Sun. She's interviewing with Atherton Blair."

"That asshole. He's probably the one who decided to put the fetal-alcohol convention above the fold. You know he doesn't drink."

"A newspaperman who doesn't drink," Bobby Jay said. "Things have changed."

"Not only that, he's in AA."

"He is?" Nick said.

"Our information is that he's in AA. He goes all the way out to Reston, so no one will know."

"No kidding," Nick said. "I should mention that to Heather." Polly frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know. Could come in handy. Maybe she should pitch him a story on how great AA is or something."

"And score points off alcohol-bashing? That's privileged information. Like everything that gets said around this table."