Here's a Tip
Playwright and author of light prose, ROBERT FONTAINE lives in Springfield, Massachusetts.
As a heavy smoker who has been known to burn up three packs a day and who often has two cigarettes in his mouth at once and one behind his car burning his hair, I have frequently switched to filter tips with the happy feeling that I was then safe from tars, resins, slivers, and carbon monoxide poisoning.
The trouble is that after a few puffs on a filtered cigarette a fellow in my position, working day after day with his brain, finds that the tobacco smoke has not done its job of ascending through the sinuses into the forebrain, soothing the old brain, shaking up the new brain, and producing ideas in the cranium.
What seems to be the trouble is that whatever there is in tobacco that causes an author to be witty, original, and the possessor of a continuous flow of good ideas is filtered out by forty thousand tiny filters all just sitting there waiting to absorb an exciting literary gem.
The result is that I have had considerable experience with smoking filtered cigarettes without the filter. I know that many research agencies, a few of them honest and unbiased, have made reports on filtered cigarettes and nonfiltered cigarettes, but no one to date to my knowledge (and it’s vast) has reported on filtered cigarettes nonfiltered. I have, by the way, tried filtered cigarettes in a filter holder. The result is something akin to breathing fresh country air. Dreadful!
Hit Parade has a filter that comes off with an easy flick of the fingernail and even, in some instances, leaves just the trace of a tip to prevent tobacco on the lip (Fontaine’s lesion). The main problem is that Hit Parade tastes to me just the same with or without the filter, a little like a Lucky Strike with an inferiority complex.
On Parliaments the filter presents a problem to me. It seems that the filter has been managed so well it never comes off without tearing some of the paper, leaving the tobacco standing out like my daughter’s hair after she has just washed and dried it.
The Kent filter is curious in that, while it comes off well and leaves a neat cigarette, it tastes curiously unrelated to a Kent, as if the removal of the tip had caused a mutation in the flavor.
Viceroy, Salem, and king-size Kools all de-filter well, Kools tasting pretty much the same, or as if you had Vicks VapoRub on your tonsils.
There is another method of getting a good strong smoke out of filtered cigarettes, and that is by lighting the filter end without removing it. It takes a strong man indeed to smoke it until the filter burns away, which it is very reluctant to do. Meanwhile, unless the smoker is far from any human company, he is likely to be looked down on in much the same way that he would be if he were burning rubber boots and hemp in the fireplace.
Finally there is the effete method, certainly no Marlboro man would use, of removing the filter from one end and putting the other end in your mouth. I suppose this can be made to work satisfactorily, but I always feet a trifle uneasy with the wrong end of a cigarette in my mouth. I mean, since all the bad products are supposed by science to be at that end.
Is it possible wc will ever have a cigarette we can light in the middle and smoke back and forth? I suppose not.