Ed

When I was ten years old my best friend was the Marlboro Man. Not the real Marlboro Man, mind you, but an old hobo who hung out in a vacant lot I passed by every day while walking home from school. He’d sit there chain-smoking and drinking what I supposed was coffee out of a thermos emblazoned with the familiar red, black and white of the Marlboro pack. He always said hello, but I always just kept walking. Even though it was 1968 and a kid could still roam around free-range after school, we were still advised about the stranger danger. One day I figured I’d seen him so many times that he no longer qualified as a stranger, so I stopped to talk.
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He told me lots of stories, including that he had gone to Vietnam in 1961. I was an oddly precocious kid who read a lot, so I knew there were no Americans in Vietnam in 1961. But he told me there were and that I should look it up again in five or ten years when the "truth" finally comes out. One day he told me he had learned how to size up a man within five seconds of looking him in the eye. He said, “It’s a matter of life or death; you gotta know if he’s gonna help you or doesn’t give a s--- or is gonna f--- you over.” I had never heard an adult use either of those words without apologizing, let alone both in one sentence (except for my mother, that is).
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One day I asked him about the thermos. I had seen Gemini astronauts, the Monkees, the Man From U.N.C.L.E. and all kinds of stuff on thermoses, but never a cigarette brand. He told me he sent in box tops to get it, that it was the only thing he got from smoking cigarettes other than emphysema. I said I had read about that, but he stopped me before I could tell him what I knew. All he said was, “If you like the thermos, you can have it when I check out.”
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One day later that summer, I walked by the lot. He wasn’t there, and I never saw him again.
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The Marlboro Man taught me lots of things that they wouldn’t teach us in school, and over the course of my life I’ve found that every darned thing he told me was true. However, I always doubted his claims about Vietnam. I finally looked it up and confirmed that, officially, there were no Americans in Vietnam in 1961. However, there was a contingent of covert CIA operatives there at that time, so maybe the Marlboro Man was telling the truth after all.
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I don’t know if the emphysema got him, or the CIA, or if Scotty beamed him up back to wherever he came from, but I do know that I wouldn’t be the man I am today without hearing the stories he told me. I also know that it wasn’t coffee in that thermos he was drinking. To this day, whenever I take it down from the shelf, it still carries with it a bit of the aroma of cheap whiskey. It takes me back to when I was ten years old and my best friend was the Marlboro Man.