Alexander

Five hundred Marlboro Miles equaled one hundred packs of Marlboro, which in turn equaled one shiny, plastic, read and white thermos with the words Marlboro emblazoned upon it. There it was, neatly packaged and delivered to our two- bedroom Brooklyn apartment. I couldn’t help but wonder whether we would display it in the living room, the way we displayed the Marlboro robot, assembled from empty packs back home. No. The thermos would get no such honor. It would simply be stored in the pantry, never to be used again. Thinking back, I realize that it has never been used and we had never had any use for it in the first place.
###Here in America, Marlboros are sold everywhere. My father would simply go into a store and buy a pack or a carton. He would walk outside and smoke a pack of Marlboros, not as a sign of social or financial status, or political affiliation, or a sign of subversive attitude towards the government.
###Back home, however, a pack of Marlboros, or a robot put together from empty packs, says that my father has traveled across town to a poverty-stricken neighborhood to find an elderly woman wrapped in rags. She is sitting on a short stool out in the street, with a potato sack of pan-roasted sunflower seeds, which she sells by pouring them into a cone rolled from old newspapers. She recognizes my father as the nice lawyer man who helped her obtain a document saying she is too old and sick to get arrested. She takes my father’s order for Western gum and cigarettes. She then lifts the potato sack to expose another sack filled with forbidden, capitalist goodies, same goodies I was taught in school would decompose my spirit and ruin lives of working folks. The hidden sack is like a treasure chest with a glorious glow.
Once the deal is done and the cigarettes are smoked and the gum is chewed up, we are left with empty packs and wrappers that are a constant reminder of how much better things are beyond the border. To people that enter our dwelling and see these badges on display, it is a message that they entered a place of certain views, opinions, and politics.
###Here, in Brooklyn, the thermos will not be displayed in the living room because the Marlboros were not purchased in secret, under fear of governmental scrutiny. The thermos will not be displayed in the living room because it is 1992 and the Soviet Union is no longer in existence. The thermos will not be displayed in the living room because it no longer signals social and political ideas to outsiders coming into the apartment.
###The thermos will be stored in the pantry, never to be used, because its symbolism is now a footnote in the history of my family.