My Marlboro Man
My Marlboro Man
Marsha Leigh St.Claire
*note: My author name appears differently in some submissions*
Carl Jr. was born and reared in the California desert in San Bernardino where hope thrived among acres of fruit trees, amidst the Depression, work was plentiful here. As Hollywood begat King Kong and Duck Soup, Carl strolled to school passing orange crates on streets lined with eucalyptus trees stretching up to worship the hot sun. The scent of sage in the breeze was (and still is) heaven, and before all the cars and freeways came, the purple mountain backdrop would take your breath away.
In his 30s Carl had the looks of a movie star, head full of wavy black hair, eyes of the lightest green, and a deep and penetrating gaze. His natural tan and handsome physique were ripe for discovery. Hopefully, for a cowboy picture. The man adored and even met Ward Bond in the local mountain resort of Lake Arrowhead. It was rumored Carl did a few screen tests before I was born.
When Carl was a kid, his personality was a bit like “Spanky”. He and his gang were street-smart and all of them gave each other nicknames like, “Buck (tooth)”, “Dizzy” or “Long-Neck-Pete”. Although the nicknames usually had something to do with a physical characteristic among his friends—I never heard my dad say if he had one. Carl was feisty, and as he told it, had lots of fights. He and his tough pals all smoked cigarettes by age 9 and in his world, in those days, as well as in my young mind, it felt like the whole world smoked. Every home had ashtrays—so did all public places in town.
Grown-up Carl was manly. He chain-smoked and looked cool doing it. I can’t remember Carl without remembering him smoking. If he wasn’t smoking, he was holding a cigarette. He wore Pendleton shirts over his buffed chest with two flap pockets, just the right size for a pack. He kept a lighter in there too, and with a flick of a thumb, you’d hear the flint snap, then back in the pocket it would go for a short time. Sometimes only 10 minutes.
Carl moved like James Arness with a Robert Mitchum voice. He was a man’s man (and a womanizing man) full of ideas on how to make money through wheeling and dealing. He came fully equipped with a commanding personality interior, while the exterior included buffed biceps protruding from a well-tailored jacket. All this, plus an exceptional shiny grin that scored a ten on the charisma scale. Carl, the smooth talker, the epitome of charm and persuasion in the workforce, discovered his perfect calling—a car salesman! He and his dad (Carl Sr.) eventually managed to own a large dealership in town. That’s the timeframe that everyone referred to my dad as Carl Jr. Not to be confused with his business (and co-conspirator) partner Carl Sr. They were quite a pair.
The two of them thought they were as big as the wheels on their Dodge Trucks.
A few years after World War II, Carl met Edith, and a few years after that they secretly adopted me as an infant from a young girl who worked with Edith at the coffee shop. The adoption was kept secret for 65 years. That’s when a DNA test on the Ancestry site resulted in a sibling’s email asking questions about my parents. More on that in a later chapter.
For my entire childhood, I thought I came from my handsome dad. I imagined my tininess and thin frame would someday blossom into a beautiful singing cowgirl like Dale Evans or the beautiful women (usually walking around saloons) in the Westerns we watched together. I was starstruck by Carl, I was his biggest fan. It wasn’t long before Carl would tease me about my petite stature and gave me a few of his choice nicknames: “Squirt”, and my least favorite, “Runt”—later in life, “Slim”. For my dad, the christening of a nickname meant you were endeared to him, and from his absolute passion for dogs. Puppies would come and go at our house, and I suppose I was the runt of his litter. I was to be the only child with his first wife.
I have so few pictures of him, even more rare, the two of us. My favorite is a Polaroid, me, around age 7, in a cowgirl outfit standing next to my dad wearing one of his Pendleton’s. Cowgirls were popular back then, influenced by a lot of Sheriff John on KTTV in Los Angeles as well as Howdy Doody also wore Western attire—it was everywhere. Together my dad and I watched all the westerns on our black and white TV. In the photograph, I look so small compared to my dad. I remember how big his hand felt around mine. The photo took me back to his giant reclining chair. I would slide next to him, swallowed up in leather upholstery as we watched one after the other: Paladin, Gunsmoke, Maverick, Rawhide. My dad, as good-looking and cool as the actors, I got the feeling he wished he could be with them. He was happy there. Carl’s ashtray sat beside us and as he smoked was careful not to flick ashes anywhere near me while my mother monitored us for cleaning as she investigated from the kitchen. Edith would often remark during my childhood that all she ever heard on the TV was annoying galloping and shooting and sometimes Indians yelling EYE EYE EYE EYE!! She tolerated it but I loved it all, every sight, every sound. I became Jingles and my dad was Wild Bill Hickok, I wanted to be my dad’s sidekick forever.
Carl provided a good home in those early years. A home surrounded by sun, a white picket fence, where a long water hose lay haphazardly in the yard—a place, however, where every adult that entered, smoked.
Smoking was an Olympic sport in our house, with shelves of trophy ashtrays to prove it. I still have visions of our table—everyone lighting up after the last bite—some even smoking between soup and salad. Soon, the atom-bomb-like mushroom cloud formed overhead; followed by clean receptacles made available by Edith as she scurried around.
My mother’s favorite, the gaudy and ornately carved fake-silver free-standing model had prominence in the dining room. This thing weighed a ton but had a handle for carrying around the house; the heavy glass bowl could be easily removed for scrubbing.
We also had quite the beanbag collection. These little things could be and WERE thrown everywhere, accompanied by yelling. Sometimes the yelling was about sons of bitches, phrases I didn’t like but was numb and accustomed to. My cousin and I occasionally played with the clean ones—the small cheap metal bowls fashioned on a beanbag, in plaid fabric that matched nothing in the room, very trailer park. The plan was, they were placed on the end of arms of chairs or tossed near a sink. Smokers in our house never searched, they only had to tilt their heads in any direction, to spot a place to flick.
My dad’s favorite, the Goodyear tire one he got from his dealership, sat near his chair at the dining room table. I still see him smoking there while he played one-man solitaire.
He shuffled like a pro, and as he lay each card on the table, a Marlboro lazily sat slanted on his bottom lip. He could talk and smoke without touching it—the rotation, the puff, the eye-squint, as the smoke billowed; the Marlboro getting brighter, dimmer, smaller.
My dad smoked like Fred Astaire danced.
It’s a lost art. I never tire of watching the chain-smoke masters; Bette Davis lighting one with another or Humphrey Bogart holding a butt between his thumb and forefinger, the lit end facing the palm, then raising it to pursed lips, before the dog end is then tossed away.
With my dad, a dining room table would be our meeting place (his place or mine) for the rest of his life—cartons of Marlboro boxes stacked neatly nearby. In my early adult years, sitting across from him, smoking too, I would search his lined face, trying to find common features to my own. Nothing ever gave me a clear reason to doubt I was biologically his. After Edith died, he would have been free, free from her control over me, to tell me. But I think he had been under great pressure from knowing their faces, their identity. Promising them. It was so different in the world in1952. And so Carl Jr. decided the secret would go with him when he left the earth.
Carl died in 1981. I haven’t smoked since 88.
Sometimes when I’m having morning coffee, and sitting alone at my dining room table, I think I almost hear the cards shuffling and the spark wheel of my dad’s lighter.
So many times, as he grinned and looked in my hazel green eyes with his light green eyes, he would offer me one….
“Cigarette, honey?”
