Free Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley

turbulent inside the cabin that the woman forgot her problems of heart, and left deep fingernail impressions on Nick's left forearm. By the time he checked into the hotel it had been a long day and he was too tired to do anything but drink two beers and eat about four hundred dollars' worth of nuts and pretzels from the minibar.
    His room service breakfast arrived and with it the morning paper, the Winston-Salem Tar-Intelligencer. He flipped it open and to his surprise saw his picture on the front page, in color, beneath the fold. The headline read:
    F ighting B ack: T obacco S pokeman R ips G overnment " H ealth" O f ficial F or M anipulating H uman T ragedy
    The article fairly glowed with praise for his "courage" and "willingness to cut through the cant." They'd even managed to get a sympathetic quote from Robin Williger in which he absolved Nick of personal responsibility for his cancer and said that people ought to take more responsibility for their own lives.
    The phone rang, and a businesslike woman's voice announced, "Mr. Naylor? Please hold for Mr. Doak Boykin."
    The Captain. Nick sat up. But how did they know where he was staying? There were many hotels in Winston-Salem. He waited. Fi nally a thin voice came on the line.
    "Mister Naylor?"
    "Yes sir," Nick said tentatively.
    "Ah just wanted personally to say, thank you."
    "You did?"
    "I thought that government fellow was going to have himself a myocardial infarction right there on national television. Splendidly done, sir, splendid. Are you here in town, do I gather?"
    It was a sign of the really powerful that they had no idea where they had reached you on the phone. "Would you lunch with me? They do a tolerable lunch at the Club. Is noon convenient? Wonderful," he said, as if Nick, many levels below him on their food chain, had just given him a reason to go on living. They fought a war over slavery, and yet they were so courteous, southerners.
    He bought USA Today in the lobby on his way out. He found it in the "Money" section, front page, below the fold:
    Tobacco Companies Plan to Spend $5 Million
    ON ANTI-SM OKING CAMPAIGN, SPOKESMAN SAYS
    He read. BR flailed in a vortex of neither-confirming-nor-denying. While many details remained to be worked out, yes, the Academy had always been "in the front" of concern about underage smoking and was prepared to spend "significant sums" on a public-service campaign. Yadda, yadda. Jeannette was quoted saying that Mr. Nay lor, who had made the remarkable assertion on the Oprah Winfrey show, was unavailable for comment: "We're not sure exactly where he is at this point in time." She made it sound like he was in a bar somewhere.
    In the cab on the way to the Tobacco Club, Nick reviewed what he knew about Doak Boykin, which wasn't much. Doak—he was said to have changed the spelling from the more plebeian Doke— Boykin was one of the last great men of tobacco, a legend. Self-made, he had started from nothing and end ed with everything. Except, evi de ntly , a son. He had seven daughters: Andy, Tommie, Bobbie, Chris, Donnie, Scotty, and Dave, upon whom the burden of her father's frustrated desire for a male heir had perhaps fallen hardest. It was Doak Boykin who had introduced the whole concept of filters after the first articles started to appear in Reader's Digest with titles like "Cancer by the Carton." (The asbestos filter was a particular brainstorm of his, which was now causing Smoot, Hawking many thousands of billable hours in the Liability courts.) As the articles proliferated and the industry found itself in need of a little more presence in Washington, he had founded the Academy of Tobacco Studies to serve, as its charter stated, as "a clearinghouse of scientific information and an impartial and always honest mediator between the concerns and needs of the American public and the tobacco companies."
    The Captain's health was in some question. Rumors abounded. He had collapsed at the Bohemian Grove in California, and had