Cigarettes
an Art of dying fragment
Growing up in Sweden and cutting one’s cigarette-smoking teeth in that over-taxed country, one gets quite used to tobacco costing a long arm and a longer leg. And, buying a 20-pack of Prince at the Copenhagen railway station before we boarded for Germany and beyond, I discovered that they were even more expensive in Denmark. A 20-pack (they also came in 10-packs, which does testify to a cost issue) of Prince were about ten Danish kronor at the time, a small fortune for me, as for anyone poor and without income.
That said, one miraculous thing I discovered arriving at Flag, was that cigarettes, which you bought and stocked up on while sailing the wide and beautiful tax-free sea, cost about two dollars a carton. That’s about ten Swedish kronor a carton. A carton.
Once we left Casablanca dry dock and headed west for Madeira, I (who had never bought a carton of cigarettes in my life) now bought two of them huge things — both non-filtered Lucky Strike (which reminded me of our own Swedish John Silver cigarettes, which the ship’s canteen did not carry and had zero plans to carry, no matter what pitch my pleas).
Now a proud and still a little disbelieving owner of two cartons of Luckies, and I hadn’t even spent half of our weekly allowance. This was just too good to be true, but true nonetheless.
Get Wolfstuff’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
As for pay: Flag crew got a $10 weekly allowance — in local currency, Dirham for Morocco, Escudos for Portugal, and Pesetas for the Canary Island which belong to Spain. True, perhaps $10 doesn’t sound like much, but if you have no other expenses, all room and board supplied by the Sea Org of course, as well as uniforms, unless you have some expensive habits (and smoking would no longer qualify as expensive) you had plenty of spending cash — my take on it, anyway.
Over the next few years, on the ship, I smoked a lot. I think I reached three packs a day at one point, at least two and a half — you could almost hear the tar in my lungs cluck-cluck-clucking away if I jumped up and down in a silent room.
Once I left the ship for the United Kingdom in 1974, I had to cut down, drastically. You just don’t keep up a three-packs-a-day habit on four quid a week (and those were the weeks when financial planning had enough money to play with to pay us our full allowance). Instead, I turned to roll-ups with Rizla paper and Old Holborn cigarette tobacco, and sparingly at that. I guess this saved my lungs.
I quite altogether in 1984 and haven’t smoked since.
A curious aside: I visited Washington, D.C. in 1973 (I believe it was) and there I bought a carton of cigarettes for the same ridiculous two dollars — no tax on cigarettes there at that time. Don’t know about now.
© Wolfstuff
P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.
