Avoid Wet Butts in your Jeans

Some kids collect seashells, bottle caps, rocks, marbles, trophies, baseball cards, coins. Most kids collect things they see as an extension of themselves. Things they are proud of and can display on a shelf and share with other people. They bring their conversation pieces to school for show-and-tell, spread them out for other people to pick over, admire and wish they were the lucky ones who found all those neat things. Not me. My collection was top secret. I definitely wouldn’t think of leaving it sitting out. My sisters would tell my mom and I’d wind up in a meeting in my parent’s room to get to the bottom of it. “Why!! Why do you have cigarette butts in your closet!! Are you smoking!?? You’re only ten years old!!!”

I kept my butts hidden in the pockets of the plastic shoe caddy nailed to the inside of my closet door. I put shoes in over top of them so no one would find them. I might pull out the cigarette butts, examine them, hold them between my two fingers pretending to be the person who absentmindedly smoked the cigarette all the way down to the filter or the one who only smoked half of it because they were in a hurry. I had all the mannerisms worked out – their voice, their vocabulary, what they thought about when they were smoking the cigarette, where they were going, and why they dropped their cigarette right there in the parking lot of the A&P.

My collection started out of the blue one day when I accompanied my mom on an errand to the grocery. I got tired of waiting in the car in the parking lot of the A&P so I started walking from the car to the sidewalk in front of the laundromat. On the way, I noticed the cigarette butts on the asphalt. There were quite a few. The cigarette butts worth keeping were found closest to the storefronts because they were less likely to have been run over by a car. I didn’t want the flat ones. The stories were squashed out of them. I wanted the ones I could hold between two fingers. The ones that still had life in them.

I bent over and picked them up and slipped them into my pocket quickly before anyone saw me. If anyone saw, there would be questions to answer and I didn’t have any answers. I didn’t stop to ask myself why I collected them. I just collected them. Did the kids with the baseball cards have to have a reason why they collected baseball cards? Did marble collectors have to defend their marbles? “That marble was in someone else’s hand! Yuck!” No. That never happened to them. But I knew with my collection, people wouldn’t understand.

I hit the jackpot the time I found a cigarette that had a beige plastic filter attached. Someone who really likes to smoke makes the effort to buy all the accoutrements. When I found a cigarette lighter in the parking lot that was a lucky day, too. Especially if it hadn’t been run over by a car yet and it still had a little juice left. It encouraged me to find cigarette butts that had a little more than an inch of tobacco in them so I could have something to light and hold and really pretend I was the lady with the red lipstick who smoked Pall Malls.

She probably lived in a brick house with plastic ornaments like ladybugs and bumblebees in her garden. Faded plastic flowers and a front porch about four feet wide, covered in that thin green indoor/outdoor carpet that you find at the miniature golf course. She probably talked to her neighbors over coffee and said things like “Mitzi, what ever do you use to get coffee stains out of carpet?” She’d use her cigarette hand to gesticulate, and when she listened to Mitzi’s advice she’d hold her cigarette between her lips and say “mm-hmmm” then she’d blow the smoke away from Mitzi’s face and put her cigarette out in the ashtray with several gentle taps on the end, smothering the hot tip into the remaining butt until the smoke ceased curling up and around her fingers.

I categorized the cigarette butts the same way any collector would of their marbles or their seashells, in order of popularity. There were non-menthols, usually generic brands such as Kent, Parliament, Viceroy, Barclay. There were menthols, Kool and Newport, usually. Cigarette butts with lipstick and cigarette butts with the plastic handle. There were brown cigarettes. The brown cigarette butts and the plastic filter cigarette butts were the rarest finds. The most common cigarette butts were flattened, stepped on and twisted apart sometimes, but usually flattened with tire marks. They were so common they weren’t of any value. Cigarette butts with no filter at all or sucked on so hard the filter was a dirty amber were of no value either. Even I knew when something was gross.

It was the sort of collection that got me thinking about things larger than just my world but the lives of strangers, and the weather. If it hadn’t rained in four or five days then it would be a good day to collect. It took a few days for fresh, unrained upon cigarette butts to appear. The number one rule was to never pick up a wet cigarette butt. They stunk to high heavens. You couldn’t get that smell off your fingers or out of your jeans pocket until you washed them. You definitely don’t want wet butts in your closet. Only pick the best ones. As your collection grows, you develop a trained eye for detail and can weed out the substandard butts. That’s what makes a good collection.

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