The Tobacco People

By Michael K. Frenz

Here is the ultimate crime book, and it is all legal.

An addiction to cigarettes drives a man over the edge into a new world of health and happiness. A great governing of tobacco over his younger years led to him quitting smoking before death occurred. This quitting comes from a breakdown on Christmas 2013an appropriate date in history for a man destined to quit. He makes the decision to quit as forced by his marriage, the law, a coma that robbed him of three weeks of his life, and a brush with death in a Boston ICU in a major hospital. All these put the author in the right situation to write three books in three years. He is now getting world-class treatment, getting one leg back for a transfer to HealthBridge, and years of care in rehabilitation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524559618

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Michael K. Frenz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 11/15/2016

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: In The Beginning

Chapter 2: Reality

Chapter 3: Learning

Chapter 4: Recovery

Chapter 5: Why

Chapter 6: The Future

Chapter 7: Wealth

Chapter 8: Justice

Chapter 9: Getting On With It

Chapter 10: The Damage Done

Chapter 11: Justice

At this checkup in the month of November and as ordered by my psychiatrist, the doctor removed the suction cups from my chest and analyzed the EKG. Finding nothing wrong, he let me up to report to the business office for the co-pay, along with a previous anonymous chest X-ray in Bridgeport also ordered by the psychiatrist. The conclusion was negative!

All I could think of was my next cigarette on Christmas Day when someone scratched my asshole above the operating table as I went under general anesthesia for a lifesaving operation in Boston. They say I went into a coma for two weeks, and my mother, the reverend, snuggled next to me so I would not die alone. My recovery is still taking place after thirty-three months. I’m starting to go outside again in the nursing home. I remind myself that I quit this once-in-a-life time opportunity as a result of brain stroke—with Massachusetts Health paying for it! Joblessness is now a problem with my career as a computer worker, and I have also been incontinent for a year with this medical problem which was freaky to begin with.

A question: how does a blood malformation go from the leg to the brain without being disintegrated by vital organs such as the kidneys, the liver, the heart, and a myriad of veins and arteries in the human body? I’m asking so that I don’t light up with the smokers sent to the tent during frostbite warnings. I know someone who goes outside and gets a smoke; I say hi and very little else (he has lost his right leg and is known as Manny [English for Manuel, a fine Spanish name]). Tobacco, to him, is probably the enemy.

I try and get outside once a week for mental health reasons, and being a smoker is the best bet to do that. Once again, I detect a health catastrophe related to tobacco with medicine in the dark. There should be a social worker helping the patient with an understanding of the situation, not a hospital smoke break with a man who has lost his leg because of tobacco smoking. I myself am no better without a job for eighteen years. The federal government has cracked down on tobacco, fiercely taxing the product at ten times its rate, driving many smokers into the street.

We are part of a new lost generation created by bans on tobacco smoke. We were good people who smoked and very little else and who may have been part of the intelligentsia. This ban has created a hole in American society, leaving expatriates angry, dissatisfied, and wanting their money back! Imagine the abuse we get—we are U.S. smokers treated as third-class citizens. Thank God for the drug company that marketed the nicotine patch and Nicorette gum, so at least somebody cared for a generation that all innocently used tobacco in good faith for tough situations that require perfect poise and kung fu concentration. As with most new laws, change comes hard, and Pres. Bill Clinton’s Administration for change, coined fifteen years ago, is still taking place; I have gone from sixty cigarettes a day to zero and still crave a butt!

He is the chairman of the Democratic Party and runs a tight ship and still participates in lawmaking. The Clean Air Act is next and will be paid for by tobacco taxes. Most nonsmokers appreciate a breather now and again, thus, less carbon monoxide is good. They want to get cars off the road, and taxing them is the best way. Since my wife likes SUVs, she loses her money. In a government push me, pull you with the automotive industry over having fewer cars on the road, my wife is thus a victim of ungodly property taxes.

A year of payments making car ownership very difficult means the chances of me returning to tobacco addiction are probable at 90 percent, with the Arkansas prosecutor expecting trouble. I always am on alert; over time, I’m a bad bet. Still, there is that desire to inhale tobacco smoke and light up when I remember my chances of retiring are hopeless; my wages are in the negative, preventing employment; and my psych drug-caused diabetes insipidus, which resulted in a coma for two weeks. What a comedy of errors! To make matters worse and to make a long story short, I must turn down a date with the Otis Hill gang for a booze cruise on Christmas Eve. I need an even break, not two odds for kidneys. For a real laugh: try taking my drugs and quitting. It can’t be done!

My fanciest girl in my undergraduate education was an incinerator when it came to smoking pot and had a gangster-like image when she collected party dope from friends. This woman could get high! She lived in the north tower of the quadrangle at the college. Here is where I made my first mistake, with my purchase of a water pipe. It was something different, made of clear glass (not hard plastic in dark blue) and outfitted by an Eagle Scout with a rawhide leather carrying handle so as to not break easily. My dormitory basement housed friends, and I came to know her there on the weekends. This woman really shook me up. Her behavior was disconcerting, to say the least, when she otherwise seemed like a damsel in distress. Where the cafeteria had a cigarette machine that supplied matches. Along with after-dinner coffee and Marlboros.

Later in life, at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University, another retail machine would plague me, tempting me to rip off my cash register by overcharging customers by 25¢. You guessed it—another cigarette machine dispenser with Marlboros creating a melee of problems in the lunch line, including a false accusation of a $20 theft involving the police when the minimum wage was well under $2 an hour. I was exonerated the same day, and the opening cash drawer was left one dollar short the next day.

The elements of statistics course was also a severe problem. In this course, your future as a major in political science and economics was decided by the criteria of a C or better. Outside the life science building were two mega ashtrays used before they opened the doors to life science with the three-blackboard classroom which the professor would fill with these waste receptacles. These devices held a carton and were overfilled each day before STATS met. The smokers on the math patio outside of life science were always nervous about what the chairman of the Math Department would teach every day the class met.

To say the least, we all knew our standard deviation from the norm. Here is where I got my first unauthorized kiss, at a time when the Delta Psi billiards table was awaiting, perfect, and was used for continuous cowboy billiards. At this sport I became an expert, making it to the semifinals of the all-fraternity tournament. We would attract quite a crowd on Thursday nights for a cold draft beer, amounting to over two hundred guests, exceeding occupancy for the building. The great stretch of green felt would take some abuse on these nights, as cigarettes were placed on the frame of the table. When we were really busy and it was shoulder to shoulder, a guest would spill beer, requiring our maintenance man, Dutch, to replace the big felt the next day, thus keeping our reputation as the best fraternity in the Delta Psi brotherhood, Yale and Columbia included.

I have been set back to pre-quit. Including pneumonia, I am now frustrated with it (my health and a chest cold). My scavenging led to pneumonia, and breathing in CO required a thickened-fluids diet. Even orange juice seems rotten thickened first thing in the morning, and thick coffee is maddening. What made matters worse was a psych drug invented during the sixties that made cigarettes more desirable, making quitting worse. Bronchitis and aspiration pneumonia can cause death from suffocation—in other words, emphysema; a horrible death. Picking cigarette butts became a way of life, and these diseases are contagious, so I must be careful about what I do. Living off the fat of the land, I would say, as I picked a half-smoked butt off the sidewalk and ignited it with a butane Cricket lighter.

In Brooklawn, where I lived with my wife and in-law, were a lot of businesses and yes, a lot of trash. Some of the shops let the employees smoke, like the liquor store, and they would accumulate a bucket of butts that I found under the ice machine. On rainy nights, I walked the half mile to smoke there, helping myself to used cigarettes. This was okay until the VA (Veterans Affairs) wanted me tested for tuberculosis, and just as a smoker I am at risk for disease.

At the military shelter in Bridgeport’s South End, I learned something from a friend named Mr. K. He showed me the answer to smoking’s accompanying financial problem: Criss Cross Kentucky mint leaf tobacco bought for a song ($23 equivalent to a carton), Top rolling papers made with Top rolling pins, and a canvass belt, plus a trick (RYO: roll your own), saving my dignity and life from disease, plus $6,000. During my stay at the VA, the doctor stopped the pneumonia and hepatitis in my lungs from taking over with an injection from two vaccines. Then dirty smoking became a habit of the past, and Criss Cross saved my life, as well as $6,000 during my disability!

My illness prohibits drinking water, and this causes discomfort, so I charge the water fountain to stop thirst, which causes friction between the staff and me. On a grey Massachusetts day on December 25, I became a stroke victim by way of bad luck. My seizure had been going on for months because of brain hemorrhage from blood clotting deep inside my left calf muscle (thrombosis) that was stopped with surgery, saving my life and leg. After two weeks of coma, I awoke only to have the same disease— tobacco addiction and the loss of my left pelagic. I had a paralyzed left side and now I use my right hand only (it is 55 percent harder to work on the computer)!

Now let’s get real, I was fired for smoking nineteen years ago, and because I was disabled before that, on Social Security it paid out $170,000 in earned benefits. With Gramp’s gifts, it added up to $200,000, all on $22,500 in cigs. With necessary Medicare losses (barebones medicine). Congratulations to Sir Richard Branson on a smokeless business! In and out of the air. Wow! Virgin Atlantic Airways Limited.

Today was the second week in February. My friend Pretty Audrey the nurse manager authorized a chest X-ray that proved negative with bronchitis and pneumonia in my airways and lungs, but I have some emphysema. I have now gotten to the point where I can’t trust myself with smokers and unguarded cigarettes. I now have severe health problems that point to a death dive that can occur because of smoking. If I start again, I will probably die in jail for theft and crime. As with any addiction, you are warned, and use of the product is not an absolute result, with many users quitting and walking away innocent—along with friends and family hoping for the best with an outright toxic substance called tar and nicotine smoke. I am reminded of the time when I was in my private college of choice, when every fraternity brother I knew stopped smoking and graduated but me; when I went into business at the Connecticut minimum (eight); and when I came close to jail and was saved by a little-known law (the sixty-day forgiveness time limit for bad checks in the state of Connecticut, which was repealed in the twenty-first century). Since that time, I have stayed out of trouble by eating one meal a day. And I am the writer of the economic diet.

One thing I learned over the years is minimum wage is starting wage, or there is a big, clear reason for a difference in business performance. The money in labor dried up years earlier in Connecticut, thus, workers are just holding on, waiting for profits to resume, which puts a double squeeze on tobacco users with price and the law. A smoker today must be highly non-addicted and he/she must be able to quit for multiple periods of time or end up in jail. This modern smoker cannot be hooked, or he/she will be forced to swear off all tobacco products and never be addicted when at work, when traveling, and when in nonsmoking areas. In other words, a modern smoker must be a butterfly. These insect people will be picked off by the law all the time. And there is always the law’s cold response that you should have quit as they go to jail as debtors on usury time who were unwilling to quit. And as always, some upset judges will recall who made it and who didn’t and why. They fail for a very small reason: cigarettes.

I wonder if an old roommate of mine is still chained to the butt bucket, or if he quit before the new state hospital got him. I think he started a delivery business to compete with the post office, dealing in advertising for strip clubs and nightspots. He was a former letter carrier and civil service employee. As a federal employee, his chances of quitting were obscure. I, on the other hand, watched my weight. My mother the reverend called an ambulance on Christmas Day 2013. Surprise, surprise, surprise… I have been getting TLC in the hospital ever since. Every day I try and make progress by following advice for my incontinence and paralysis, keeping my behavior uniform without psychiatric drugs at times, living in excrement. My friendship with the head nurse continues. Well, the psychiatrist said, Let the wife handle the money… Avoiding the bills was her strategy while using Mark’s money, which was needed, so she embezzled income and was truly a crooked accountant, ending us up in tax debt. We’re $110,000 short from Frenz Family Trusts. The problem seemed to be her transportation taxes. Losing the money,