My First Time Chewing Snuff
Monday, April 1st, 1974Looking back from 2009-11-01.
Sometime in the spring of 1974, [Mentat] and [Tad] introduced me to this snuff-chewing habit. They seemed to enjoy it and I wished to do so as well. So I asked [Tad] to explain to me how to do it. His brand of choice was Copenhagen. He said that you take a pinch of the stuff between your thumb and index finger, and place it inside your lower lip in the front. I did this, and wow! It burned! I mean, it really burned, and my mouth filled instantly with saliva. I’d often wondered why people carried around empty Pringle’s potato chips cans who rubbed snuff. Now, I knew. They used them as spittoons.
Minutes after I took my first chew, I grew very dizzy and sick to my stomach. I should have stopped it then and there. But I didn’t, because my friends assured me that this was a normal experience for first-time chewers to have and it would eventually disappear once I got used to the smokeless tobacco in my mouth. It would take me two weeks of trying it at least once a day to “get used to it.” Again, I should have listened to my body, which was emphatically telling me not to chew. But I kept chewing, and yes, I did get used to it, but in the process, acquired a very difficult-to-overcome addiction to tobacco.
It was a disgusting habit. I’d walk around, spitting into empty pop cans, and even used 2-liter pop bottles. I could fill one of those up in less than three weeks too. In electronics and wood shop classes, I’d spit out the door so that by the end of the period, there was this big brown puddle of saliva on the ground outside. Yuck! But at thirteen years of age, my sense of decorum was far less refined than it is today. in other words, I didn’t care how it looked. Plus, I used to think that I was “getting over” on the house parents and teachers, believing that they never even suspected that I was chewing. But later, after I quit, my nose became real sensitive to tobacco odors, and as a result, I could smell someone chewing thirty feet away. Looking back, I now suspect that the house parents could smell me doing it too, though they rarely said anything.
I would go on to rub snuff for another twelve years before I managed to quit it in 1986. More on that later.