"U Cant Smoke This"
By Ryan G. Murphy
When the time came to blow out the candles on my tenth birthday cake, I closed my eyes and made two wishes.
“I wish to be friends with MC Hammer,” was the first. And, “Please, God, help me convince my grandparents to stop smoking cigarettes because I’m afraid they’re going to die,” was the second.
As fate would have it, a fourth grade school assignment offered the chance for both of these improbabilities to come true just a few months later. A national, anti-smoking campaign prompted students to submit a piece of artwork demonstrating the perils of smoking.
As our teacher, Mrs. Perry, read off the instructions for the contest, my hand shot into the air.
“Yes, Murphy?” Mrs. Perry said. (She called all the boys in the class by their last names only.)
“Can we submit a song?” I asked.
Mrs. Perry scanned the piece of paper in her hands.
“It doesn’t really say anything about a song here,” she said. “But sure. If you want to do a song, you can do a song.”
That was all I needed to hear. I got home, changed out of my St. Charles school uniform, which included Style-o-Pedic dress shoes, and got to work. Naturally, I was going to write a song - a rap to be specific - that would not only win this national contest and garner the friendship of MC Hammer but also be so impactful that it would forever change (and save) the lives of my grandparents, who were both lifelong chain-smokers and had not once during my ten years of knowing them demonstrated the desire or ability to change.
I learned quickly that writing raps is not as easy as MTV made it appear. There are only a few words that rhyme with “smoker” and even fewer that rhyme with “cigarette,” so my initial attempt at pumping out contest-winning verse was unremarkable.
“If you wanna be a smoker, you be messing like a joker, you ain’t never been broker,” I wrote out into my marble notebook, clearly ignoring Mrs. Perry’s grammar lessons.
After floundering in the shallow end of mediocrity for the better part of an afternoon, I finally had something that was - using a very liberal interpretation of the phrase - "worthy of recording on tape."
I sprinted to my room in search of my Casio cassette player. After rummaging for an eternity, I found it buried beneath the giant Ziploc bag of crushed seashells in my toy chest.
This cassette player was great. Not only could it play my MC Hammer and New Kids on the Block tapes at varying volumes, it also had a built-in voice recorder that could capture anything I wanted to say or, in this specific instance, rap.
Since I didn’t own any blank tapes to drop my rhymes on, I decided to sacrifice my “Teddy Ruxpin Lullabies: Warm and Cuddly Songs to Dream By” cassette. It was a small price to pay, especially considering my rap would not only result in a lifelong friendship with MC Hammer but also stop my grandparents from smoking. Besides, I didn’t even own a Teddy Ruxpin doll, only this tape.
I put the sacrificial cassette in the Casio and simultaneously pressed “play” and “record.” I heard the dead air emanate from the speakers and the panic of being live on air for the first time is something you can’t really prepare for. It was a bumpy start but once I found my groove, I was rapping at well above a fourth grade level. At least it felt that way. MC Hammer was going to love this. Grandma too.
I hit my final line.
“Cigarettes are bad, they make your family sad. And you gotta stop today, just throw them all away.”
I said “word” at the end, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t do that but, seeing as I was now a part of the hip hop game, it felt more than appropriate.
I pressed “stop” on the Casio. The machine clicked and I exhaled. I’d done it. I’d rapped what was probably the most influential, convincing, and heartfelt song ever written. Not only would grandma and grandpa stop smoking, but people around the world would stop, too. I would become the flushed face of anti-smoking campaigns. Big Tobacco would threaten me. Disney would ask me to Grand Marshal a parade, the same way they did for Super Bowl quarterbacks. And, of course, MC Hammer would want to meet me.
But before the world could hear it, I should hear it, just to be sure. I rewound the tape and pressed “play.”
As far as I know, there is no word in the English language that accurately captures the shame one feels when they hear their own voice on tape for the first time. I suppose “dread,” “humiliation,” and “mortified,” come close but, in reality, if you gave these words the ability to travel at the speed of light, and they then traveled across space and time for one billion years without stopping, they still wouldn’t even be in the same galaxy as whatever the word is for describing “I just heard my voice on tape.”
My voice was so repulsive, so high-pitched, so unfamiliar, I thought I’d failed to tape over the Teddy Ruxpin lullabies and was, in fact, listening to the teddy bear. It wasn’t until I recognized the uninspired anti-smoking lyrics that I realized, “No, that’s not Teddy. That’s me.”
I sounded like a bootleg Mickey Mouse who refused to pronounce his “Rs.” It was atrocious. Hideous. Until that moment, the voice I always heard when I spoke was deep, manly, baritone – sort of like Hulk Hogan filming a promo before a big wrestling match against Macho Man Randy Savage. I sounded nothing like that on the tape and I was shocked.
My problems compounded from there. As I quickly found out when listening to the tape, there was no beat or no background music in my production. It was just a 10-year-old kid trying to rhyme “smok-ah” with “jok-ah” on this now completely ruined Teddy Ruxpin cassette. The entire scene was a parody of itself and the disconnect between my creative vision and my execution shook me to my core. I pulled the tape from the Casio and buried it deep within my toy chest, never to be seen or heard again.
Since I still had an obligation to befriend MC Hammer and save my grandparents’ lives, I decided to push on. Sure, maybe rapping wasn’t my thing, but I could still win this contest. I decided to get creative. I pulled out my MC Hammer “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” cassette, one of my most prized possessions, and cued up my favorite song, “U Can’t Touch This.” I played it over and over and over – probably 150 times until I’d copied down every single lyric into my marble notebook.
With Hammer’s lyrics etched into the pages, I took out my Troll doll eraser and started thrashing at the pages, determined to improve the two-time Grammy winning, multi platinum song that sold 18 million copies.
I erased all 42 instances of the word “touch” and replaced it with “smoke.”
I read the lyrics:
“I toured around the world
From London to The Bay
It's "Hammer! Go, Hammer! MC Hammer! Yo, Hammer!"
And the rest can go and play
U Can't Smoke This"
No other changes were made to the song. “Touch” changed to “smoke” 42 times and you know what? It was perfect. Not only was I entertaining listeners, I was also giving them specific and clear instructions on how to defeat their decades-long nicotine addictions.
I’m not entirely sure how da Vinci felt when he completed the Mona Lisa and I can’t be certain how excited Michelangelo was when he first unveiled the statue of David, but I am positive their exhilaration seemed tame compared to Ryan G. Murphy’s when he created “U Can’t Smoke This” in Staten Island, New York in 1992.
Then, like a painter guiding a final stroke across his masterpiece, I added an instructive preface to the top of the page – just so the contest judges would know exactly how to enjoy this timeless work of art.
“Please sing this song aloud to the beat of MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This,” I wrote.
I knew once these judges got to the final line of “U Can’t Smoke This,” the tens of thousands of other contest submissions would be discarded into the trash.
I danced on air walking into fourth grade the next day. When I handed Mrs. Perry my contest submission, she scanned the paper.
“Murphy, I thought you were doing a song?” she said.
“Yes, it IS a song,” I said, and then pointed to my instructions for the judges.
Mrs. Perry sighed, probably because she was left breathless by my genius, and I skipped to my seat, where I spent the entire morning dreaming about receiving the contest trophy, what it would be like to become friends with MC Hammer, and how quickly my grandparents would quit smoking once they read my song themselves.
Days turned to weeks – which might as well have been years – and, still, we had no results from the contest. After enduring one too many sleepless nights, I decided to confront Mrs. Perry about the unacceptable turnaround time and the accompanying agita she was causing.
“What contest, Murphy?” she said when I approached her the next morning in the school parking lot. “Oh, the smoking thing? Soon, Murphy. Now, would you mind?”
I stepped aside so my teacher could get out of her car.
It baffled me that Mrs. Perry didn’t evaluate our submissions the moment we handed them in. Where was this sense of hard work she was always preaching about? Of artistic appreciation? Of customer service? Teachers only had to work for, what, six hours a day? What else could Mrs. Perry possibly be doing for the other 18 hours that was keeping her from reading my “U Can’t Smoke This” rap. What were my parents’ tuition payments even for?
A few days later, we had the reviewed contest submissions waiting for us on our desks when we returned from recess. Mine had a star-shaped sticker on it that read “Good Job!” That was it. No grade. No note about winning the contest. Just a sticker.
A tightness developed in my chest. I could taste bologna and cheese Lunchables and fruit punch in my throat. Paper in hand, I walked as calmly as I could to Mrs. Perry’s desk.
“Yes, Murphy?” Mrs. Perry said.
“I thought…I wanted…am I going to meet MC Hammer?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“The contest,” I said. “I thought I would win and then I would get to meet MC Hammer.”
“Why would you think that?” Mrs. Perry said.
I didn’t know. The whole time I just assumed I would. I thought our submissions would be sent to the national judges and they would be so impressed by “U Can’t Smoke This,” they’d call MC Hammer right away and he’d demand a meeting with me. We’d bond, become friends, probably produce a collaborative album.
“So I didn’t win?” I said.
“We can’t send all the submissions to the national contest,” Mrs. Perry said and then gestured for me to return to my seat.
Even though I was nearly five-feet tall at 10-years-old, it was the smallest I’d ever felt.
If there was a consolation prize for not getting to meet MC Hammer, it was that I could still save my grandparents’ lives. The next weekend, I brought my copy of “U Can’t Smoke This,” to their house.
When I handed the rap to my grandparents, they scanned the paper and feigned interest in the same way we all do now, in the modern day, when someone hands us a phone and says, “you HAVE to watch this video. You’re going to love it.”
I watched as my grandmother's eyes surveyed the page at record pace and, when she reached what I assumed to be the end, she gave familiar feedback.
“Good job, Ryan!” she said, echoing the gold star atop the paper.
My grandfather didn’t say anything, just nodded in agreement.
I asked my grandmother if she sang the song to the beat of “U Can’t Touch This.” She said “of course I did,” and even though I didn’t believe her, I thought it impolite to call the woman a liar in her own living room. Nonetheless, it was clear I’d finally convinced the woman to quit smoking.
Thirty minutes later, I found my grandmother smoking in the kitchen. She was blowing the smoke from her Kent III Ultra Light into a built-in wall fan that could kinda sorta redirect the smoke outside – a loose interpretation of her promise to “stop smoking in the house.”
I didn’t understand. How could she still be smoking? The song wasn’t, “U CAN Smoke This” or “U SHOULD Smoke This” or “U OUGHT to Smoke This.” It was “U CAN’T Smoke This!” CAN-NOT! The lyrics were clear as day. Did she need to read them again?
I started yelling, parroting the anti-smoking ads I’d seen on TV.
“...including lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other serious conditions!” I said.
“Ok, Ryan,” she said. Then she went back to cooking Sunday dinner and I went outside to play basketball.
As I mindlessly shot free throws, I wondered why any human being in their right mind would intentionally blacken their lungs; or give themselves a wet, hacking cough; or make their entire house stink like burnt toast? Where was the upside for smokers?
Amidst these questions, one thing was clear – “U Can’t Smoke This” had failed everyone.
The crusade to save my grandparents continued as I transitioned from a failed, 10-year-old rapper into a know-it-all, oily-faced teen. Since raps were off the table, I pivoted to the communication medium I was learning to perfect in my early teenage years – passive aggression.
To get my grandparents to stop smoking – or, short of that, make my disapproval of their habit clear – I tried a number of infuriating tactics. The first was mutilating cigarettes. Anytime I could, I’d remove one cigarette from their packs, snap it in half, and return it to its original location. My goal in doing so was not to get my grandparents to quit cold turkey. Rather, it was to create a negative association anytime they tried to smoke. Reach into the pack, find half a cigarette, get pissed off. This kind of reinforcement training worked for dogs – why not humans?
Next was hiding ashtrays. I’d put them between couch cushions, in the refrigerator, in the pantry. I once hid one out on the driveway, hoping my grandfather would run it over with his car. He didn’t, but he did end up finding it a few weeks later, embedded in ice as he was digging his car out from a winter storm.
My final tactic was parroting, in the way only a bratty teenager could. Anytime my grandparents would release one of their wet, phlegmy smoker’s coughs, I would cough as well. We’d go cough for cough. Every time. I’d match the exact pitch and duration of their coughs just so they could enjoy the full, surround-sound experience. I played dumb once they caught on and asked what I was doing.
“What? I had to cough,” I’d say. “I can’t control when I cough.”
Of course, none of these tactics stopped my grandparents from smoking. In hindsight, one could argue I actually caused them to smoke MORE from all the stress my antics delivered. I decided to stop with all the anti-smoking hijinks, though, once my grandmother got sick.
The angriest part of me wanted to tell my grandmother “I told you so,” but I never did – largely because I blamed myself for her diagnosis. It wasn’t her fault. It was mine. “U Can’t Smoke This” was uninspiring and unconvincing. So were all of my passive aggressive antics. It seemed like I had chance after chance to help my grandmother stop smoking and now it was too late.
I asked God to intervene. I spent 30 minutes every day inside the chapel of my high school praying, asking for some kind of miracle. I did the same at home before bed. I pleaded and begged. When those tactics didn’t work, I started bargaining. I promised God I would sacrifice my favorite pastime – using AOL to find dirty websites – if he healed my grandmother’s lungs. To sweeten the deal, I’d even throw out the Playboy magazine I’d been hiding under my mattress. These proposals were declined. Shortly after, my grandmother was gone. In the wake of her passing I asked myself, countless times, what one thing I could have done differently to change everything, but the answer to that question never came.
The following August, Gramps and I took a trip to Cooperstown, New York to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Just the two of us – a guy's trip. We stayed at a motel overlooking a lake and, during the evenings, after exhausting ourselves with baseball, we talked as the sun set. Gramps was still smoking regularly but not as much as he once did and, as the fireflies twinkled over the water, he promised me he was going to quit for good.
“And these,” he said, picking up a pack of cigarettes from his lap. “After this, no more of these. That’s the end of ‘em. I’m gonna start taking better care of myself.”
I wasn’t sure Gramps would stick to his promise but, in that moment, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
It’s impossible to say how many cigarettes Gramps smoked over the next 22 years but it was more than I wanted him to. I’d sometimes find him sneaking a smoke on the steps leading to his house – which was infuriating since he was seeing a pulmonologist for breathing issues.
“Are you kidding me?” I’d scream, usually combined with expletives. Then I’d storm off. One time I got so mad, I ripped a cigarette from Gramps’ hand and screamed: “You can’t smoke this!” before tossing it over the fence. It wasn’t intentional, but more than 20 years later, I guess I was still just trying to get him to listen to the rap I’d written in fourth grade.
Watching the people you love become human is difficult. It’s the hardest part about growing up, I think. The people we love – all of them – have quirks and anxieties and fears and some of them smoke cigarettes and, for whatever reason, I just refused to accept Gramps was normal like everyone else. I held him to an impossibly high standard because I wanted him to always be the infallible giant I knew as a child.
I think that’s why Gramps never fought back when I yelled at him for smoking. He could have said to me, “Leave me alone, Ry, I’m a grown man. I can make my own choices.” But he never did. He knew it was never his 30-something year old grandson yelling at him. It was always a scared, 10-year-old boy who wanted to say “I can’t lose you,” but could never find the right words. Instead, that boy wrote MC Hammer raps, and hid ashtrays, and broke cigarettes in half, and threw them over the fence.
Perspective can be a funny thing because it often comes too late. I wish I’d spent less time trying to perfect my grandfather. And maybe I’m saying all of this now because, if I’m lucky, my son Michael will start to view me the same way that I viewed Gramps. And then one day he’ll notice one of my bad habits and maybe he’ll write a rap trying to get me to stop. And then, hopefully much later, Michael will start to see that I’ve been just a regular man the whole time. And I hope that when that happens, I will be as brave as Gramps and give Michael the space to be mad at me for being normal just like everyone else.
