How can I describe my wife's face the first time she saw me shove a fat hog of chewing tobacco into my lower lip?
Picture the face Rosemary made when she first glimpsed her demon baby. Revulsion, nausea, incomprehension. Or else imagine the face your spouse might make if you said, "Would you try on these panties I found in my sister's closet?"
Furrowed brow, curled upper lip, squinty eyes. It was a face that gave me far too much immature glee.
But I get it. In my social circle, chewing tobacco elicits universal disgust. It brings to mind marrying your second cousin, jaw cancer, and cups of warm brown spit at awful frat parties long ago.
That's because I live in an artsy-fartsy low-testosterone bubble.
In my social circle, chewing tobacco elicits universal disgust.In much of the rest of America, smokeless tobacco is huge and getting huger. By 2013, about six million Americans regularly stuffed tobacco in their mouth, and sales were rising by about 6 percent a year.
As you might imagine, a large number of users are baseball players and good ol' boys. But according to my admittedly unscientific research, it's also catching on among Wall Streeters. I've met several finance guys who semi-secretly keep a tin in the back pocket of their suit. Smokeless tobacco is big enough that it's the target of a crackdown. By 2017, ten major league stadiums will have banned it.
My editors—who are all from Texas, for some reason—were shocked that a Yankee like me had never tried it. They prescribed a fix: Take oral tobacco (street name: "dip" or "chaw") for a month and report back.
So on a random Thursday morning, I take a cherry-sized pinch of Skoal Classic Mint and tuck it next to my gum.
Tastewise, I'm prepared for the worst. One helpful Internet commenter warned that dip tastes like "Big Foot's dick." Another: like "a rodent exploded in my mouth." But actually, I find it more weird than gross. The clean taste of mint mixes with the dirty tobacco—it's an odd paradox, like I'm licking an ashtray filled with Tic Tacs and Marlboro butts.
Physically, it's more of a challenge than I thought. The tobacco stings my cheek like orange juice on a canker sore. And I have no control over my wad. It's supposed to stay compact, but strands of tobacco migrate all over my mouth. The spit builds up fast. I put my empty Poland Spring bottle to my lips and do my best. But instead of the bullet I've seen ballplayers emit, I let loose a messy, chin-dribbling drool.
As for the feeling: It's fantastic, until it isn't. For the first five minutes, I feel like someone is pumping helium into my cranium. One of the best head rushes I've ever had. I can't stop smiling, like a demented flight attendant.
Physically, it's more of a challenge than I thought. The tobacco stings my cheek like orange juice on a canker sore.Then, with alarming speed, comes the nausea. I don't throw up—a common dipping-tobacco rite of passage—but I feel profoundly uneasy, like I'm in a two-seater airplane bouncing through a snowstorm above Buffalo. I sweat. Light hurts my eyes. I space out, staring at my iPhone and trying to remember why I took it out. I burp repeatedly.
"I have to lie down," I say to my wife.
"Don't drool on the bed."
I obviously need some guidance. I search the Internet for "How to Chew Tobacco." The first piece of advice that pops up: Don't start. The Web is loaded with images of receding gums, caramel-colored teeth, missing jaws, and white patches called gator lip, along with testimonials on how smokeless tobacco is absolutely, positively not a safe alternative to smoking. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that it might contain delicious arsenic, lead, and mercury.)
Ron Galella, Ltd.Adventures in dipping, #3: Charlie Daniels was what we call a Big Dipper.
But the public has a right to know. So I forge ahead. I stumble onto a YouTube channel founded by a man who calls himself the Dip Doctor. The Doctor is perhaps not the best person to dispel chewing-tobacco stereotypes. He wears a camouflage cap adorned with a Confederate flag. His T-shirt reads PURE WHITE TRASH. He owns a company called Mud Jug that sells portable spittoons with names like Backwoods Badass Outlaw.
But still, he's passionate and knowledgeable, so I call the Dip Doctor (real name: Darcy Compton) to get some dos and don'ts. He's got plenty.
- Learn the lingo. A pinch of tobacco is called a "hog," a "hammer," a "dinger," or a "ham hock."
- Stick with the popular brands, like Copenhagen and Grizzly. Skoal is okay. Avoid Longhorn and Kayak, which is nicknamed "Yak," since that's what it tastes like.
- Before you take a pinch, tap the top of the tin three times to condense your tobacco.Use three fingers to grab your dip from the tin, chopstick-style.
- Don't pull your lip out with the other hand before packing a hog. It's amateurish.
- Do not confuse chewing tobacco (the loose stuff that comes in a bag, like Red Man) with the slightly classier dipping tobacco (the more finely chopped stuff in a tin).
- Put some force behind the spit. "It's almost like a 'pfff, pfff, pfff.' "
I tell the Dip Doctor about my wife's less-than-enthusiastic reaction to my experiment. His response is immediate: "Don't ever quit dippin' for a woman."
It's been four days and I'm getting bolder. I've been dipping wherever I go: the subway, the street, Starbucks, picking up my kids from school.
I work at one of those shared offices where a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds are beta-testing new social-media platforms while downing bok choy smoothies and discussing yoga studios.
I sit in the corner and quietly spit my chunky tobacco juice into a thermos. I feel rebellious and dirty and unhealthy.
Adventures in dipping, #2: Zach Galifianakis takes a dip.
Also focused. This stuff is like Adderall. For about half an hour after I put in a dinger, I'm on fire. This morning, I banged out fifty emails.
I'm stuffing in bigger hogs. You can spot the swelling in my cheek, perhaps conveniently foreshadowing the tumor I'll eventually develop. The lumps of tobacco affect my speech. They make me sound—appropriately enough—like I have a Kentucky drawl. The phrase "Nice to see you" comes out "Nahs to shee ya."
Today I get cocky. I take a massive wad of some hardcore stuff and soon feel a wave of nausea. I run to the bathroom at work and stand in front of the urinal spitting, moaning, and dry-heaving. I hear someone open the bathroom door, then shut it without entering. Good call.
I have been reading up on the history of my new habit. Native Americans chewed tobacco leaves for centuries. After Columbus, European settlers took to the new drug, with popularity reaching its height in America in the nineteenth century. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited our shores and was thoroughly grossed out by what he called the torrents of "yellow rain." He noted there were spittoons everywhere—in courtrooms, hospitals, the Senate. And in the White House, where the president's inner circle often ignored spittoons and just "bestowed their favors" on the carpet.
Smokeless tobacco went into decline for a couple of reasons, including the rise of cigarettes and fear of disease. (Doctors of the day probably incorrectly thought the spit was spreading tuberculosis.)
I sit in the corner and quietly spit my chunky tobacco juice into a thermos. I feel rebellious and dirty and unhealthy.But in recent decades, dwindling opportunities for overt manliness have many of us spittin' like there's no tomorrow, and chew remains a force for millions of Americans—a large majority of them male, according to the CDC. This I could have guessed. My freezer has been filling up with these hockey pucks of tobacco I order online, and the logos are almost comically macho: a grizzly bear, a rifle, a longhorn bull—everything but a scrotum.
There's also a subset that seems aimed at teens, with wacky fruit flavors including melon, banana, and coconut. I try them. They taste like Jolly Ranchers gone bad. The Dip Doctor is not a fan, either. "If I wanted to taste apple, I'd eat an apple."
Wherever I go, I take out a tin of dip and offer it to those around me. It seems the hospitable thing to do.
Sometimes the tin's appearance elicits moral outrage (one friend, the daughter of a dental hygienist, asks, "Are you doing an article on getting gum cancer?"), but just as often, it simply causes confusion.
"Are those chocolates?" asks a woman at a business dinner.
"Is that salmon?" asks a woman at a book party.
No, I don't carry around canned fish.
Wherever I go, I take out a tin of dip and offer it to those around me. It seems the hospitable thing to do.I offer it to a stubble-faced Internet CEO at a cocktail party.
"Uh, no thanks."
"Ever try it?"
"I did it a lot in high school," he says. "I only dip once or twice a year—when I'm really constipated." (I won't go into detail, but yes, the stuff is like Metamucil.)
As I leave the party, I offer it to three men on the sidewalk taking a smoke break. They shake their heads, then turn their backs to me. Ostracized by the ostracized.
So who are the six million users? Well, baseball players are the most visible. A major league outfielder agrees to email me to explain the love affair—as long as I don't use his name. Is it a performance enhancer? Not really. More of a semi-sacred ritual that passes the time, lowers stress, and distracts you. Because baseball, if you hadn't noticed, is really damn slow.
Other big buyers, according to the Dip Doctor, include soldiers, MMA fighters, football players, and the occasional Hollywood star (Ashton Kutcher and Zach Galifianakis among them).
Adventures in dipping, #3: Dan Rather gets down.
That's not to mention a surprising number of finance guys. As a vice, it's got plenty of advantages. If you're a trader, you don't have to leave your desk and lurk in a doorway with other cigarette-smoking reprobates. You can stay in front of your Bloomberg terminal, spitting into empty soda cans.
"I first got interested in it while researching companies," one tells me. He prefers not to use his name, since he's in the closet at both work and home (where he keeps the tins hidden in the basement, away from his wife). "The smokeless-tobacco market was growing. I justified my habit because I told myself I was doing research."
Max Shea—who works in international equities at Cantor Fitzgerald—tells me he dips when he has to work late nights writing reports. "You're not going to fall asleep with tobacco in your mouth, no matter how many years you've been chewing it."
A third tells me, "There are more of us than you think. I live in a small Connecticut town where a lot of people work in finance. And the gas station here has a whole fridge full of smokeless tobacco."
I am doing a research project on my family history and go visit a seventy-two-year-old genealogist at her home to discuss the latest findings.
When I get there, I realize I've forgotten to bring an empty soda can or Mud Jug. "Can I have a cup?" I ask.
She goes to the kitchen and hands me a glass. It's got a picture of a nineteenth-century rabbi on it—part of a collection, she tells me.
"Did you want water? Or soda?" she asks.
"No, I'm just using it for spit," I say, taking out my tin of Copenhagen. "I'm testing out chewing tobacco."
Her eyes widen. "Let me get you a plastic cup. You shouldn't be spitting on the rabbi."
Spitting is the most controversial part of smokeless tobacco. It's the part my family hates most, thanks to the half-filled Diet Coke cans I often forget to clean up that dot the tables of my apartment. Miraculously, no one has yet taken a swig.
True dip fans swear by expectorating. "It's my favorite part," says the Dip Doctor. "There's something about the ritual of it I find comforting." A scientist friend once told me that "the most fun you can have is when something is entering or leaving your body." And it's true—emptying your body of any liquid, it's liberating.
Jonathan DanielAdventures in dipping, #4: Lenny Dykstra, dipping extraordinaire.
And yet not all smokeless tobacco requires spitting. I figure it's time to test out some saliva-free versions. First, I try a tin of dry snuff. Snuff is powdered tobacco you can ingest by snorting. It's got a long history—Beethoven and Napoleon loved to carry around boxes of it—but snuff just reminds me of cheap, dirty-looking cocaine. When I sniff a little mound, it makes my nose burn, then I sneeze repeatedly. I can't get over the brown powder all over my hands. I look like I just came in from plowing potato fields.
Next I test out an increasingly popular product called snus. Snus started in Sweden, where they remain hugely popular. They're little individual packets of tobacco, each one the size of a Chiclet. You tuck the snus into your upper lip, not the lower, because it's the Scandinavian way. There's some evidence snus might be a tad healthier than chew, though I wouldn't bet my insurance premium on it. Regardless, they cause much less saliva. You rarely if ever need to spit.
I tuck a snus into my lip one afternoon at my laptop and immediately fall for them. Snus are clean, compartmentalized, modern—a bite-sized version of Ikea. They're prepackaged and convenient, like my kids' juice boxes.
The Dip Doctor would be disappointed. "If it ain't dip, it ain't shit," he once told me. And I feel un-American. But several of the Wall Street guys tell me they prefer the snus as well—they're easier to hide at work. You can have one tucked into your cheek at a meeting, no cup required. Plus, they can be surprisingly strong. There's a brand called Thunder that turned my brain to Jell-O. So for the next week, I go on a snus binge, tucking away a half dozen a day.
It's been a month. This morning, I woke up, checked the time on my iPhone, and then, while still in bed, tucked a snus into my upper lip.
Ten minutes later, I temporarily remove the snus to brush my teeth.
"Can you please put that somewhere else?" my wife asks. She points to the brown lump of tobacco on the sink. Damn, that is a sad sight. A clear sign that I'm on the verge of addiction.
I'm not rabidly opposed to oral tobacco. I now understand its appeal very well—the buzz, the ritual, the oral fixation, the history. I understand the possibility—according to some research—that it's not as dangerous as cigarettes (a position that remains controversial).
But I've already got two drugs in my life, my beloved caffeine and alcohol. I don't need to be a slave to another.
"I'll stop," I tell my wife. "But you really should try it before I toss all the tins. You know, for journalism."
She's a sport. She agrees. Taking a pinch of the Skoal mint in her lip, she grimaces. But nothing like her expression as she watched me begin my habit. The reality is less repulsive than the idea. She spits—"pfftoo, pfftoo." She looks at me and smiles, flecks of tobacco on her teeth. "Give us a kiss?"
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