My First Time

My wife was the one who started me down the slippery slope of cigar smoking.

Looking for something new in the category of "Christmas presents we won't open when the kids are home," Sally stumbled upon a 5-pack of Harvill rum-flavored Jamaicans while buying a bottle of 12-year-old scotch (during the holidays she likes to feed my delusion that I'm a man of means with expensive tastes. In reality, she gives me the 12-year-old, it's gone three weeks later, and I'm back to Seagrams 7 and Old Overholt).

She picked up the Harvills on a whim, thinking that I might appreciate them in a culturally ironic way, whether I actually liked them or not. A new direction in campy indulgence.

She was right. The moment I unwrapped the cigars, I laughed with appropriate hipness (me, smoking a cigar! Next thing you know I'd be buying a smoking jacket!), but I also noted a seismic rumble below the surface, a tectonic unmooring, an immanent sea change that Shakespeare likely would have foreshadowed as a strange alignment of the stars. But I ignored this feeling of import, laughed and said, great, this should be fun! I'm not even old or rich, but what the hell. I'll try it!

I didn't know the least thing about the Harvill brand - whether it was respectable or some horrid rag of a smoke that even a park bench wino would decline if offered. I didn't know how to characterize their size, either, but they looked pretty impressive. Bigger than cigarettes, though not nearly as thick as the bazookas that balding men chew in movies and TV shows. Now, looking back in my accumulated cigar wisdom, I would guess they were cigarillos.

I kept the pack of Harvills in my sock drawer for a week, then took them along on New Year's Eve. Sally and I went to a jazz club here in this Nondescript Midwestern City, and it was pouring down freezing rain. We got up during the first intermission between sets, and ran upstairs to smoke outside the doorway. I lit the little stogie and started puffing like a maniac. The first thing I did, of course, was inhale by accident. Anyone who has ever smoked cigarettes (and I have, in the distant past--including way too many that I didn't enjoy in the least) must overcome this reflex - but once you've messed up with a cigar, you learn fast: Inhaling don't taste good, bub.

So I kept puffing away, learning not to inhale, playing around with the cigar, biting it a little to get a better draw, exhaling like a captain of industry into the howling wind and rain. "How do ya like it?" Sally yelled out, puffing on her I'm-being-bad-tonight Marlboro light.

"Hmm," I said. "It's not bad. I can actually taste the rum flavor." I huffed and puffed a few more times, starting to get an inkling of the chacteristic warmth and fullness that distinguishes cigars from their lowly cigarette cousins. Cigarettes can't give good mouth, let's face it. Only a cigar can take you by the tongue and never let go... But all this I was yet to truly comprehend. It was just a cigarillo, after all. So, an inkling...

"You done?" said Sally, stubbing out her schmig.

"Uh, no." I still had more than half of mine left.

"Well, shouldn't we go back in? I mean, the band's gonna start up again pretty soon."

"Oh. Well... ok." So I ruefully stubbed out this, my first "real" cigar, not sure what I had just experienced, but having learned a lesson that every cigar smoker must surely learn: It's all about time management. No five-minute quickies, son. If you can't stand and deliver for at least half an hour, put that lighter right back in your pants.