The skinny vegetarian could stand it no longer and said, ‘I resent your cigar!’ : Not Up in Smoke

I was in the outdoor section of a Topanga Canyon restaurant the other evening when a fat man at a nearby table lit a cigar.

It was a good cigar and, typical of good cigars, smelled like it was made of compressed garbage. I loved it.

The aroma evoked memories of filthy old Uncle Leo, who used to sit on our front porch and puff away on stogies and spit over the porch railing into the Martha Washington geraniums.

Often, as I recall, he also drooled, which caused a permanent brown nicotine stain from the corner of his mouth to the tip of his chin.

Uncle Leo was a disgusting old man, but he was also kindly and generous and gave me a nickel when he visited.

Poor kids don’t care how disgusting a relative might be as long as he has nickels and doesn’t insist on kissing you.

But that isn’t the point of today’s column. Beverly Hills is the point, as you will shortly see.

Meanwhile, however, before the fat man at the Topanga restaurant could take one good puff on his cigar, a skinny vegetarian three tables away began waving his hands in the air to sweep away the smoke.

Well, I don’t know that he was a vegetarian, but he certainly was the type. I suspect he ate only foods blessed by Pritikin and brought his own sealed utensils to the restaurant in order to avoid contamination by microscopic bits of cooked animal flesh.

The fat man puffed away and laughed and seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, fatsoes being traditionally possessed of wit and good cheer.

The skinny man, on the other hand, was growing increasingly distressed by the cigar smoke, and his angular face was twisting into an expression of rage.

Skinny men are often tortured by stress-related sexual problems and are intolerant of those who have no inhibitions at all about reaching for the gusto.

As a result, the skinny man could stand it no longer and said in a voice that scattered coyotes for miles around, “I resent your cigar!”

Well, sir.

The fat man stopped in mid puff and replied, quite calmly I thought, “This is an outdoor section. It’s for smoking.”

“It is inconsiderate and offends me,” the skinny man said.

“Then,” the fat man replied, “move.”

I could not allow a pleasant evening to end in violence, even over a $12 Havana International, so I suggested to a waiter that he ought to do something. He did.

He first asked the fat man if he would put out his cigar and when the fat man told him to go to hell, he told the skinny man to move.

The skinny man, outraged, stomped out. Well, actually, he didn’t stomp, he huffed out. Skinny men rarely stomp.

Let me say here that I myself smoked cigars until about six months ago.

I gave them up not because they offended sexually troubled vegetarians, but because I was drugged by my wife and doctors and, while in a chemically induced trance, brainwashed to believe that cigars were dangerous to my health.

They knew they had to drug me to change me, because in my unaltered state I could quite readily point to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and George Burns as three prominent cigar smokers whose lives were not shortened by sucking on stogies.

I still think about cigars and sometimes I even dream about cigars being smoked by naked women standing in huge vats of vodka martinis, and I wake up smacking my lips.

My wife thinks I’m a degenerate and my analyst refuses to discuss it with me.

But I have avoided long enough the point of today’s journey into the world of sexual disorientation.

The incident in Topanga focused my attention on the confrontations that will likely occur in Beverly Hills when the restaurant smoking ban becomes effective.

It’s a law, I suppose, whose time has come. But while I may agree with it in principle, I’d rather dance with the devil than ally myself with the kinds of people who support smoking bans.

I propose we deal with them too.

As long as we demand a society governed by health laws, we should also consider mental health and pursue with equal vigor legislation to forbid stressful situations in public places.

We would, of course, begin by not allowing tense, smug, sexually troubled vegetarians into any restaurant not designated by statute.

But how, I hear you ask, would we know who these people are? Simple. First, they will carry their own sealed utensils. Second, they will order organically grown soy beans cooked in rain water.

Third, and most important, they will demand that the man at the next table who is enjoying an end cut of prime rib be ordered to cease eating red meat in their presence because it offends them.

Once recognized, they will be instantly arrested and shipped to Argentina, where there are no smoking bans, and persuaded by the federales to keep their mouths shut in public places.

And then you and I can finish our prime rib and go home and dream about naked ladies in dry martinis smoking $12 Havana Internationals.

They’ll be snuggled around Uncle Leo.