A Leper of Our Time--the Cigar Smoker--Is Weary of Exile

I have reached the lowest rung of the social scale, below the lonely, pimply faced teen-ager at a junior high dance, lower than heartless corporate attorneys and even beneath those who smoke cigarettes in crowded elevators.

I am the leper of our age.

I smoke cigars.

I’ve been kicked out of cigarette-smoke-filled bars, I bear the snickers of passersby on the street and I move downwind from those around me who frown on my simple pleasure.

To me, taking my cigar for a walk around the neighborhood at night, even my neighborhood in Panorama City (“Home of the Blythe Street Gang”), is the crowning touch to a good day and the salvation of a bad one.

But even in a ‘hood like mine, I’ve endured catcalls from second-floor apartment windows and disapproving stares from the walking-the-dog set.

All this I can stand, because I recognize that what I find to be a fine Macanudo is viewed by others as a stink bomb. But my patience is being tried.

Thanksgiving Eve provided a good example.

Down at the Plush Pocket pool hall on Parthenia, a favorite hangout of mine where I had never been molested for my cigars, a friend and I waited in the stereotypical darkness of the billiards parlor for a table, admiring the play of sharks who regularly occupy the front three tables. Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” blasted over the CD jukebox. Wisps of smoke curled around the lights hanging over the tables. Young toughs tried to impress their dates. This is what pool halls are all about.

I lighted my Partagas Naturales and wondered to myself how, at the still-green age of 26, I was able not only to afford but also appreciate the finer things in life, such as a good cigar and a kick-bank combination to the side pocket.

Then came the tap on the shoulder from the bartender.

“Excuse me,” he said, almost apologetically. “We don’t allow cigar smoking in here.”

I was stunned. I mean, how low do you have to be to get thrown out of a pool hall?

But I wasn’t about to stub it out, so into the wind and cold I headed. A relit stogie is never as good.

On my way to the door, a hefty man in a heavy-metal T-shirt laughed at me and said, “I wondered where that (expletive) smell came from.”

I did what any refined gentleman would do, of course. I ignored him and carried on.

Most cigar smokers try to be polite to others. We sigh when the stigma attached to cigarette smoking is applied to us. We cringe when others lump our Arturo Fuentes, Zinos and Cohibas in with the Swisher Sweets of the world.

Cigars do not create the cravings that cigarettes do. One does not inhale a cigar. Rather, cigars are smoked for their taste and aroma, much like one enjoys a fine wine. And just as a Mondavi drinker would be insulted to be associated with Thunderbird swiggers, Montecristo lovers turn their noses up at the King Edwards of the world.

“Probably the worst thing that happened to cigars is when cigar makers started making them here in the United States,” said Wayne Arak, manager of the Cigar Warehouse in Sherman Oaks. “That’s really what gave cigars a bad name.”

Domestic “drugstore quality” cigars, Arak said, are made of scrap tobacco and tobacco paper, hardly in the same class as the hand-wrapped premium cigars of Honduras, the Dominican Republic and, of course, Cuba, which are made completely of tobacco leaves.

Like wines and grapes, cigars and tobacco leaves of different types and from different countries have unique tastes and aromas that reflect their breeding.

Still, owners of restaurants, bars--and now even pool halls--have their rules, and they mostly exclude cigars.

“They’re offensive to a lot of people,” said Joe Rice, owner of the Plush Pocket in Northridge. “I grew up with my uncle who smokes cigars. I don’t resent it, but a lot of customers do.”

Even the Insomnia Cafe, co-owned by cigar-lover John Dunn, is no haven for us. Last Friday, I was playing chess in the Ventura Boulevard coffeehouse when I was informed that I had to extinguish my cigar, despite people puffing cigarettes all around me. Seconds after I snuffed it out, as if to mock me, a sultry blonde flicked her pale blue Bic and lit another cancer stick. All I could do was bow my head and return to the chess game that had suddenly lost its appeal.

Dunn sympathizes.

“I wanted the place to be cigar-friendly, but unfortunately, the people who would come there, they would complain,” said Dunn, who has been smoking cigars for eight years. “Cigar smoke is much richer and thicker than cigarette smoke. I love the smell, but there are people who don’t like it.”

Cigar smoking is allowed in Insomnia, Dunn said, as long as no one complains.

Like every cigar enthusiast, Dunn has his own stories of discrimination. Earlier this year at an outdoor Allman Brothers concert--”where all sorts of things were being smoked”--a woman screamed at him to put out his Cuban.

The mood toward cigars may be lightening up, however, said Marvin Shanken, editor and publisher of Cigar Aficionado magazine.

“There seems to be a Renaissance under way,” Shanken said. “Many restaurants, particularly those up-market establishments, want the clientele that eat fine food, drink fine spirits and smoke cigars.”

The glossy magazine has compiled a list of more than 1,000 “cigar-friendly” restaurants in the country and plans to publish it early next year.

I can’t wait: leper colonies for cigar smokers, where we can revel in exile.