Have a Martini My Dear?

I walked into the house one day recently smoking a cigar and my wife looked at me as though I had a naked starlet slung over one shoulder.

Her expression was a blend of surprise and horror, and the sight of me puffing on a stogie for the first time in 15 years struck her speechless.

By the time she was able to express herself, I was at my liquor cabinet mixing a very dry martini, no twist, hold the olive.

“Will you get-that-thing-out-of-here!” she said, pointing to the cigar and isolating each word that whistled by my ear.

Before I could respond, she had turned her attention to the martini I was mixing with the concentration of a pharmacologist.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” she demanded. “Cigars? Martinis? You’re unraveling again, Martinez.”

“They’re making a comeback,” I explained. “It’s a new thing.”

“Well, you’re an old thing, and if you think I’m going to tolerate your return to the C&M; Era, you are badly mistaken.”

My C&M; Era involved enough cigars and martinis to render me constantly odorous and occasionally awash through much of the 1970s and into the ‘80s.

Cinelli called me Two Martini Martinez in the days when it seemed amusing, but the fun ended when my habit escalated. Four Martini Martinez offended her sense of poetry. It didn’t scan.

*

It is true that cigars and martinis have once more become popular, notwithstanding all the warnings of their various dangers. Evil has a way of crawling up over the horizon when we least expect it.

According to the Cigar Assn. of America, the sale of premium cigars topped 163 million units in 1995, up 30% over the previous year. U.S. gin consumption was up 2.7% for the first time in six years, leading the industry to believe that martinis are making a comeback too.

Bartenders around town tell me that the reason the martini is doing so well is that women are drinking them. Women are also smoking cigars, both of which are expressions of their new entitlements in the post-feminist era.

The martini supposedly was invented in San Francisco by someone who, appropriately, was named Martinez. The cigar has been traced to the 10th century. A pottery vessel discovered in Guatemala depicts a Mayan smoking a string-tied roll of tobacco leaves. He looked faintly like George Burns.

I picked up the cigars at La Plata, a storefront, family-owned business on South Grand, where they are rolled with loving care by two women and two men, all of whom enjoy the products themselves.

La Plata is owned by Victor Migenes Jr., who inherited it from his father, who learned the craft from his father who may have learned it from his father in their native Puerto Rico.

I don’t know if the art of martini-mixing is similarly passed from generation to generation but it ought to be. The ability to add just the right amount of vermouth is in itself a talent limited to a gifted few.

*

Migenes, 35, whose first love is music, almost abandoned the family business when anti-smoking fervor nudged him to the brink of bankruptcy. But he felt he owed it to tradition to try to keep it going.

By hanging on long enough, Migenes has seen his sales triple in the new popularity of his product. “Suddenly,” he explained one day as we puffed away in his back room, “I was making money.”

The reason for that was that restaurants, clubs and other entertainment establishments were setting aside certain nights for cigar smokers to get together to dine, drink and smoke with impunity.

I explained to Cinelli that good cigars, the name for which comes from the Mayan sik’ar, meaning to smoke, are made without chemicals and are not intended to be inhaled.

She said, “They stink and they’re bad for you.”

Unfortunately, that is a sustaining opinion throughout health-crazy L.A., which is one of the reasons I gave up cigars; that and the fact that Cinelli was refusing to kiss me if I persisted in the habit. God knows what else I might have had to do without.

One of the other less appealing aspects of cigar smoking is, alas, the necessity to spit occasionally, which even I find unpleasant if not downright disgusting. That was also a consideration in my abandonment of what Groucho Marx once called the sensual smoke.

I have never completely given up martinis. It isn’t so much the taste as it is the haunting shape of the martini glass that keeps calling me back, although I will never return to the excesses of the C&M; Era.

“At least,” Cinelli observed with reluctant acceptance, “martinis don’t stink and you don’t spit when you drink them.” Not usually.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com