Up In The Smoke
My son Joe sent me a link to a Jack Nicholson story that ran in an old issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine. While being interviewed, Jack pulls out a fat Montecristo stogie from his pocket and attempts to light it with a wooden match, which is the right way to do it. You roll the cigar around over the stick match to get an even burn. But he’s having some difficulty getting the bastard lit. The matches keep going out.
Tossing out one bad match after another, he says, “With all this cigar culture stuff, when the hell are they going to make a decent match in America again? You can’t light a cigar with one match anymore.” That’s true, Jack. When the hell is someone gonna step up to the plate here?
Another famous cigar smoker in the news recently was Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had a mambo pothole in his neighborhood. All the neighbors were crowing about it—with no response from the city after numerous tries. The ditch was screwing up cars and bicycles for weeks. So the Terminator and his buddies grabbed some pails of tar and fixed the goddamn hole themselves. Arnie said to his sidekicks, “Let’s not complain about it. Let’s do something about it.” And they did. We should light one up to celebrate that move.
JFK was a helluva cigar smoker. He made sure to get himself 1,200 Cuban stogies before he set the trade embargo in 1962. Jack was often photographed with a hand shoved in his suit jacket pocket because he had a cigar in it. He thought his pockets were ashtrays until his suit caught on fire.
Hey, I lit up a big one when I was seven down in the reservoir. A Macanudo I swiped from my father. I’m telling ya, nothing can beat the look of a little kid smoking a big cigar. The neighborhood kids from that day on knew who was boss. All I can say is, “I’ll be back.”
Keep your dukes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KznVB8ylH8M
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