Cigarro

August 7, 2007

There’s something seductive about a man and his cigar.

I couldn’t quite figure it out why, really. Maybe the superciliousness of a cigar makes it alluring; or maybe the images on the airwaves that assaulted my senses over the years: the maverick who, after saving the world and getting the girl, smokes a cigar as a victory dance; the first-time father who lights up one after getting the good news from the doctor; and in some cultures, the rite of passage from boy to man.

History is also replete with powerful people who prefer cigar. At the top of my head, I’ve got the revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevarra, communist Karl Marx, writer Mark Twain, poet Pablo Neruda, British statesman Wintson Churchill, inventor Thomas Edison, director Alfred Hitchcock, President John F. Kennedy, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

I mean, those names in the list kick ass!

There’s also the dynamics of exclusivity. Like pissing on an empty bottle without spilling a drop, cigar smoking has so far remained the domain of men. Though lately, Hollywood female celebrities were seen smoking cigars but look at the roster:  Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct), Linda Evangelista (supermodel), Demi Moore (G.I. Jane), and Gina Gershon (Bound, Showgirls). These are strong women who could cut your balls off, fry it with batter, and peddle it as Kwek-kwek in the street.  

Of course it’s easy to see the semiotics of the cigar and its association with power and triumph as opposed to a cigarette for example, which could be unfairly classified as the opium of the proletariat. To oversimplify the subliminal message, it’s a question of have and have-nots.  

In reality, however, cigarettes cut across the social class and it could be even argued that more famous people choose cigarettes over cigars. To mention a few, we have Princess Stephanie of Monaco, Christina Aguilera, Victoria Beckham, Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow, Winona Ryder, Franklin Roosevelt, John Lennon, Oscar Wilde, Jean Paul Sartre, the man in black Johnny Cash, and the rebel without a cause, James Dean.

As you can see, the list proves that image is not the problem. My beef with cigarettes is that I could never stand the smell of second-hand smoke and the after-smell. The look of Guns and Roses’ lead guitarist Slash plucking those six-strings with a cigarette dangling on his mouth might look cool but, let’s just say, I ain’t keen on kissing him soon. It’s like a marriage contract, it looks good on paper but reality tends to throw you a curveball.

There’s also the pipe but for Chrissakes, who smokes a pipe these days? Maybe if I drove a Rolls Royce, I’d throw in a pipe and a top hat just to complete my image of a snobbish tycoon. The pipe has never looked cool. Even the people who smoke it are often pigeonholed as intellectuals and, by the theory of relativity, nerds. Who are they? Let’s see, relativity proponent Albert Einstein was one, then there’s C.S. Lewis, Alexander Graham Bell, astronomer Edward Hubble (of the Hubble Telescope), painters Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and the fictional character Sherlock Holmes who couldn’t be seen without his ubiquitous pipe. Even on Popeye, the pipe looked weird.  

Okay, maybe JRR Tolkien and Vincent Van Gogh were cool but that’s only a testament to how dorky I am.

Though they may look identical, each premium cigar is unique because they were manufactured by hand. Tobacco leaves are aged under controlled conditions to reduce sugar and water content. Then the leaves undergo fermentation so the aroma, flavor and characteristic of each leaf permeate through before they can be rolled by a, well, cigar roller.

The cigars are then stock up in a box called a humidor. It’s no ordinary box since it can control the conditions inside and keep the cigars from drying up or amassing moisture.

Symbolisms aside, it’s also the way a man lights a cigar where each procedure carries weight. From the moment he picks a cigar from the humidor, he smells it for the aroma; he fingers its edges for dampness or dryness as they influence the taste of the cigar; he strokes it for consistency and perfection as any lumps in the contour is considered an anomaly and therefore unfit to be consumed.  

After choosing the perfect cigar, the smoker then clip the bottom and light up the top, not with a lighter, but with a match. The fire from the wooden match supposedly retains the flavor of the cigar.  

That kind of attention to detail could never be accomplished with lighting a cigarette, which seems to thrive on the concept of instant gratification. If I have to make an analogy, cigarettes are like having sex with prostituted woman who’s trying to achieve a quota for the night, reducing the time for foreplay since every so often, she asks you to speed it up because you’re hogging all her time along with potential customers.

The farthest I’ve come with a cigar was to smell it because I couldn’t stand the stench of tobacco smoke. Not with cigars, cigarettes and certainly not with pipes.  So is it a case of penis envy since the cigar is often seen as a phallic symbol? I wouldn’t even venture to overanalyze that premise.

Freud was once said to have turned defensive when he was grilled over his passion with cigars and how it relates to his own phallic obsession: “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.”

And sometimes, a blog is just a blog.