A Cigar is Never Just a Smoke

A cigar is not a thing usually shared. You don’t pass a cigar from mouth to mouth. Well, at least men don’t do that. I don’t even think cigar smoking women would do that. But, a few years back, my younger son had come to visit with me in Seattle where I was managing a tour to promote Fruitopia, Coca Cola’s superfluous answer to Snapple. His name is Zach. His older brother is Ari. First one “A,” last one “Z.” It just came out that way, but I like to tell people we did it on purpose in order to keep the universe in balance.

It was Ari, as our firstborn, who seemed to draw from his mother and I all the energy and willingness to go on adventures with him. We were young enough to take in Disneyland and the Renaissance Faire, and see it through his eyes. We even did “Small World” enough times to permanently scar our brains with that insipid tune. (I know, now you’re singing it too. Sorry.) Zach, being second, often missed out on the willingness of his parents to schlep somewhere, because we’d done it with Ari, and we were getting older and more easily tired. We took him to Disneyland for sure, but we didn’t stay quite as long. He never did get to see the Renaissance Faire. (We never took either of them to Magic Mountain because I didn’t want them to see their father cry, or throw up, or both.) Second is just not the same as first. Ari went on a trip with me to Hawaii. Zach, at age 27, reminds me to this day that I still owe him one of those. I hope it might still happen, I really do.

It always seemed to Zach that Ari got the better deal – first one to the toys, first one to get a dog, and he would always be destined to tread on the road more traveled. It wasn’t until he got to school that Zach, faced with the taunts of a bully, realized with utmost glee, that only he could have a big brother to look out for him – Ari would never have his very own protector. That was some consolation for son number two.

So as I was saying, Zach joined me in Seattle, and that night the guys on the tour went out and got some really cheap-shit cigars, Swisher Sweets I believe. Blech! But the night wasn’t about the cigars, it was men playing pool, drinking, laughing and smoking cigars together. Zach was about seventeen at the time, and had never smoked a cigar. He never had smoked a cigarette either, or so I thought in my fatherly naiveté. So when we all lit up I offered him one. He was reluctant so I just passed mine to him and told him to try it. (I sound like a drug pusher, don’t I?). He smoked a little and he liked it, so we continued to pass the cigar back and forth like a joint. Not that he’d ever had weed at that time in his life. More fatherly naiveté I fear. So we had a great time, and Zach loved being accepted among the men. With his easy humor, he more than held his own.

About a month later, back in Los Angeles, Zach came over to my apartment and we sat out on my balcony and again shared one cigar, albeit this time of better quality. And as we sat there on a warm Summer evening, we started to talk, father and son stuff for sure, but for the first time as men, without the barrier of parent child roles between us. We talked about the divorce between his mother and me, and about the pain we both felt, and we talked about his travails with girls. I don’t remember all that we talked about, but there was an easiness to the conversation, and a caring that passed between us that we both acknowledged. It was one of those too few special times between father and son.

My father smoked four cigars a day, for the entire part of his life that I shared. Since my mother wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, that took some artful dodging, and as I think on it now, probably one of the reasons why he wasn’t home more. In his later years, when he had the money, he remodeled their ample apartment and he built himself a small room with a recliner, TV, and a whopper of an exhaust fan. When that thing was on, we had to tether the grandbabies, lest they be sucked out along with the smoke.

As a young boy I was never bothered by the smell of his cigars, even before the recliner days, so I spent many an hour with him, watching TV while he smoked and we talked, but only about the show or ball game we were watching. I think the reason the smoke smell never bothered me was simply because that was his smell. His clothes, his hair and skin, all smelled like . . . Pop. This ritual of ours continued into my adulthood and his old age in the recliner days, and I still can recall the sight of him falling asleep in that chair despite the considerable volume of the TV needed to overcome the noise of that fan-jet exhaust. (FYI, you know you are a senior when you find yourself falling asleep in front of the TV, just like your old man.)

So, as I sat alone on my apartment balcony after Zach left, finishing our cigar and my glass of Port, I realized that I had never had such an experience with my father. In all the twenty some odd years while I was an adult and he was still with us, he had never even offered me a cigar. I had no idea why not. I suppose it was fear of my mother, who surely would have killed him if she found the two of us puffing away, but she never came into our sanctum anyway. So there the question hung in the air, like the smoke I had just exhaled. Why not? The simplest explanation would be that he just didn’t think I would want to smoke, but I don’t really believe that’s the whole truth. My Pop, like many of his generation, was unwilling or unable to breach that boundary between father and son and accept me as a man, an equal. I never had a deep, real conversation with him in all our years together. I didn’t fault him for this, as I believed it was because I came along late in his life, and with the huge difference in our ages, I would always be in his eyes, the baby of the family. But it was also because he was incapable of any kind of heart to heart, any genuine closeness. I have since learned from my older brother that it was the same with him. My father would no more have looked us in the eye and shared his feelings with us than he would have gotten out of his recliner and gone fox hunting. In any event that fact that I and my day never had the kind of experience that Zach and I just shared, either with or without the accompaniment of fire and smoke, left me feeling sad, and more than a little bit cheated.

You see that cigar was a kind of talisman, a ritualistic object that my son and I shared – passed from me to him and back, a symbol of my acceptance of his elevation to manhood, and his acceptance of my descent from the mythical tower of omniscient Fatherhood. Those Native Americans knew what smoking was all about. For the first time as adults, Zach and I came together in shared sadness and joy. From that day forward we would treat each other more or less as equals in our strengths and weaknesses, and with a caring for each other that would forever more be somehow different, and special between us. Sure, I’ll always be Dad (or “Dude” as the little prick likes to call me) and he will always be my boy, but from that night forward we would see each other, always with love, but now eye to eye.

Zach and I have smoked cigars together on several occasions since that night, some ten years ago. I don’t really smoke that often, and I think he only smokes with me, but in any event, now he gets one of his own (of course, I’m still buying them). And each time we repeat our father and son ritual, we seem to have the most significant and genuinely intimate conversations.

I remember now that the last time we smoked together, we were in Laughlin, Nevada, where he and his brother, took me to celebrate my sixtieth birthday. We were outside on a path by the river, having consumed a wonderful meal and bottle of wine, and we all lit up. It was my birthday, and they had given be the best present I could ever wish for. I was in Dad Heaven. Then, while we walked, and smoked, and laughed at each other, an odd thing happened. Ari admitted that he didn’t really like cigars all that much, and crushed his under his shoe, while Zach and I continued to smoke as we walked along. I hadn’t thought about it until tonight, but as I sat down to write this story, it came to me that from the moment Ari dropped his cigar, Zach would always have something experiential with his Dad that is his alone, and that as far as his relationship with me is concerned, he will never again walk in his brother’s footsteps.