This story is almost entirely true.  The parts that aren’t literal are, well, close enough …..

Unless you’ve been in a Turkish prison or a hermit’s cave, you know that cigar smoking as a (primarily male)  “fad-du-jour” has come and pretty much gone once again. Like wearing a hat, donning a bow tie, or sipping a well-mixed cocktail, the practice of firing up a fine hand-rolled Corona, Churchill, or Rothschild occasionally rises up to the forefront for certain guys as an outward sign that one is not just a man, but also well-practiced in the manful arts. In fact, there was a time just a few short years ago that the “cigar boom” was king.  Much of it was fueled (at least initially) by Marvin Shanken’s very slick publication “Cigar Aficionado”.  Catering not only to all things “cigar”, but also to all things that a well-heeled gent might engage in whilst enjoying said smoke.  Fine drinks, fine clothes, fine watches, fine golf destinations, racing, gambling, …. well, if it is considered “gentlemanly”, the magazine touched on it in at least some sort of way.    Even so, that most recent popularity of placing a rolled wad of leaves in your mouth and setting fire to it seems to be going away again, to lie dormant until some new generation of manly men decides … “it’s time”.

Just for some perspective though, all you recent cigar aficionados take note: I had you ALL beat by almost five decades. ……

As I pulled my bike into Larry’s yard that crisp autumn day back in the late 60’s, I saw him sitting on the steps of the side porch with one of those “cat-that-ate-the-canary” looks on his face.  I knew something must be up.   “So, what’s up with you?” I asked. Without a word he reached into his jacket pocket and produced the biggest, meanest, GREENEST cigar I had ever seen.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

I mean, I actually HAD seen them before…I’d seen them nearly every time I went to Larry’s house. Larry’s dad almost always had one of these babies, half burned down, dangling from a corner of his mouth. Reading the paper, mowing the yard, washing the cars…. now that I think about it, I actually have a hard time visualizing Larry’s dad without a cigar.

This baby was was typical of the stogies that Larry’s dad smoked.  One of those “double tapered” torpedoes that are pointed on both ends. Larry had no doubt pilfered this one out of the cigar box while his old man wasn’t looking.

“Cool.” I said. “Let’s smoke it NOW!”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this wasn’t *just* a cigar. It was a CEE-GAR, and it was GREEN.

Pearlescent Green.

Glowing green.

Other-worldly green.

If it had been a Crayola crayon, the label would have said  “Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon Green”.

Cigar wrappers have names.  From Oscuro (so dark it’s nearly black), to Maduro (a rich chocolately brown), to Colorado (a medium reddish brown) and so forth.    The official cigar term for Larry’s dad’s color of cigar wrapper is “Double Claro”, or “Candela”.

It probably came from a dirty machine in a back alley in Tampa that churned out a thousand or more an hour.  But to our young minds,  it was easy to imagine instead that a sultry, dark-skinned, raven-haired Cuban beauty in a low cut blouse in a sweaty Havana emporium had been just so, so  busy putting the finishing loving touches on this work of art after having rolled it with skilled, powerful hands.  Then she would offer it up with an inquisitive and sexy, thick accented voice to an unwary stranger, “Candela??”

Whatever.

In my memory, this baby was CHARTREUSE, and it looked DANGEROUS.

Now, it would have been easy to hop on our bikes and ride the half-mile to a vacant lot down by the railroad depot to fire up this prize in relative seclusion, as we had done with a pack of Pall Malls or Lucky Strikes or Camels from time to time.

However…. and I can’t even begin to explain it now … there is a logic that is an innate part of being a young boy who is up to no good. And that logic, on that day, with the prospect of smoking that cigar, led us to down into Larry’s basement, and straight to his mom’s closet-sized laundry room to accomplish the dirty deed.

Go figure.

Larry produced a box of wooden matches and began to slather up this chartreuse torpedo with saliva the way he’d seen his dad do it a hundred times before.  He pulled out a match to light the other end…  I stopped him.

“WHOA!!! Wait a minute,” I said, “I’m not sticking that thing in MY mouth after you’ve slobbered all over it!”

Ever being the resourceful one, and with that same flawless 12-year old logic, Larry produced a pocket knife with a sharp blade, and proceeded to surgically bisect the stogie into relatively equal parts.

“There. One for you, one for me” he said.

“Cool”, I said.

So we each slathered our individual green pointed half-stogie, lit up,  and began to puff away there in the confined space of the laundry room.

An hour or so later, …… (ok, so maybe it was more like 5 minutes) ….. we were both standing there in a fog so dense we could barely see one another.

“Larry, I’m not feeling all that great” I said.

“It’s OK, it’ll be fine,” he said bravely, “don’t worry. Just smoke.”

Nevertheless, through the smoke and my own tears, I could see that Larry’s own eyes were beginning to look a bit watery too. I wasn’t completely sure, but he may have been swaying back and forth a bit, like a willow in the wind.  Not at all steady on his feet.

As for me, my world was beginning to spin like a circus merry-go-round, and the painted pony … the CHARTREUSE pony … obviously had no intention of stopping to let me off. I was only vaguely aware of it just then, but there was something reminiscent of a volcano starting to gurgle and bubble down in my little tummy.

Just then, Larry’s mom, an unusually chipper and joy-filled woman, came strolling down the stairs with a load of laundry.  She may have been singing, “On the sunny side of the street! … ”   But at the bottom of the stairs as she turned and took in the scene….  the soon to be TRAGIC scene….. she stopped short.  No singing. No chipper. No joy.

There was nothing at all we could do. We were caught red-handed. CHARTREUESE –handed. With a look of utter shock and horror on her face she peered through the dense clouds and yelled “What in the HELL is going on down here?” Almost simultaneously with her (obviously rhetorical) question, and perhaps BECAUSE of it, the volcano in my stomach reached a Vesuvius-like point of no return. I felt the lava beginning to rise … ERUPTION!!!!

I puked all over a basket load of freshly washed sheets and towels sitting on the floor beside me.

Did I say “all over it”?   Splattering on it, around it, dripping off of it, off the walls, slicking the floor and I can’t be certain but *maybe* even the exposed beam ceiling …..   THAT kind of “all over it”.

Projectile hurling. The folks of Pompeii could not have been more surprised in their own moment of horror than I was, than Larry’s mom was, and as you will soon see… as Larry himself was.

Now, I’m sure that Larry would have LIKED to respond to his mom’s question with a reasonable VERBAL explanation.

Responded with maybe something out of the Official Eddie Haskell playbook.

Something such as “Well, hello there mother! Young John and I, well we’re just down here trying to see what all the fuss about this *smoking* thing is.   Guess what mom?  Funny thing is, as it turns out, (and Mom, I think you’ll enjoy this realization on our part), you’ve got nothing to worry about mom!  Because…well … mom, this smoking…. we’ve decided it’s just not for us!!!”

That soliloquy didn’t happen.

Instead, the sight (and perhaps the sound and smell) of me puking ….. combined with his own inexperience with cee-gars …. was just too much for the lad.

So, in a remarkable show of solidarity which sealed the bonds of our manful friendship forever, HE puked right on his own new sneakers. The ones on his feet.

And, not coincidentally… he puked on mine too.   Not just ON them, but somehow INTO them.  He puked INTO my shoes.  With my feet still in them.   Ruined a perfectly good pair of socks.

If you don’t want to call it “puke” or “vomit”, try one of the alternative and more colorful names or phrases for the very normal biological process known in medical texts as “reverse peristalsis”.  For example, “blow your cookies”, “stomach overflow error”, “looking for Ralph”, “sell the Buick”, or my personal favorite and the one that actually seems to fit best here … to “shout at your shoes”.

I had not known this before, but Larry’s mom, bless her soul, was a very, very wise woman.

She made the two of us clean up the mess, air out the space with fans and air-freshener, and re-wash the whole load of soiled laundry. We scrubbed floors and walls with a very fresh-smelling green cleaner.  A cleaner that only marginally masked the terrible smells.

But here’s the thing.  Bless her heart, she never told my mom.   I was sure when I got home, I’d get a lecture.  Or worse.  But it never came.

When I finally told my mom about the incident, over 30 years later, sitting around after dinner one night with coffee and pie,  I thought she was going to bust a seam she laughed so hard.

Motherly love is an amazing thing to see in action, you know.

Now, I’ll admit that these days I’ve been known to indulge in a fine, dark chocolate-brown Maduro cigar from time to time.  In fact, being a manly man myself, I was a charter subscriber to the aforementioned Cigar Aficionado magazine.   But on those relatively rare occasions when I light one up,  no, it’s not in a downstairs closet,  but rather out in the wide open spaces of the golf-course, or kicked back while fishing, or out on the back porch just gazing at the glory of the firmament.

Still, that early experience with the green torpedo, and the wisdom of Larry’s mom in making two adolescent boys clean up that horrific bio-hazard of a mess means that even today, all I have to do is LOOK at green cigar, and my stomach starts to churn anew….

later …  gotta run.   The tobacconist is closing in a bit.
John