The title of this was the first line of a short story I wrote for a class in college. Two things I didn’t know much about back then: Cigars and Stories.

I started smoking cigars a year or so before that, I was in my 20s, and that was several years before the cigar boom of the 90s and you could still get a good cigar for $1 or less, especially by the bundle or the box. My first actual-for-reals full-on cedar box of cigars was Baccarat Lonsdales, and back then all boxes had 25 cigars and not 20 like so many have today. When I was buying singles at the cigar store you could get Arturo Fuente curly heads which are the “seconds” rolled by the beginner rollers for a buck, and they were good and perfectly fine smokes, and this is what I had most of the time. They were called “curly heads” because the head of the cigar was twisted into a pigtail because the roller wasn’t yet adept at adding the triple cap. You could twist off the pigtail and you didn’t need a cutter though most of us used one because of the ceremony of it all. Cigar smoking is mostly about the ceremony since you don’t inhale the smoke. I even took the pen name “Arturo Fuente” and anglicized it to Arthur Fence while writing articles back then over 30 years ago.

Anyway, a cigar is like a story and that was the conceit of my short story, that a cigar is made up of the filler, the binder which holds it all together, and a fine and beautiful wrapper which makes it look nice and professional-like. My story took that idea and some real-life stuff and went from there.

Ok, you convinced me. In the story, our main character (almost always me) is a regular at a college bar (Bash Riprock’s in Lubbock.) Back then you could smoke in a bar, and some of us would gather there and smoke cigars and drink beer. My character is asked why he never smokes big cigars like Churchills, and he says only rich people and retired people have time to smoke big cigars. Poor people are in a hurry and always doing something to get by, so they have to smoke smaller cigars. One day a professor comes in (his name is “the Professor” cleverly enough,) based on a real person, and he is smoking a Churchill cigar and he starts regaling everyone with stories of his life. He’d done anything and everything. He’d lived a Hemingway-like life of danger and adventure. Everyone loved the Professor’s stories except the main character who thought the Professor was a blowhard who made up stories about himself. And the guy smoked Churchills, which meant he was double the phony.

Long story short (you never expect that from me, nor will you ever really get it) the Professor dies, and they all go to the funeral, and they are sitting around the gravesite after the burial smoking cigars, and these other strangers come to the group and start telling stories about the Professor. Plot twist. Turns out all his crazy stories were true.

Death has a way of solidifying the legend or the myth of a person, and our main character comes to realize that he hasn’t really lived life or done anything worthwhile, and he’d wrongly judged the Professor. Nor do we know anything, really, about the Professor or if he was a good person or if his children hated him or if he’d left behind 4 ex-wives. It’s hard to know someone.

Later in life I became a writer, and I started rolling cigars almost 20 years ago and I’ve gotten pretty good at one if not the other. I try to write every day and I try to roll cigars every day, but when I wrote that story I didn’t know anything about cigars or stories at all. When you get old you shake your head at the certainty of youth, and their pretense of mastery over things that take a lifetime to learn to do well or even adequately.

I roll cigars now, and I write stories, and I’m more likely to go into a bar and listen than I am to tell people stories about my life. I still don’t smoke Churchills, but I don’t smoke Lonsdales either. A size somewhere in between is fine by me. I like it when people like my writing when they do, and I like it when people like my cigars too. Stop me some time and you’ll have to ask about either one, but I’ll be glad to talk to you about them if you want. Or anything else, really. I’m an open book.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.