Cigar sisters (a quick story)

I was excited when Janice invited me to have dinner with her and her sister Vanessa.  Not only are they two of the sexiest women I know, but they are also the only sisters I know who are into cigars.  And I did let it slip out not long ago that I find women smoking cigars to be a real turn-on, so I had a feeling that this dinner might be quite a trip…

Walking into the restaurant, it didn’t take me long to spot them.  They were the two most voluptuous, loudest ladies in the whole place.  I don’t mean they talk loudly necessarily, but they just exude a presence.  They are big ladies, big all over: not incredibly tall, but wide in the hips, ample in the belly, big breasted, with large sensual features and beautiful light-brown wavy hair which they grow long.  They are not twins – Janice is the older one by about 5 years – but they have a strong family resemblance.

Dinner passed very pleasantly.  The food and wine were good, and we caught up on what each other has been doing.  Vanessa told some of her patented scandalous stories about how guys can’t seem to keep up with her sexually, how one recent guy had almost literally climbed out the window and run down the fire escape and another had changed his phone number after she demonstrated to him that prostate stimulation is a beautiful thing.

Around the time I was paying the check, the ladies invited me back to their apartment for some spirits and cigars, and I caught Janice winking at Vanessa so then she turned to me and winked at me too and blew me a kiss.

The couch in their place is one of those that once you sit down you don’t think you’ll ever get up.  A couple Jameson’s on the rocks and an Oliva Series V Double Toro and I was well on the way to being quite comfortable.  The ladies kept up with me – in fact it was their decision to start with such a massive cigar, and we were all maybe halfway through our stogies when Vanessa excused herself.

I didn’t think much of it, but a few minutes later while laughing with Janice about the latest snafu with my roommates, Janice’s eyes lit up and turned around to see Vanessa, Oliva clenched between her teeth, buck naked, her splendid breasts hanging just a bit with the nipples already a bit hard, with a sizeable purple strap-on jutting from her crotch.  “So bitch,” she said to me, “where do you want it, in the ass or down your throat?”

Maybe 15 minutes later, I had one rubber cock in my ass and the other in my throat, Janice having also strapped one on, with me positioned in doggy style on their bed and Vanessa laying back against the head board.  Having a cock down my throat was a new experience but I was doing my best to bob up and down with force so that Vanessa’s clit was getting lots of friction.  And Janice was pounding away at me behind – she had been kind enough to use lots of lube and it felt great.  The two ladies were still smoking their cigars – Vanessa was actually smoking mine also, holding the two side by side in one hand, wrapping her large voluptuous lips around both and dragging hard and then exhaling from her nose and mouth simultaneously.

A cell phone went off.  Janice answered it without missing a beat.  “Uh uh, we’re here with C.  We’re in the bedroom, you wanna come over?  Great, the door is open.  There are cigars in the livingroom if you want one.  Don’t make us wait.”

“That was Jeanine.  She’s going to join us.  We haven’t played with her in, what, 6 weeks?”  Vanessa agreed.

Jeanine is their downstairs neighbor.  She is very pretty, and they know that I like Jeanine.  But I haven’t gotten up the nerve to ask her out yet.  Well, it sounded like we were going to go way past that.

I heard Jeanine come in a few minutes later.  After lighting herself a cigar, also an Oliva Double Toro, she came into the bedroom.  “Wow, it looks like you need some help!” she exclaimed.  I didn’t know what she meant, but a moment later, I felt her tongue licking the underside of my cock.  She had climbed underneath me, and was now positioned to suck my cock.  Which she did.  And the combination of Janice’s strap-on slamming into my prostate and Jeanine’s mouth clenched around me sliding up and down me, had me shooting cum in a big way in no time.

When I returned to planet Earth, Janice had taken off her strap-on and she was lying back agains the headboard with Vanessa licking her pussy.  I was sitting beside Janice against the headboard, and Jeanine, now naked, was sitting on my lap, still smoking her cigar.  She leaned into me and we started kissing.  I’ve never kissed a woman while she is smoking a cigar – always wanted to do that.  It was very hot.  She took a big drag, turned and blew the smoke into my mouth as we Frenched.  I could feel my cock growing again, and knew that in no time I would be fucking Jeanine’s daylights out.

Mrs. Douglas’s recreation, part one

When her husband Michael was diagnosed with throat cancer, Catherine was understandably upset and concerned. But as the plans for treatment started to be formulated, and she and Michael discussed changes in lifestyle, she found herself adjusting.

Then one evening not long before his first chemotherapy session, Michael announced that he was going to sell his prized collection of Cuban Cohiba Esplendido cigars. They had already of course decided that they both would give up smoking cigarettes, but Catherine hadn’t really thought about the cigars. Catherine had assumed that he would give the cigars to her, since she had recently taken up smoking an occasional cigar, and now a cigar now and then would help to ease the transition from smoking cigarettes all the time.

But hearing him talk about getting all the cigars out of the house made Catherine feel guilty to even consider smoking. Of course she wouldn’t do it around him. They had a cabin on their property a good distance from their house that she had decorated and where she spent some solitary time. If she wanted to smoke, she could do it there, de-fumigate herself, and then re-join her husband without him having any idea that she had been smoking. Nevertheless, it would look too selfish on her part if she tried to keep the cigars when he was facing a fight for his life that might have been precipitated or exacerbated by smoking.

So Catherine came up with a plan. She knew the avenues by which Michael would sell the Esplendidos, so she had a friend secretly purchase the cigars for her. Then she had a large humidor cabinet put in the main room of her cabin hideaway, and she put the boxes of Cubans in the cabinet.

After his chemotherapy, Michael was wiped out and went right to bed. Catherine took the opportunity to leave the kids with the nanny and slip away to the cabin. Walking across the lawn toward the modest sized building, the cool night air felt good – it helped to erase some of the troubling images of the day from her mind. But of course nothing would really set her right like a nice cigar.

Entering, she turned on the light in the main room of the cabin, picked up a remote control and pressed a few buttons to get some nice jazz playing in the stereo system, and sat down in a big soft leather chair, with the large humidor cabinet across from her. Her pulse quickened just a bit – she had been so looking forward to smoking a cigar, since she had stopped smoking cigarettes cold turkey more than two weeks earlier. She didn’t realize how much she missed smoking, how much she love it, until this moment.

No matter how much her desire to smoke, though, she was not going to rush it. She stood up and walked to a cabinet, pulling out a nice big wine glass, then opened a bottle of Malbec and poured a glass of the deep red wine. She swirled it around in the glass, took a couple of slow long inhales through her nose to smell the wine. It would be good, very good once it had a chance to breathe, she decided.

In the meantime, she wanted to see what these Esplendidos smelled like. She opened a cabinet door and immediately the smell of cedar and aged tobacco wafted over her. She took one of the boxes out – a box that had already been opened and was only half full – popped open the lid, carefully plucked a cigar from inside, and put the box on the coffee table opposite her big side chair. She raised the cigar to within an inch of her nose and inhaled forcefully and deeply through her nose, just as she had done with the wine. Mmmmm, it was sweet but also had a hint of spice to it, almost like a good single malt.

She couldn’t take it any more. She wanted to smoke, God-damn it. She put the cigar between her teeth, clenched down slightly, and strode quickly over to the other side of the room. There, she opened a drawer in a hutch, and pulled out a guillotine cutter, a torch lighter, a box of long wooden matches, and a large black ceramic ashtray. After arraying them around the coffee table, careful to leave a little space for the bottle and glass of wine, she sat down, reaching for the cutter and taking the cigar from her mouth.

She cut just a small round piece from the head of the cigar, just as a girlfriend had shown her years earlier. She picked up the torch, returned the cigar to its position between her teeth, flicked the torch to life, raised it to the foot of the cigar and, pursing her lips around the cigar, began rhythmically sucking on the cigar, bringing the flame into contact with the tip. After a couple of drags, some smoke started leaking from the sides of her mouth. After a few more drags, it turned into a cloud in front of her face, and the cigar was nearly lit. She rotated the cigar a bit, brought the blue flame back to just below the already glowing tip, puffed a few more times.

Mmm, the smoke tasted good in her mouth. Not as sharp as cigarette smoke. If cigarette smoke is like coffee – strong, bitter – cigar smoke is like chocolate – rounder, sweeter, more mellow.

She sat back and without thinking, put the cigar back in her mouth and dragged hard, pulling the smoke into her lungs until her lungs were full to bursting. After holding it in for few seconds, she leaned back and exhaled a huge cloud into the room, the smoke pouring out her nostrils and mouth simultaneously.

“Oh shit,” she remembered, “you’re not supposed to inhale cigars!” Oh well, she reasoned that since she hadn’t smoked in such a while, it was ok to inhale a little bit, just to get a bit of that nicotine kick she loved so much.

She put the cigar back between her teeth, stood up and dragged no-hands as she walked to where the wine was, and then reaching the counter, exhaled the smoke in a fluid stream from her nostrils. Christ, it was great to be smoking again. She took a nice big hit of the wine – wow, it had warmed up, and the flavor was strong, bold, fruity, even caramelly. And the flavor of the wine and that of the cigar smoke still lingering on her palate mixed together quite wonderfully.

She smoked about two-thirds of the cigar and drank most of the bottle of wine sitting there in her chair, not really thinking about anything, occasionally noticing the jazz that was playing. But little by little, something did enter her mind.

The other thing that she missed besides smoking was sex. They kind of went together for her and Michael. And since the diagnosis of the cancer, he hadn’t touched her. And she’d been so caught up in a whirlwind of emotions and activities around the cancer that she hadn’t noticed how much she missed sex. Until now. Something about puffing on this large Cohiba was making her feel very aroused. She knew without touching her crotch that she was very warm and moist down there.

What to do? Well, Catherine was no angel, so the hutch which had contained the smoking materials also had a drawer filled with toys. A bottle of lube, condoms, rubber gloves, vibrators, butt plugs, even a harness and strap-on. In no time, she had all the contents of drawer strewn on the couch to the left of her chair. What should she play with? Maybe before the night was out, she would get to most if not all the things that were there.

Maybe she would call up a boyfriend or girlfriend to come over and join her. A couple of them were smokers, so perhaps she could entice them into joining her in smoking some Cubans. Yes, she had lovers. She was loyal to Michael, she loved him, the rest was just fun. She was a gorgeous woman, still in the prime of her life, just barely 40 years old, with a drop-dead body – ample breasts, a nice round rear-end. Maybe people wanted to fuck her, and some people got to do it.

She was getting too excited to wait for someone else to arrive, so she took off most of her clothes, threw them aside, picked up a nice sized battery operated vibrator and a bottle of lube. She quickly realized that once she started playing with herself, both her hands were liable to get sticky, so her choice was either stop smoking, or smoke with no hands. No fucking way she was going to stop smoking – she was enjoying the cigar too much, and plus she wanted to feel pleasure of as many kinds as possible all at once. So she put the remaining 2-1/2 inches of cigar between her teeth and clamped down.

In no time at all she was fucking herself with the well-lubed vibrator, rubbing her clit with the other hand, and puffing on the cigar in rhythm with her fucking. Every once in while she would breathe in forcefully as she felt a wave of arousal flood through her body, and she would suck in another lungful of cigar smoke, and then exhale through her nostrils. That was quickly becoming her favorite way to smoke a cigar.

Faster and faster, she pounded her pussy with the dildo. Faster and faster, harder and harder, she rubbed her clit. She nearly bit through the cigar, puffing on it harder and harder, filling her lungs with strong cigar smoke over and over.

Finally, she could feel the tingle, and she knew the end was coming soon. And then it came. Her whole body seemed to explode and burn with the orgasm. Her mouth and most of the rest of her went limp, and what was left of the cigar tumbled to the floor. Sitting back frozen in a reverie, she could see she had smoked through most of the cigarband. Oh well, she thought with a chuckle, I’ll have to control myself next time.

After a few minutes she revived a bit and realized that one orgasm was not enough. Hmmm, what toys should she play with next? Maybe she should call a playmate to come over…

Her cell phone rang. It was the nanny saying that the children were asleep, Mr. Douglas was asleep, and she was going to go to bed too if the Mrs didn’t need her for anything else. Anything? Hmmmm, Catherine thought…

“Ingrid, would you like to come over and have a glass of wine?” Catherine said to her. The nanny hesitated and then said she would love a glass of wine. She would put on some shoes and come right over to the cabin.

In the two minutes it took Ingrid to arrive, Catherine managed to stow away most of the incriminating evidence except for the wine and two glasses and the cigars and cigar accessories. Before anything else, Catherine wanted to see if she could get her young pretty, no, sexy nanny to smoke a cigar. If they got to smoking together, Catherine was pretty sure she could seduce the younger lady into having sex with her.

Indeed, when she and Michael had smoked at home, Ingrid had joined them for a cigarette once or twice, and showed some fascination with Michael’s cigars. She once volunteered to take care of the cigars while the couple was away on vacation, and proudly displayed a newfound knowledge of cigars she had gotten from the Internet. So Catherine was pretty sure she could get Ingrid to smoke a cigar also.

OK time to get back into this! Cigar fetishes don’t just tell about themselves!

Wow, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written, like, anything in this blog!  I should be shot!  Or at least branded by the poker-hot burning end of a large stogie by a voluptuous sexy lady! (c’mon, a guy can dream!)

Well, life is flying along.  And since March, I have done a bit of traveling, to a couple places you may have heard of, lol – Paris and Chicago.  In each place I did some cigar smoking, but not too many sightings.  I’ll get to that in a bit.

Recently, I have not been smoking much.  But I did go out recently to my local lounge, and saw some great sightings and had some great interactions with some sexy ladies who were smoking.  So why don’t I start out by filling you in on that a little bit?

So before settling in at the lounge, I went and got some Chinese takeout and beverages.  I grab a tv table and set myself up just at the moment that two young dark curly-haired ladies are selecting cigars from the wall humidor.  They couldn’t have been more than 20 years old, I swear.  One has already lit something with a perfecto end and taking a couple of puffs.  I said by way of commentary as her friend accepted a light from the hostess, “getting a good light at the start is more than half the battle.”  The first girl nodded as she took another drag on her perfecto.

The second girl, who was quite petite, maybe 5’1″, was getting a light with her back to me.  But I could see clouds of smoke rising along the sides of her face, showing that she was puffing with determination, making sure her cigar was well-lit.

The two ladies went into a corner and found some comfy seats, and an older guy walked in who turned out to be the shorter girl’s dad.  A dad smoking with his daughter and his daughter’s visiting best friend – how cool!  How sophisticated!

Then three ladies came in who were novices, who shared a corona-sized cigar that I believe was flavored – vanilla or something.  One, a small cute Hispanic lady, chatted a lot with me and my friend, and was very happy to get our pointers on how to smoke a cigar.  She was an occasional potsmoker, so we were showing her how to drag without inhaling.  She smoked more of the cigar than her two friends,eventually producing some nice exhales.

A couple ladies I know a bit came in later on, so I spent the balance of the evening hanging out with them and a couple of guys, sitting at a table outside on the sidewalk.  They were sharing a Padron, smoking the thing all the way down to the nub.  Quite impressive.  Then one of the guys lit a big fat cigar, a 6 by 60 (just like I like to smoke).  It is rare to see women who are game to smoke such a large cigar, but when he offered it to them, they gamely accepted the fattie and took impressive drags.  The lady sitting closer to me even did a sexy little nostril exhale.  oh baby!

So now let’s move from my most recent sighting to an opportunity for sightings I am anticipating.  My girlfriend (who still doesn’t know about my fetish) is going with me to the Maryland Renaissance Faire in about a month.  For her the draw is to visit cousins in Maryland not far from the Faire.  She’s been telling them all about me (and me all about them) and can’t wait to show me off (yep, I’m a pretty amazing catch).  For me, the draw is the Faire, and particularly the chance to hang out with the members of the Order of the Burning Leaf, a cigar and pipe club who meets every weekend the Faire is running.  The OBL includes a number of female members, and my friends, if there is anything sexier than a woman smoking a cigar, it is a woman smoking a cigar while wearing a bustier and/or corset showing ample cleavage!  Yes, I am a bit of a breast man, among other things.

All of this was totally cool, and then my girlfriend dropped a bomb on me this past weekend.  As we were sorting out the details of the weekend – Amtrak down Saturday morning, hang with cousins Saturday afternoon and evening, stay over at a hotel near the Faire, attend Faire Sunday, Amtrak back to NYC Monday morning – she told me that I should be sure to bring some extra cigars, because her female cousins are going to want to smoke cigars with me Saturday night.  !!!!!  As I am processing this, she adds, you better bring at least a dozen cigars.  Considering there are only about 4 cousins in question (one of whom doesn’t smoke), the math started sounding extraordinary – more than one cigar for each cousin?  I can do that!  I’ve got my fire-engine red leather travel humidor which fits 16 cigars, that all the ladies love, and I will pack it with some of my finest fattest cigars for that weekend.  No problemo!

So keep your eyes peeled sometime in early to mid October for a report on what promises to be a first-rate cigar smoking weekend, with more cigar sightings than any person could wish for!  My girlfriend will be bringing her camera, so I’m hoping there will be photos of all these bodacious babes sucking on stogies that weekend!

Cigar Sightings in Miami, March 14-21, 2010

First of all my apologies for not writing more frequently lately!  Life has intervened and kept me from my writing.  For one thing, I’ve been dating someone for a couple of months and it is starting to get serious (more on that to come I am sure).  For another thing, since getting back from Florida, I have just had so much to catch up on – finances, music rehearsals, all kinds of stuff.  And I wrote a travelogue in my non-fetish blog, http://spaghettification-karl.blogspot.com.  Certainly if you want to get the details of the trip, check that out!

So Sunday, March 14 we took a puddle jumper from Tampa to Miami.  A hellatious experience.  We settled in very quickly at our hotel and went out exploring that day, and got our bearings, but didn’t find anywhere too exciting to smoke cigars, so we settled for smoking on a nice patio alongside the hotel that was really nice, but we had it all to ourselves.

On Monday we checked out the Deco Drive Cigar Lounge on Lincoln Road, a small place with a lot of terrace space which does hookahs as well as having a very nice walk-in humidor.  My friend and stopped by in the afternoon and were followed into the humidor by a very pretty dark-haired woman – I couldn’t decide if she was Cuban or French, but she was definitely very sexy and helpful.  She gave us lots of advice on cigars and told us about some of her preferences.  She then told me how she objects to her landlord not wanting her to smoke in her apartment – she feels strongly that since she pays rent, that entitles her to smoke cigars inside any time she feels like it.

Unfortunately, she only was working until 6 and we figured we would probably go back in the evening when she wasn’t there.  It would’ve been really cool to hang and smoke cigars with her.

The first sightings weren’t really until 2 days later, on Wednesday, when my two other friends arrived.  After smoking on the terrace at Deco Drive in the evening, we walked down Washington Ave. to get a bite to eat at Five Guys burger restaurant, passing the Dreams club along the way.  These ladies standing in line to get into the club practically attacked my friends, circling them and touching them and talking loudly.  When they realized that one of my friends was smoking a cigar, all of them then wanted to take at least one puff.  Man, they were really drunk! and also very cute, all decked out in their club dresses.

The following day was the big day of the entire Florida trip.  Some friends of ours had arranged a whole day of visiting cigar factories, eating lunch at a cigar lounge called Cuban Crafters, having dinner at a posh restaurant and so forth.

So we got picked up in the morning, and taken to tour the Don Pepin and El Credito factories on Calle Ocho, the main street of the Little Havana section of Miami.  At El Credito, the rolling room was large, with a great number of rolling tables, some of them empty.  At one table sat two fairly attractive 40ish women rolling, who were both smoking quite large cigars.  I saw one woman  pause for just a few seconds from rolling, pick up her cigar from the counter in front of her, take a nice drag on her cigar, and then blow out a tight thick cone of smoke – really nice.

After a stop at our hosts’ clothing shop in Coral Gables, we headed to lunch at Cuban Crafters.  One of our hosts was an attractive 50ish woman who has just recently become a cigar smoker, and she loves smoking, and joined in readily when we smoked cigars both before and after lunch.  Then we had a tour of Cuban Crafters factory and store, and went to dinner, where we were joined by some other local cigar business folks, including another woman friend of ours who loves cigars.

After a great dinner, we went onto the rooftop bar of this hotel, the Gansevoort Hotel.  Unfortunately it was chilly, even a little rainy, so there weren’t many people up there other than us.

However, there was a group of about 8 attractive 20-somethings nearby, and two of my friends engaged them, and got one of the ladies to light a cigar and then pass it around to her lady friends.  They did it mostly for show, but one or two of them tried smoking the cigar with real purpose.

The next day one of my friends left to go back to NYC, but the other three of us went out for more adventures, first to Cuenca Cigars in Hollywood, FL and then to dinner and dancing back at Cuban Crafters again.

Cuenca was a goldmine for sightings.  First of all, Ana Cuenca herself smokes cigars whenever she can take a break from working her shop with her husband Miguel.  And then, there are lots of lady regulars who are very attractive and love cigars.  We saw several as we hung out there and smoked for a couple of hours.

At Cuban Crafters that evening, we also saw lots of ladies smoking cigars.  Our host’s niece who is no more than 21 smokes cigars, and wow, she is hot.  And there were many couples where the woman would share in her guy’s cigar as they sat and relaxed after their meal.

The next day, Saturday, was sadly our last full day in Miami.  I was under the weather (smoking several cigars a day for 2 weeks straight will do that to you!), but joined my friends in the evening for another trip to Cuenca Cigars for an event.  We met up with some of the ladies we had seen the day before, and also met a few others who were really into cigars.  A couple of them were transplanted New Yorkers, and they promised to look us up when they come north the next time.

Overall, I have to say I was a little disappointed – I thought I would have a lot more quality sightings.  But there were a few other lounges we didn’t visit because they were kinda far away from where we were staying, and we didn’t want to lay out serious money for taxis.  Next time we will be better prepared, and will spend more evenings at swank cigar lounges smoking with the sexy local ladies.

Cigar Sightings in Tampa, March 6-13

First stop in Florida: Tampa.  First stop in Tampa: Bay Area Renaissance Festival, Saturday and Sunday, March 6 and 7. I walked in the gate in my Renaissance gear, a brocade doublet with dark blue hose and a dark purple chaperone on my head.  I was headed toward a particular spot to meet some friends, but first I was going to have a once-around to scope out where things were.  Sure enough, things had gotten moved around quite a bit, but almost without looking for it, I found the cigar booth, out in the middle of a section, right next to one of the big pubs.

I stopped for a minute to talk to the pretty young lady who was working at the cigar booth.  They had a nice selection of cigars there: on the right side as I faced it were lots of flavored cigars, which of course is where they would steer a lot of the ladies looking for a smoke; in the middle was a good mixture of brands like Rocky Patel and Padron; to the left more of the same, as well as a small separate table with unopened boxes of cigars on it.

I knew I would get some of my best sightings of the weekend there, so I took a picture of where it was in my head, and ran off to meet my friends.

As it turned out, the pub that was right next to the cigar booth was the one where my friends liked to hang out.  Woohoo!  On Saturday in the middle of the day I was there with them, reconnecting with some friends of theirs who I’ve met in Tampa in the past, and meeting people I haven’t seen before.  In the latter category was a tall broad blond woman who was rather attractive and looked to be a bit older than me.  As we were talking and drinking she lit a filtered Pall Mall.  Then later I noticed her smoking a slender flavored cigar from the cigar booth – she was more than halfway through the cigar, taking deep inhales into her lungs and then letting the smoke leak from her mouth a bit before expelling the rest out in a hard cone.

It was my ambition that first day to attend the Renaissance Smoker every day I was at Faire.  Each day at 4:15 for $10 you can get 2 local cigars, 2 beers and wings and smoke and drink and eat in a little semi-enclosed area while you are entertained with bawdy songs and jokes by some of the Faire’s actors.  I went to the Smoker once last year and found a good number of attractive ladies smoking cigars, so I decided I would attend it as often as possible this year.

Unfortunately, I was drinking a bit on that Saturday, and had something to do at 3:30 (this game we call ratpucking), and so before I knew it, it was like 4:45.  Should I go and buy a ticket and join the Smoker late, I wondered.  Well, I wandered over and took a peek into the enclosed yard from the side, and saw a couple of middle-aged ladies and one fairly young attractive lady smoking cigars, along with probably 2 dozen guys of different ages.  Looking a bit more, I saw a girl named Kristin I had met earlier, a blond buxom fairly pretty girl who likes to dress as a pirate but all in pink.  She was sitting there puffing on a fairly large cigar, trying to get it burning.  Over and over, she would put the cigar in her mouth, and take several cheek-hollowing drags, really puffing hard.  Wow, pretty sexy.  And interesting, since this cigar was much bigger than the cigars that were free with admission to the smoker, which meant Kristin had bought a cigar from the cigar booth and brought it with her into the Smoker.  So she knew a little something about cigars and wanted to smoke something good.  How about that?

After watching Kristin for a minute, I decided to rejoin my friends and try harder on Sunday to get to the Smoker at the beginning.

The next day, Sunday the 6th, I was more conscious of finishing up rat pucking and getting over to the Smoker.  I sat down at a table next to three people I had met only a little while earlier at the pub, two guys who were really really drunk and a really hot woman with big teeth wearing a blond wig and a sexy red pirate outfit.

Unfortunately, the sexy blond pirate did not smoke a cigar.  However, I saw a few other ladies smoking cigars.  For example, at one table were two fortyish ladies with red highlights wearing civilian clothes who were both working their way fiercely through coronas.  They were dragging frequently, blowing the smoke out into the wind, and tapping the ash off their cigars constantly (damn cigarette smokers no doubt).

Then at a table way on the other side of the yard from me, partly obliterated by the sun blazing right over her shoulder, I saw a very young kind of pudgy girl with short brown hair at a table with like three pudgy looking young guys who was repeatedly puffing on a corona.  After about 10 minutes of that, she tired of the cigar and went and got some chicken wings.

At a table just to my left were two couples who definitely were really into cigars.  One of the guys had one of those travel humidors that looks like a metal briefcase, and he was selecting and handing out cigars to the three other people.  His wife, a pretty blond lady, took a toro-sized maduro cigar, accepted a light from him, and smoked it in a leisurely fashion, talking to him the whole time.  The other lady, a small brunette woman, smoked a reddish-brown robusto, but took infrequent puffs and the cigar kept going out.  One nice surprise right at the end of the Smoker was that the pink pirate, Kristin, showed up, pulled out another toro-sized maduro like the one I had seen her smoking the day before, lit up and puffed on it with obvious delight, showing off in front of some people she knew.  Hmmm, maybe she brought cigars with her from her home humidor!  Unfortunately, she let the cigar go out and I never saw her relight it (could she have tossed a good cigar after only smoking it for like 10 minutes?).  Anyway, she is one hot cigar smoker!

During the week in and around Tampa, I just had a few sightings.

While with a friend who drove over from Orlando on Tuesday the 9th, I went to King Corona, the most well-known and probably largest cigar lounge in Ybor City, the historic/touristy section of Tampa.  We selected cigars and sat at a table inside, but I could see a table outside where two young ladies sat with a guy, and all three were smoking nice fat robustos.  One lady was small and blonde and was very comfortable with her cigar, holding it out in front of her, gesturing with the hand that held it, and kinda studying it as she listened to her friends talk.  The second, a bbw blonde, had her back to me, but she also seemed to enjoy her cigar quite a bit.

On Friday the 12th, my friend from NYC and I went to a large place called Tampa Humidor to meet a guy we had met online who was local.  It’s a really nice place, big with all different kinds of set-ups to sit in/on – tall stools, soft leather couches, leather chairs, wooden chairs surrounding a dominos table, and a big u-shaped bar area, with a very pretty girl as bartender/hostess.

There were a couple different blonde women who came in with groups of loud-mouthed young guys.  One bought a small cigar and smoked it for like 5 minutes, until another lady showed up and then she seemed to want to act more ladylike like her friend and let the guys do all the smoking (what can I say, Florida has lots of that old-fashioned/backward culture going on…).  The second blonde lady I saw was a little more bold.  Her boyfriend was smoking a robusto while they sat at bar stools around a tall table.  She was obviously not happy with the stool, so when a really nice couch freed up she said, “let’s go over there” and like 5 minutes later when I looked in their direction, she was the one who was smoking the robusto, and I don’t think she ever gave it back to him.

The next day, Saturday the 13th, our last full day in Tampa, I went to the Renaissance Faire one last time.  I hoped it might be a good day for sightings, and sure enough, it didn’t disappoint me.

First of all, while hanging at the pub, I looked over toward the cigar booth, and saw the lady who worked there smoking a churchill-sized Rocky Patel Decade, taking nice big puffs and then exhaling a nice cloud of smoke each time.  Since she was working, though, she couldn’t concentrate on her smoking so much, so after a few puffs, she put the cigar in the ashtray.  Later I saw her re-lighting the cigar and taking more puffs, showing off for the customers, the lady customers especially who found the idea of a lady smoking such a nice big cigar either comical or intriguing or both.

You know, I still don’t know about some of the people my friends hang out with.  While some warmed up to me this year more than in past years, there are still some who are cold/rude and ignore me.  I guess I’m just not cool enough or young enough or something.  Well, believe me, I don’t lose sleep over it.  The reason I bring it up is because there was a couple I think I met (oops, drinking beer before noon again! bad boy!), who later I saw the woman, an attractive voluptuous 40ish dark haired lady, trying to smoke a nice slender flavored cigar.  The thing is she is a cig smoker and she wasn’t really getting the cigar lit – she would puff a little and then think it was lit and put the lighter away, and then within like two minutes she would have to re-light but she never got it well-lit.  If she weren’t such a snob, I could’ve explained to her the right way to light a cigar…

The 13th was the first day of the ratpucking tournament,  so we finished early and I had plenty of time to make it to the Smoker and get a good seat, yay!

There was a seat open right next to a cute 20-something woman who was smoking a robusto next to her husband and her husband’s parents – all four of them were smoking cigars!

To run you quickly through some other ladies who were smoking cigars at this Smoker – on a bench next to the fence was a plain girl who might have been 15 smoking one of the coronas, and on the other end of the fence was a woman who could’ve been her mother (only they had no connection to each other), also smoking a corona.

In the back, a pretty Irish-looking girl shared a robusto with her boyfriend, taking nice big drags for her turns.

At a table to the left of my table were again like 3 couples all sitting together, and all 3 ladies were smoking cigars.  One was really beautiful – it was spectacular seeing her completely comfortable smoking a fairly large cigar of her own, taking long gentle drags, tilting her head back, and blowing out the smoke.  Wow.

So there you have it. Tampa sightings.  In the next post I will tell you about Miami.

Apologies, apologies!

So yes, I have already been back nearly two weeks from my trip to Florida, to Tampa and Miami, where I smoked numerous cigars, etc., and I have yet to say anything here about my trip.  I’m sorry!  I have been playing catch-up, am still playing catch-up!

But here I am finally, and I am going to give you the highlights from a purely cigar fetish standpoint of my trip to the two great cigar cities of Florida.  I think I will space it over several blog entries.  So I will start tonight, but it may take me a few days to finish.

So as prologue to what happened earlier this month, let me just bring you up to date on what I have been up to lately.  Firstly, when I came back from Florida, I had a cold which lingered – I’m almost finally over it now.  So I had to deal with taking care of myself as well as going right back to work when I got home.  That in itself kept me wrapped up.  But then also there was seeing my girlfriend who was missing me terribly, and making appearances at my local cigar lounges, which I did as soon as I was feeling a little better, somewhat out of necessity.

And I have already gotten back into smoking.  Last night I went to my local Brooklyn lounge where there was a birthday party, and there were at least 8 different attractive African-American ladies smoking cigars.  The birthday girl must’ve smoked like 4 cigars.  Like real cigars, like Padrons.  One woman who said she had only smoked a cigar once before smoked a My Father torpedo, a quite strong cigar.  The shop owner and I were like, “are you sure you want to do that?” but she was ready for it, and sure enough she smoked the whole thing and enjoyed it, good for her!

The previous Saturday my group of friends gathered at the Brooklyn lounge to open a box of cigars that was given to us by a cigar factory owner in Tampa.  And while we were there smoking this new cigar, there were a number of ladies, mostly with boyfriends accompanying them, who came in and smoked cigars.  In addition, there were two attractive young ladies who sat near my friends and I, and we had a great conversation with them, talking about cigars, food, sex, relationships, etc.

This Saturday I am going back to the Brooklyn lounge to meet up with those ladies again.  I’ll let you know what happens!

For now, starting with the next entry, here is the story of my cigar sightings in Florida!  Enjoy!

But enough about me… let’s talk about what you think about me!

That’s right, boys and girls, it’s time to take a break from trashing cigarette smokers and talk about that most sublime of human characteristics, selfishness.

As in, what kind of megalomaniac must I be to think that anybody wants to hear about my pathetic life?

As in, since fetishism is about self-gratification serving to right all the wrongs that the universe has perpetrated on one individual, and nothing is as selfish as the act of self-gratification…

OK, hold on a minute. You are going to start to hang one of these selfishness-is-good trips on me, aren’t you? You’re gonna put that baby in the dryer some fabric softener and see how sweet you can make it smell, am I right? Well, I ain’t buying it.

Well then it’s all about self-survival. About bucking the system before there’s even a system.

OK, I guess I can live with that. Pray continue.

Oh shit, now I’ve lost my train of thought.

That will happen.

Well, why don’t you tell the story then. You don’t have any trouble talking about yourself, do you?

No, I don’t. And I don’t need to be a wanker to make myself feel good. OK, here we go again, folks.

No apologies. For being selfish. For droning on and on through one boring story after another just so I can feel the pleasure of filling a room with my own voice.

Somehow somebody is gonna get something out of listening to me. I can’t believe otherwise. I was put here for a reason.

Cigar smoking has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years, and will continue to exist for at least hundreds of more years. A number of people beyond measure have gotten exquisite pleasure wrapping their lips (and often teeth) around a fat tube of tobacco and puffing, a perfect marrying of delivery of the drug to their bodies relaxing them and making them more alert, and the oral gratification of, well, putting one’s lips and often teeth around a tube of tobacco and puffing, making sucking motions with the muscles of their cheeks and neck.

I have for a long time said that cigar smoking is not a substitute for fellatio as some people suggest, but instead a re-enactment of that most primal, seminal experience in the life of a new human, being connected to one’s mother’s breast, feeding from the body of the person who bore you. Chew on that image, swallow it, digest it, it’s time to move on.

As much pleasure as cigar smokers derive from their pastime, hobby, habit, curse, pre-occupation, distraction, we cigar fetishists get something a little extra out of cigars, whether we smoke them or not. Watching someone smoke a cigar, smoking one ourselves, or perhaps just thinking about either or both of those things, brings us to a crowning glory of sexual release, to a moment when the earth stops spinning, the dogs stop barking, kvetchers stop kvetching, when the fetishist has momentarily put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The tragedy of existence is that that feeling of well-being and euphoria will not last and must, must, must be sought again. To make us feel better. To relieve tension. To save us from the boredom of human existence. To keep the cats from howling outside in the alleyway.

But there’s nothing wrong with seeking that feeling again and again, is there? Do you know any child who, if he could’ve articulated it, would’ve said, “You know, I’m kinda done with this whole breastfeeding thing. It’s getting kinda old.” On the contrary, most let’s say two year olds would probably like to say, “Are you kidding me? I plan on doing this at least until I’m ready to leave home for college! This feels great!”

So enough with this pseudo-spiritual bullshit about restraint. If other people wanna restrain themselves, I’m cool with it – more for me. But don’t come and try and sell that moldy cheese to me, brother. The spiritual journey is about emptiness as well as fullness, yes, but both qualities are equally useful, necessary, and not to be traded for each other. As a matter of fact, I’ve just been through a period where there’ve been a couple stretches of a few days with no self-pleasuring, no experiencing of that release. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened.

And you know, my attitude about abstaining is this: if I can withhold myself, I know that first time is gonna be more powerful, more explosive than other times. But I can’t guarantee it’s gonna be that one, that post-orgasm religious experience when the person next to me nibbling at my ear might just as well be Jesus. It’s hard to predict when those moments will come to make everything seem right for 5 seconds or 5 minutes. Resolution is fleeting, and unpredictable, and it can’t be forced or held in place.

Oh shit. I’m getting pretty graphic here. Are these people gonna shut me down? I hope not.

Oh. Anyway. Lost my train of thought again. Oh yeah: the journey. Anything can be put to use. Anything can be a building block toward creating the perfect person who is going to save civilization, if not the world. So for my building block, I choose selfishness.

Now can we finish up with this self-examination crap, and get back to talking about me?

Tact, Consideration and Smoking

When I was young, I overheard my father, a cigarette smoker from his teen years until his mid-60s when he developed heart-disease, telling my mother a story.

There was outrage in his voice.  It was clear he felt that he had been wronged by someone.  That day when he got out of work and headed to the bus stop where he would get his bus home, the beginning of the busline, he saw the bus was early, sitting there open and the driver nowhere to be seen.

My father walked onto the bus, selected the best seat, in the bus, sat down and lit a cigarette.  He noticed that the bus did have a no smoking sign, but how could that apply, since the bus was not moving and there was noone on the bus but him, not even the driver!  Besides, it was a long day and he needed a cigarette, and if he stood out on the sidewalk smoking, by the time he got onto the bus, his perfect seat might already be taken.

My father was only a few puffs into his post-workday cigarette, when the busdriver stepped onto the bus, loudly sniffed the air, turned to my father, and simply declared, “buddy, you’re going to have to put that out!”

Now keep in mind, this was the early 1970s, when people still smoked virtually everywhere.  In the wake of the Surgeon General’s findings on the ill-effects of smoking, some non-smoking signs had started popping up here and there, but most people, even a lot of non-smokers, just attributed that to wrongheaded government intervention and ignored those signs, and tolerated people smoking everywhere.

So my father did not immediately put his cigarette out.  Instead, he took another drag on it, exhaled the smoke towards the driver, and said, “c’mon buddy, what’s the big deal?  The bus isn’t moving yet, and noone else is on the bus, except you and me!”

The bus driver’s response was, “well, I’m here and this is my bus and the sign says ‘no smoking’ so I don’t want any smoking on my bus!”

“Oho,” my father countered, “so this is a personal thing?”

“No,” the driver said, “it’s simple: the law says no smoking, and I am just enforcing the law.  So you can either put out your cigarette right now, or you can step off the bus and finish smoking.  But if you step off the bus, I’m telling you right now, you’ll have to wait for the next bus, because I don’t want you back on my bus!”

At that, my father grumbled, gave in, and stomped on his cigarette, blowing one last cloud of smoke toward the driver.  And the conclusion to his story was to tell my mother some version of “what’s the world coming to?”

Hearing that story, I knew that I disagreed with my father.  And I knew if I had walked onto that bus after he had been smoking on it, I would’ve been annoyed.  His insistence on smoking somewhere where he was clearly not supposed to struck me as being the defiant act of an unenlightened bully.

Surely, it seemed to me, if it was so important for him to smoke a cigarette, he could’ve done it outside the bus, and then gotten whatever seat was then available.  That was the cost of wanting so badly to do something that was not allowed on the bus – giving up the possibility of getting the best seat.

Besides, why couldn’t he have smoked his cigarette on his way from his warehouse to the bus stop?  Why did he have to wait until he was at the bus stop to smoke?  Would smoking have slowed his walking so much that he would’ve missed the bus?  I doubt it, since he was early for the bus.

Any way you looked at it, it was obvious to me that my dad was wrong.

But to the vast majority of smokers then, he was 100% right, and I think even now, a majority of smokers would think he was right.  After all, where was the harm?

Now, I am not going to start bandying about reports on second-hand smoke.  I don’t believe an unbiased report has yet been created, so let’s leave that out of the discussion.

Let’s just talk about good sense, tact and consideration.

Even before I started smoking, I was tolerant of cigarette smokers.  I lived in a couple of apartments that I shared with smokers – first, two floors of a Victorian house on Staten Island, NY for 3 years, then a large loft above a funeral home in the East Village of Manhattan for 1-1/2 years.  These were both large, airy spaces, where the smell of their smoking could disappate before I had a chance to smell it, or at least not last long enough to bother me.

I should correct myself to say before moving into the second address, I had started smoking cigars.  But in spite of the fact that two of my three roommates when I moved into the East Village loft were smokers, it never occurred to me to insist that I be allowed to smoke my cigars in the apartment.  You might attribute this to some lack of forcefulness or healthy assertiveness on my part – and truly, I was then and to some extent still am overly cautious, concerned that people like me and careful not to do anything that might make them not like me.  But it was clear to me that the rules were different for cigars than for cigarettes in terms of peoples attitudes, whether or not those attitudes in my view represented reality as I perceived it.

When I did bring up the question as to whether it might be all right to smoke an odd cigar indoors, I met the resistance I expected.  All three of my roommates – and mind you, the non-smoking one had been replaced by one who smoked occasionally – looked disgusted and told me how cigar smoke would hang in the air and just be nasty.  Little did it matter that their cigarette smoke might also hang in the air and be nasty – we had all already agreed that that was tolerable.

So I smoked while hanging out on our roof, or while walking in the park, or some other outside place.  I was ok with this, because I did not want to impose my smelly smokiness on anyone who was not ok with it.  And I certainly would not be happy about putting up with someone else’s nasty smoke in an enclosed space less airy than the one in which I then lived.

Which brings me back to my father.  How many times did I grimace, maybe even putting my hand over my mouth, when I got a blast of his smoke while sitting at the dinner table, lingering over some dessert when he could not wait any longer and lit his post-dinner cigarette?  Did he notice?  Did he care?  Did he think I was weak for letting the smoke bother me?  Maybe he just felt entitled.  After all, my parents, in justifying themselves for other things they did that my siblings and I found abhorent, would remind us that it was their house, and if we didn’t like it, we knew where the door was.

An aside: when you start out life facing this sense of justic and fairplay, you don’t expect to receive too much consideration from people in general.

Getting back to the discussion: is it any wonder that with the attitude smokers have had, as belligerent and unyielding and entitled as they were, that anti-smokers have adopted such a belligerent, etc. tone, now that the shoe is regrettably on the other foot?  Can anyone expect a person to be reasonable, whose reaction to the thought that what they are doing is harmful, is to assert that it’s no worse than getting a faceful of smoke from a bus exhaust pipe?  My friends, noone deliberately inhales the smoke from a bus exhaust pipe numerous times a day for all the days of their adult lives!

I can’t help feeling that if cigarette smokers had been more flexible, had shown an ounce of sense in thinking,  for example, “hmm, maybe that non-smoker right there will be annoyed at me a little less if I don’t blow smoke right in his face as I walk by…” things might be a little different right now.

But by and large, smokers are still as a group so incredibly rigid, so much in denial about the effect that their smoking has on them and the world around them, that it must appear to non-smokers that the only way to deal with these people is to stomp all over them, because in the end it is for their, the smokers’, own good.

I like to think that as a group, cigar smokers have a little more sense, and show a little more tact and consideration, just as I showed toward my cigarette-smoking roommates so many years ago.  Certainly we usually think of cigar smokers as being of a more moneyed class, and therefore would expect them to exhibit more class and decorum.  I don’t know that this is entirely true.

But when I think of cigarette smokers, I think of a class of people who, whatever their qualities otherwise, are hell-bent to hold onto what they call their smokers’ rights until they are dragged kicking and screaming to abstaining, either by debilitating disease or g-men and women carrying powerful rifles.  I put them in a similar class to people who doubt the need to protect the environment, people who are ready to use natural resources like water and oil until there’s only enough left to fill a thimble, people who see no need to examine themselves in any way and ever consider changing anything about themselves, and will one day wake up alone, uncared for, with nothing but a piece of stale bread in their souls and a half-carton of spoiled milk in their hearts.

But maybe I’m completely wrong.  Maybe the pendulum will swing the other way, and people will shake their heads and go “tsk, tsk” when they encounter someone like me who is so sensitive to smoke.  Children like me will be sent to the doctor to see what is wrong with them, and perhaps even given shots of serums derived from the ingredients in cigarette smoke, to toughen them up.

I know that you think I am joking, but stranger things have happened.  I say all this as a person who has been smoking, steadily but occasionally for a number of years, and who currently has no plans to quit.  But I assure you, I will smoke only where I am allowed to do so, and even then, I reserve the right to only smoke when expressly inspired to do so.

Can a fetishist spot another fetishist?

A couple summers ago, a friend from the Social Cigar message board whose husband liked to take pictures of her smoking cigars was being stalked by a smoking fetishist, and it was really bugging her.  So she complained to me about it.

It so happened that this fetishist had just posted some pictures of her smoking to a fetish board without her permission, so I complained to the administration of that board, and got the pictures removed.  I then faced a dilemma – how to explain to my friend how I knew about this fetishist without letting her know that I was also a fetishist.  So I took a chance and just told her I was a fetishist.  And she took it really well, and didn’t seem to put me in the same boat as that other fetishist – instead, she still saw me as the friend who she had gotten to know as a good decent person all this time.

A few weeks later, in a chat on Social Cigar, one of the other members mentioned this situation in such a way that it became obvious that he was also a fetishist who posted on that board, and that he knew that I was also a fetishist.  I already knew at that point that he was a fetishist, and that there were other fetishists on Social Cigar, as well as some people I was not so sure about.

Well it freaked me out that he knew who I was from the fetish community.  And I bet it freaked him out that I knew who he was.  Because he proceeded to start acting all weird around me, often giving me the silent treatment.

In any case, that was the first time I had identified someone I knew as another fetishist like me.  But I wonder how many more of us are out there.  And I wonder where the line is best drawn between those who might think smoking is sexy, and those who are smoking fetishists.

To illustrate, I’m going to do something I usually don’t like to do.  I’m going to talk a little bit about some people I know, including a woman I’ve met recently who is a cigar smoker.

In cigar bars and lounges, when I am doing my thing, trying to be subtle about watching ladies who are smoking cigars, I will notice guys or girls who are also doing what I’m doing.  And I usually think, “damn, am I being that obvious, too?”  And then I think, “hmmm, another fetishist?  maybe.”

But definitely some people, especially if they’ve been drinking, are not as cautious or subtle as I try to be.  They’ll say to someone or anyone, loud enough so that lots can hear, “man, isn’t she sexy?”  Or they’ll go up to the woman who is smoking a cigar and immediately start grilling them on how much they are enjoying their cigar and want to hear a full blow-by-blow description of how long the woman has been smoking cigars and how often they smoke.

Maybe the fact that they are so open in saying how sexy a woman smoking a cigar is, and talking directly to a woman smoking a cigar, is an indication that they are not a cigar fetishist.  Because I and many fetishists I know would be too cautious, too fearful of revealing what they are by being too obvious, and too earnest to, if anything, have a woman cigar smoker be their friend.  At best, we the fetishists could only hope to over time be able to spend more time with these ladies, the objects of our fetish, with the hope of one day gaining their trust enough to tell them about our love of sexy cigar smoking ladies, safe that the woman won’t yell for the police at the top of her lungs when we tell them our dirty little secret.  We would never have the guts to be so brazen like this.

Or maybe these guys who are obvious are fetishists, but they are not neurotic, tortured fetishists like me and other fetishists I know!  Instead, they are fetishists who are completely comfortable with who and what they are, and feel completely entitled to gain the trust and even affection of a beautiful cigar smoking woman.  And they are confident that in this day and age of openness and sexual emancipation, they will find people who are not freaked out by fetishists, and they are not afraid for at least certain people to know that they are fetishists.

A third possibility is that these guys (or girls) are fetishists, but they are unaware of it!  In other words, they don’t (yet at least) know what they are!  they are late bloomers, just coming into their own as fetishists, just learning about themselves.  Or they are not very self-aware, and will never completely grasp what is going on in their psyches.

This last possibility I find particularly intriguing.  Can there really be a bunch of fetishists out there, whether small or large, who are unaware of being fetishists and will never grasp their own fetishism?  Are they really so dense?  Do they think the opposite of every other young fetishist, i.e., that everyone feels the same way they do?  These are very good questions.  I think for now the best answer I can give is that, since it is obvious to me that there are many people out there, especially guys, who are very much lacking in self-awareness and awareness of what affect they have on other people through their behavior (especially as those two things relate to amorous dalliances), it is entirely plausible that there are fetishists who don’t know they are fetishists.

But getting back to the first category, that of people who might find cigar smoking sexy but not be fetishists, brings me to two people I have met recently at one of my favorite cigar lounges, and the question of where to draw the line between someone who just finds it sexy, and someone who is a fetishist.

First, there is a guy from an unknown European or Middle Eastern culture, where I imagine he was not raised being able to approach ladies and make overtures to them.  Let’s call him T.  The first time I saw him in the lounge, it seemed like he had no interest in the male majority filling the lounge.  He was only there to talk to the hostess at the bar, who is a smoker and has come to smoke cigars regularly while working.  She smokes robustos, rather fat but somewhat short in lenghth.  T was very intently asking her about the cigar she was smoking and listening with great interest to her answers.

A little while later, T bought a cigar from the lounge’s humidor cabinet that was a little larger than her usual robusto, and gave it to her as a gift.  She thanked him with a large smile, and after looking the cigar over, put it aside to smoke another time.  I wondered if he might be disappointed, hoping she would smoke the cigar right at that moment, but if he was disappointed, he hid it well.

I didn’t see him again until the other night.  I had been at the lounge for most of the afternoon and early evening, and in walked Leslie, a very pretty woman I met just recently.  She bought a cigar from the humidor, lit up and sat down in an armchair next to me, with a couch across from us.

Almost immediately, T appeared out of nowhere – I couldn’t have told you he was in the lounge at that moment – and sits on the couch directly across from Leslie.  All three of us are smoking cigars, and he is talking to Leslie – they apparently know each other – and Leslie introduces him to me, and he is a warm person and greets me warmly.

So then we get talking and Leslie with little provocation tells me her entire life as a smoker.  She liked the smell of cigars from a very young age and always knew she would smoke them, even though her parents didn’t smoke and smoking was frowned upon in her house.  Her upbringing sounded strict, with little warmth.

She then replicated her home environment to a degree by dating for years a guy who was a non-smoker and talked very negatively of people who smoked.  The first few years she dated him, she hadn’t started smoking yet, but after breaking up with him for a time, when they got back together, she had started smoking cigars.  So she had to hide it from him.  And she resented that she couldn’t smoke in front of him and he wouldn’t accept her as a smoker.

She is happy to not be dating that guy any longer.  She understands that you can’t pick a partner on the basis of whether they smoke like you, but nevertheless feels like smoking cigars is such an important part of her that it is very difficult for her to date a non-smoker ever again.

Her personality is that of the eternal tomboy who makes a point of saying that though she likes to dress well and put on make-up, she is not a girly-girl.  Instead, she is more comfortable hanging out with guys doing guy things. Though she finds herself contemptuous of some guy characteristics.  Part of her likes more sensitive guys, while part of her is intrigued by tough guys.

So I ask you, do you think either or both of these people are fetishists? I think T is, and Leslie might be.  She seems genuinely obsessed with cigars – I also remember being intrigued by them from the time I was small, drawing pictures of cigars when I was a kid, etc.  But I would have to get to know her a little better to have a better sense of whether she might be a fetishist.

I would say the dividing line is it is one thing to see a woman smoking a cigar is sexy, but only a fetishist obsesses enough, needs the object of his/her fetish, to the extent that they will seek it out regularly, needing it.  But perhaps obsession is part of a smoker’s personality too, I don’t know.  You feel drawn to smoke, I guess?

I’m definitely interested in getting some feedback on this topic.  I may have to post this elsewhere to get some reactions.

Ten Years of Watching Ladies Smokes Cigars in Bars: an Overview

I’m sure I will eventually get around to talking about specific amazing sightings of ladies smoking cigars that I’ve had in bars and lounges in New York City.  But to start with let me tell you some of what I have learned from my experiences.

I started going to cigar bars here on a regular basis in the summer of 2002.  In the last 7-1/2 years I have definitely seen some trends.  After the anti-smoking laws went into effect, at first the number of places where you could smoke indoors decreased, as some previously licensed cigar bars couldn’t adapt to the new regulations.  However, in the last couple of years, several new lounges have opened up here, helping to meet the needs of an increasingly active, dynamic community of cigar smokers.

Are there more cigar smokers in New York City than there were at the beginning of the 21st century?  I think the answer is yes.  At least those who are smokers are more visible than they used to be.  And more and more of them are women.  I mean, let’s be honest, women still make up a tiny percentage of total cigar smokers, less than 10%.  But whereas it used to be unusual to see a woman in a cigar bar or lounge who was actually smoking a cigar, now there are usually at least a couple in the course of an evening or day.

And I persist in thinking that the number one sees in public, i.e., out and about smoking a cigar, might represent less than a majority of women who smoke cigars.  I think there are a lot of women who in private would be perfectly happy smoking cigars, who are too self-conscious – don’t want to be stared at, don’t want to get the ridiculing comments of guys who think a woman smoking a cigar is unnatural – to smoke in public.  Let’s face it, the women who do smoke cigars where other people can see them doing it, have to be pretty tough.  They know they’re going to attract a lot of attention from the moment they light up.  And that some unenlightened fools might say something.

What protects them is that most women I see smoking cigars are in the company of a guy, whether a husband, boyfriend or male friend, and that helps to keep unwanted attention at bay.  It is rare to see a woman walk into a cigar bar by herself and light up a cigar, and rarer still to see a group composed only of women in a bar smoking cigars.

But I do think the number of women one sees smoking cigars in bars and lounges is increasing.  Consider my own experience.  For the first few years I was frequenting these establishments, a sighting was a major event, and I would take pains to remember the details and write down what and who I saw.  In time, when I knew better what time and days sightings happened the most (Saturday nights after 10pm), and might have more than one sighting in an evening, I considered myself lucky indeed.

But within a few years, there were nights when I had so many sightings in one evening, I could hardly remember them all.  It took all my mental powers to keep track of all the different ladies and what made them so sexy to me.  I’m saying more than once I had like 8-10 sightings in an evening, and a couple times I simply lost count of how many women I saw smoking cigars in one bar in one night.

Then in the spring of 2008, a new lounge in Harlem, not a neighborhood I usually associate with having a lot of cigar smokers living there, had a women and cigars event once a month for about 5 months.  At each event, for $20 you got two free house cigars and drinks.  The first one must have had about 200-300 people in attendance, with 1/3 to 1/2 of them women, and nearly all the women smoked their free house cigars.

The second event was also well-attended but not quite as crowded as the first one.  But once again, about a half of the people there were women, and they were pretty much all smoking cigars.

I missed the third event, but made it to the fourth and fifth.   By then the attendance had fallen off dramatically.  For the fourth one I would say about 50 people showed up, with maybe about 20 women, but again, they pretty much all smoked cigars.  the fifth one was a little less than that, and after that I guess they felt like the novelty was wearing off and they stopped.

That lounge in Harlem was the first of 4 or 5 new cigar lounges that have opened here in the last 2 years.  Another one in midtown east called Cigar Inn has probably been the most successful of the bunch, and is also the largest, most lavish, and has the best-stocked walk-in humidor.

Cigar Inn has had several events for brands like Rocky Patel and Don Pepin that have been so well-attended that, in spite of lasting all day long, there is hardly a minute the whole day when it isn’t so packed that moving from one place to another is difficult at best.  And this is a big lounge – I don’t know, maybe 2000 square feet? really big.

Needless to say, there have been so many women smoking cigars at those events, there’s no way I can keep track of them all.

On a nightly basis, it’s a different story though – it is uncommon to see women smoking cigars at Cigar Inn.  This lends some credence to my theory I think about women usually smoking in private.  In the huge crowd of an event, these women feel comfortable puffing on a big stogie (or several big stogies) with great pleasure.  They are in effect protected by the sheer mass of people there.  But on other nights when the crowd is small by comparison, where are those lady cigar smokers?  Probably smoking in their own apartments, or in a private party.

I will finish this overview with two more points: my own estimate of how many women cigar smokers may live and/or work in New York City, and a few words about my rules for recording a sighting.

Years ago when I never saw women smoke cigars in the flesh, I decided to try and figure out how many cigar smoking women might be out there that I was NOT seeing smoking, lol.  Anyway, an exercise that may prove interesting:

8 million people living in New York City, and let’s say another 8 million living in Westchester, New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut who work in NYC, making 16 million.

Of that let’s say that 50 percent are women (8 million) and maybe 50% of that are between the ages of 21 and 60 (4 million).

OK, let’s say that 2% of those 4 million women smoke a cigar at least once a year:  80,000.

Of that number of ladies who smoke cigars on a rare occasion, let’s say 5% smoke a cigar at least once a week: 4,000.

Let’s say that 10 percent of them smoke at least one cigar a week in a public venue (bar, lounge, party, while walking down the street): 400.

So even taking a very conservative estimate, there are still, let’s say, around 400 opportunities for a cigar fetishist like me to see a woman smoking a cigar somewhere in New York City every week.  Those to me are pretty good odds.

I like to give back to my fellow smoking fetishist by sharing stories of my sightings on fetish message boards and the like.  However, in recent months, I have done less and less of that, for two reasons.

First of all, I see so many women smoking cigars that the novelty has worn off, and I don’t really have time to sit down and remember what and who I’ve seen and write down a sighting.  All these experiences at some point just start to run together in a blur.

Secondly, and this is the more important point, as I have become more active in the cigar community through cigar message boards and frequenting certain bars and lounges, I’ve gotten to know the women who smoke cigars around the City, and so I don’t feel that it’s right to write about them, because it’s really an invasion of their privacy, and before I share such a story, I would have to ask their permission, and I’m not going to do that, because I would out myself as a fetishist if I did that.

Besides, once I know the person smoking, that eliminates the distance between me and the person I am watching smoke.  And in reality, I am not observing them anymore.  I am interacting with them in a normal way.  So I couldn’t say that I see a lot of the things about them smoking that I would normally be looking for.  If I were to stare at these ladies, they would feel uncomfortable and I don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

Rest assured, that in spite of this, I will continue to have many experiences from time to time that I feel free to write about.  There’s so much going on out there in the cigar community of New York City, that there will be bound to be things for me to write about.