My First Cigar

Over the years, I’ve been a smoker of all things tobacco. From yes, cigarettes, to cigars, pipes, and even the occasional hookah, I’ve certainly been a smoker of sorts, yet I still remember my first cigar. Though I’m discounting a Swisher Sweet someone gave me when I was fourteen (with it’s wine tip that left an artificial cloying flavor on my lips for about two days), I’m talking about a proper cigar, and my first proper cigar was a Cuban Montecristo No. 4.

Coming from from a smaller city of roughly 70,000 in a rural border town, my options for cigars were quite limited. This first proper cigar came from a store called ‘Sharkskin’ that sold an array of outdoor and nautical wear, as well as camping goods and firearms. Upstairs they had a walk-in humidor filled with a selection of Habanos products, as well as a small assortment private label sticks. It was summer time, and I was fifteen and hanging out with my neighbor friend Jim driving around in his green boxy shaped Volkswagen Jetta. As we were fully intent on acting like adults that day, we managed to purchase cigars and steaks and grill them in Jim’s backyard by the pool, as we raided his folks’ liquor cabinet for a bottle of wine and some tequila.

Looking back, I’m almost certain that back then that we weren’t aware of how to correctly light them and were most likely puffing entirely too hard. We smoked those cigars down to the nub before dinner and proceeded to smoke a couple of the Sharkskin private label coronas after dinner as well.

At the time we really didn’t know what we were doing; we were just sort of emulating what we thought of as manly pursuits. Neither of our fathers were cigar smokers and we were just a couple of kids enjoying a day free of supervision or responsibility. In one way, those fine, hand rolled Montecristos were wasted on a couple of adolescents, but in another way it started me down an exciting path of discovery towards manhood and the many wonderful cigars that have since followed. 

– Sean Douglass