Holiday Trials
The holiday season never comes without its unique set of challenges to both the unprepared and over-prepared alike. Stress mixes with joy, clichés combine with nostalgia, and money parades as affection. Pleasantries and vulgarities emerge from vinous lips. Warm embraces are exchanged in dimly lit bars--fleeting moments that will perhaps never be remembered again. Regret seems to cling to the air while we chip away at those last lingering inhibitions. It is a time for reflection and self-avoidance. Harsh truths confront us on bathroom floors or in empty beds or on ne'er-ringing telephones. Old voices that once reverberated in our halls are now only echoes in our minds.
This year, I had the unusual opportunity to apprentice at a French Quarter cigar store. I ran into Carlo "Gookie" Williams--an old smokey acquaintance of mine--while shopping for dragon fruit and mung beans at the Asian market on the Westbank. Gookie is a master cigarmaker of generous physical proportions. Gookie is not a tall man. Or a young man. Or even a very pleasant man, to be frank. He has very little sense of humor and rarely spares an extra word. Laughing might seem like a waste of breathe to him, for example. Yet he's the type of guy to whom I could read this last paragraph and all I might get in return is a "You seddit, Chawlie!"
Gookie and I randomly cross paths once or twice a half decade and can manage to get along for a few days. I attribute this mainly to our shared love of cigars, guayaberas, Canasta, aged rum, and the ability to combine all the aforementioned into one enjoyable activity--namely, sitting around wearing guayaberas, drinking rum, smoking cigars, and playing Canasta. After a few days of this, I inevitably exceed the limits of Gookie's tolerance and am banished from his presence until our next bi-half-decade rendezvous.
This is a Guayabera
This time, we exchanged our usual exceedingly-brief greeting. I asked him what he planned to make with the shrimp paste and duck eggs he had in his basket. "Dinner," he replied.
"Would you care to partake in a game of Canasta and round or two of Flor de Caña this evening?" I asked.
"Here, come to this address tomorrow morning" he ribbitted as he handed me a business card and walked off. Gookie looks and talks like a short, fat little fuckin frog.
The card had no printing, just a French Quarter address hastily penciled on an otherwise blank business card. What this could mean I had no idea. Not only had Gookie failed to answer my question but the address on the card wasn't anywhere near any of our old hangouts. Confused as I was, I decided to appease Gookie and bring myself to the requested coordinates.
The next morning as I approached the location, I could already see Gookie standing outside smoking a cigar. "Follow me" he directed before I had the chance to say Hello. He led me into an odiferous cigar store filled with people hard at work rolling cigars. "I opened this damn store a few years back. Christmas is comin, and we need extra hands to meet demand. I'll teach you what you need to know." So, just like that my dreams of rum-soaked Canasta playing were spoiled. And, somehow, without Gookie's asking nor my consent, I was working as an apprentice in a French Quarter cigar store.
The first three days of working there were nearly identical. I would sit next to Gookie and watch him roll cigars. It was a thing of extraordinary beauty and curiosity. The world surrounding him would cease to exist when he set to this task. His eyes would open wide yet lose any sense of periphery. His fat little dextrous fingers would execute perfect rolls and folds. When he would lick the tobacco-leaf cigar wrappers to seal them, his eyes would cross slightly. His ears would perk backward and upward, his mouth agape. Something like...
Gookie would roll cigars all day, insisting that I watch. I didn't mind so much, as this repetitive motion would often trigger my ASMR.
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli.
On the fourth day, it was time for me to begin rolling cigars myself. Gookie sent me upstairs where he stores the tobacco leaves. I began unpinning them from the clothes line one by one when I noticed something written on the dark, veinous underside of one. In ball-point pen, it said, Gookie, cheese not aged, bread not buttered, beware beware!
As I was staring at the writing, mulling it over, I heard a slight creaking of wood. Before I was aware of what was happening, I heard a massive cacophonous crack! as the floor beneath me collapsed and I went went falling into the downstairs humidor through its ceiling. As I fell, strange images flashed before me. Places I had been, people I had met, emotions I had felt throughout my life bombarded my mind's eye with such speed and intensity that I was both aroused and terrified. I saw dancing pine trees, spinning oboes, flying marmosets, amorphous blobs, counterfeit fine china, vegetarian beef stew, talking fish wise beyond their years. I saw rivers of blood and puss vaporize into balconies of drunken tourists. There were mountains of fear, valleys of loathing, prairies of joy, mesas of yearning. I saw myself, old and withered, greased up and ready for another go. I saw you there, and I cared deeply for you though I didn't really know who you were. I saw the face of God and I laughed tears of mourning.
I don't recall my landing nor the events leading up to my eventual regaining of consciousness. I woke up in an army cot, surrounded by barrels of rum, loomed over by an older man with latex gloves and a white coat. He put that light-up thing in my eyes, that cold metal thing on my chest and in his ears, and that pointy plastic thing in my earholes. "You're going to be just fine" he said. I stood up, limped out of bed, and went through the only door I could find after thanking Gookie's mob-doctor or whoever the fuck that guy was. I was apparently still in the cigar store, so I went and found Gookie. "I'll take my check now," I said. Gookie owed me for 4 days work. "Quit a fall there, Chawlie," he said as he scribbled some numbers onto a check before handing it to me. "More," I said. Gookie glanced at the blood on my shirt, the bandage around my head, and the pain in my eyes. He ripped up the check, wrote one out for triple the original amount, and handed it to me. I pocketed it, went into the back room with the rum and the cot, opened up a barrel, dipped a rocks glass into it, and left. See you in five years, Gookie, you amphibious little man.