Devil water. That’s what my mother called liquor.

I have a couple of alcoholics in the family, men with control issues in positions they can’t control. Prolific reproduction patterns, low paying jobs, military service, all things that will mess with someone’s psyche and where mind-altering substances become a tempting diversion. So it was with this that my mother warned me away from the liquor cabinets.

Before he married my mother, my stepdad had the usual bachelor liquor, and brought it, unopened, when he moved in with my mother. At the house right now is a 50 year bottle of Cutty Sark, of Hennessy…and I’m trying to figure out how to bring it back with me…

Anyway, my folks never really drank. Dad had a beer maybe once a year, and I don’t remember wine or New Years Eve champagne. When I visited my bio dad when I was six, he had me try his beer; Coors and Miller, and I remember spitting it out. The taste was horrendous, and even now, I recall that memory with a face wrinkled by disgust.

I was actually out of college when I drank again, and I found things I liked drinking. Screwdrivers. Rum and coke. Then to figure out what I liked, and how it made me feel was the next step. Because I had gone to college in the Midwest and watched my peers get sloppy, SLOPPY drunk, I realized what it was I wanted and didn’t from the experience. That, I believe, is the key. The stigma was still there, but the stigma is specifically against being so blasted out of your mind that you don’t remember anything. I wanted to be in control. I didn’t want to wake up in police custody and told that I punched a mailbox.

So then it came to what I was drinking. Bourbon, whiskey, scotch, vodka, rum, in their myriad of iterations, brands, flavors…and I dove in.

As far as smoke was concerned, I blame Blue Note Records. I blame jazz for making smoking look so damned cool. Forget the Marlboro Man, the black and white photography of Francis Wolff made me want to smoke. But, I knew a ton of people who smoked cigarettes and more than a handful who died of lung cancer, so the sexy of cigarette smoking died quickly for me. But…cigars.

Cigars appealed to me because of the non-involvement of my lungs. The history of tobacco is rife with oppression, but the opening of the marketing and production to Central and South America, now Black and AfroLatino folks are more involved now, so to support and taste those takes on a historic vice is pretty awesome.

The cigar kick didn’t start til I had some disposable income and a friend group who did it.

Or, most specifically, a girlfriend group who did it. A woman I was interested in asked me if I wanted to go to a lounge with her, and we did, and sat in plush leather seats in front of a big screen showing some random crappy movie. But the leather and wood captivated me.

So to do the research, to find brands to go with, to figure out what I liked and didn’t…it has become a definite feature of summer evenings spent outside. It’s not even a weekly thing to do; I seem to have missed out on the compulsive side of these habits..

THat’s just my journey, and I felt like writing it out.