CigarFest '05

or, Aching for Air

When someone thinks of CigarFest, I would bet that the adjectives “classy” or “clean” are not in the top 5, or even 10 things that come to mind. Nevertheless, the sight that beheld us upon entering the Pennsylvania Expo Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania failed to meet even the most lowered of our expectations.

Certainly, if you pack several thousand cigar-smoking people (yes, “people” – there were female attendees, I believe at least three of them, one of which was sporting a T-shirt that read “If you’re going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair”) into a poorly ventilated warehouse, you expect a – how shall I put it – certain quality of air. CigarFest ’05 did not disappoint.
After careful scientific readings, the atmosphere inside the expo center consisted of the following:

• 5% Oxygen
• 2% Nitrogen
• 4% Carbon Dioxide
• 51% Cigar smoke
• 7% Pipe smoke
• 11% Cigarette smoke
• 8% Sweat
• 7% Old Spice
• 3% Booth Babe perfume
• 2% Pork

After the odor(s), the first thing we noticed was the lines. It worked like this:

The ticket to get in cost $75. For that you got a book of coupons and a bag. The coupon book contained some twenty-odd coupons – good for one or two free cigars at each cigar vendor in the expo. Your mission was to hit each vendor booth and use your coupon to claim your free booty.

What the expo planners didn’t realize was that if you have several thousand people all trying to hit the same twenty-odd booths at once, you quickly reach a saturation point. Once this point of saturation has been reached, the lines at each booth begin to meld together like the Terminator T-1000, forming one giant line progressing from booth to booth in search of Sarah Connor.

We walked around looking for a gap in the line into which we could insert ourselves, but there were none to be found. It was a giant, smelly, shuffling centipede, wending its way around the expo floor, scooping up free cigars and tiny little shots of beer.

Not wanting to spend the day standing in line and starving because we hadn’t eaten yet, we went in search of food.

At the back of the expo hung a big sign reading “Food Court”. Typical of the rest of CigarFest ’05, our expectations were somewhat different from reality. Rather than a courtyard of vendors, each supplying their own brand of deep-fried delicacy, CigarFest’s Food Court consisted of: a pig. Now, I like pork as much as the next guy, but there’s something unsettling, and slightly creepy about seeing the cook scooping your lunch out of the waxy carcass of a roasted pig, no matter how much they dress it up with apples in the mouth and whatnot.

Nevertheless, we were hungry, and the pork sandwiches were free, so we chowed down.

This trip marked the first gathering of just the four of us: Matt, Eric, Quint and myself. The previous and first time we were all together was last October at my wedding. I’ve known Matt since high school and when we get together, for some reason, we always end up getting lost (this weekend was no exception). Eric was my lab partner in freshman Chemistry, and we’ve shared a brain ever since, much to the chagrin of our respective significant others. Quint is a crazy Canadian I drink lots of wine with every Wednesday night. We smoke cigars when we can get away with it, but it tends to irritate our honeys, so we don’t do it that often.

Matt is the cigar connoisseur out of the four of us, to the point that he can identify cigar manufacturers on sight and can pretty quickly estimate the street value of any cigar by sight/smell. He’s the one that started this whole trip rolling. Quint and I thought it would be a lark, although we don’t smoke nearly as many cigars as Matt. Ironically, Eric is the only one that lives in the area, and he smokes the least out of any of us.

Living in California, where smoking is forbidden in all public places (although now that we’ve got Arnie as Governor, who knows how long that will last) eating a greasy pork sandwich while inhaling gallons of cigar smoke made the smoking section of a restaurant seem like an operating room by comparison.

After eating, the MegaLine T-1000 had not seemed to dissipate any, so we found the end and joined it. Staring off into space, we followed our fellow cigar-hunters, taking tiny little half-steps every few minutes, our eyes streaming from all the smoke. This was truly a lesson in Soviet Russian culture. There was plenty of supply to meet the demand, but the organization of the distribution was so bad that nobody could get anything.

As we passed the Cigars International booth (the fine institution who organized this shindig), they took pity on us and offered us their free cigars without having to wait in their line. They were also the only booth selling any sort of cigar paraphernalia, and that was pretty slim pickings: a few lighters, some cigar cutters, and some T-shirts. They certainly have a lot to learn about conventions. Having a bunch of schwag booths would have distracted people from getting their free cigars for a while, which would have thinned out the lines a bit.

Approximately forty-five minutes later, we were within spittoon distance of the first booth, where again we were met with one of the many differences between “CigarFest: The Marketing” and “CigarFest: The Reality”. The ads for CigarFest had touted “Playboy Bunnies” (plural). What we got was one woman, who had appeared in Playboy, sitting at the Playboy cigar booth, grimly autographing pictures of herself. As Quint said, “On a Playboy Bunny scale, she’s only a 7 out of 10.”

At this point, Quint had had enough of waiting in line and started doing some recon to see if any other booths had shorter lines.

It turned out that the crowd had thinned enough that the giant MegaLine had broken up in various places around the expo, and (after getting a picture of the Playmate, of course) we took off around the room, getting our free cigars. Over the next two hours, we bounced from booth to booth, wherever the line was shortest (or they were handing cigars out on the side) scoring our booty.

Things picked up even more when we discovered you could keep going back to the Sauza booth for free mini-shots of Tres Generations.

I’m sure Matt could write a page about each and every cigar manufacturer there, but as far as brands go, I don’t know Don Diego from Don Corleone. I was there to hang out with the guys and score some free stogies.

Matt, on the other hand, recognizes cigar makers on sight, so he was in heaven when he saw the guy who makes Gurkhas. I like Gurkhas – Matt’s given me a few, and they’re quite good – but I could care less who makes them. Regardless, I was happy to snap a photo of Matt with Mr. Gurkha (if that is his real name). Matt’s grin was as wide as mine would be if I met, say, John Cleese.

Not only did Matt get to meet his Cigar Idol, but Gurkha Man was giving out massive, foot-long logs of tobacco. Matt figured them to be worth about twenty bucks a piece.

At least the CigarFest organizers, as well as some of the vendors, had hired some busty booth babes. You have to wonder how much they had to get paid to agree to spend an entire afternoon in a warehouse with thousands of stinky guys, breathing cigar smoke so thick it could be elected president, while wearing tight T-shirts and handing out free phallic symbols. Whatever they made, I’m sure it was more than this guy got to put on a foam cigar costume and wander around all afternoon drinking beer and smoking a cigar. I don’t know, doesn’t that strike you as sort of cannibalistic?

C.A.O. had a good gimmick: As they handed you the free cigar, they said if you smoked it and brought back the butt, they’d give you another freebie (ostensibly better quality). From the looks of their butt bin, that booth alone was responsible for ninety percent of the smoke in the room.

After we finished plundering (Quint was the only one of us to use all of his tickets, totaling 36 free cigars) we stepped outside to catch some fresh air, and finish our C.A.O. cigars, so we could go back in for our bonus free cigars.

I forgot to mention that there was a band playing in there, but they were almost impossible to hear over the din of the crowd and the horrible acoustics of the mostly empty warehouse. But they did do a passable Janis Joplin, although their singer’s voice was much less scratchy than Janis’, which is ironic considering she was inhaling probably more smoke in one afternoon than Janis did her entire life.

I have to tell you, the fun thing about smoking cigars with Matt and Quint is that, since they are such chain smokers, they will pause in the middle of smoking a really fat stogie, to smoke a cigarette, because they can’t get enough nicotine out of a cigar. Makes you feel not so bad about smoking one cigar once in a while.

Overall, we had a great time that weekend, despite the fact that I had heart palpitations for a week, probably due to sudden nicotine addiction followed by equally sudden withdrawal, and I had to air out my leather jacket for a week and a half before I could wear it again. Plus we got to see a Playboy Bunny.