I’m reading more fiction now than I have ever had before. Why? This, taken from the novel “Elieen” (2015) by Ottessa Moshfegh:
“The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.
“Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.”
For a change, a luxurious, superbly-crafted novel by Ottessa Moshfegh is published. A woman I never heard about until just the other day is now a part of my life. The story captures me on page five of the Penguin Random House LLC edition, when the author writes, “This one evening – I’ll begin my story there – I found him (her father) sitting barefoot on the stairs, drinking the sherry, the butt of a cigar between his finger.” And then her exquisite prose solidifies my interest in the book on page seven, “My father grunted and puffed on the short butt of his cigar.”
I could smell the rancid stogie he was pinching between his smelly fingers. I had made a definite connection and discovered that the character in the novel was writing this some fifty years after the facts, intrigued me even more. To smell a sickly, sour cigar butt, surrounded by opposing and descriptions of how Eileen perceives herself, gave me permission to soak up her true personality. “I looked like a shy and gentle soul from afar, and sometimes I wished I was one. But I cursed and blushed and broke out in sweats quite often, and that day I slammed the bathroom door shut by kicking it with the full sole of my shoe, nearly busting the hinges.”
I want to read on. I want to see what she does with her internal anger and her smoked-soaked father whose smell is reminiscent of eight or nine spit-saturated cigar butts short on space in a dive’s lounge’s ashtray where the owner could give a shit if the place reeked of skunk.
But I’m expanding my reading interests. Of course, I’ve read fiction before. But now it’s becoming more frequent. As is my desire to try various cigars that I once thought to be good and turned out to be bad or the other way around. I’m no longer in 2017, but rather in 2018, and if I inch my neck a bit higher above the unbuttoned shirt collars I now wear, 2019 will follow to a perfectly visualized, beard accepted 2020.
When you read this, the IPCPR in Vegas will be over. The trucks will have gone. The ersatz smiles readjusted for next year. The bad cigars will weed themselves out and the good ones will give the standards a run for their money. And the resultant bar credit card bills of a lot of the attendees will be cursed attesting to the fact that some people just cannot hold back in “Sin City.”
Another convention will fill the Las Vegas Convention center and hopefully, no one caught the norovirus while attending this one. All you really needed is common sense and a swipe of Clorox Healthcare® Bleach Germicidal Wipes that claim to be “effective against 58 microorganisms, including norovirus, TB, and C. difficile spores, in 3 minutes or less.” Impressive promises. But who knows. No one would say, not even the front desk would confirm or deny when I called about the “illness” that was moving everything from the host hotel to the convention center. Exercise, uh? Ah, let’s hope the catchphrase from the 2008 movie with the same name holds true, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
It’s a changing environment. Cigars. Back on the road, back to what we cigar brokers did before the show, we’re doing after the show, but with a twist. Fiction.
Fiction or “literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people,” could be stretched to include some of the cigars that were introduced at the show. Names withheld, of course.
Change is good. Like when Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” was released. A story based on fact, and written in what is now referred to as “literary journalism,” or add today’s screaming, “Fake News!” It’s good to move around an object rather than just observe it from one static angle. So it is with the cigars that I collected while at the show. Some may seem real, others may seem to implant doubt in my mind that this one sample can’t really be considered a cigar. (One’s cello was so yellow from the unintended age {it was plain old} you gotta wonder.)
It’s movement that can chill and burst into flame. I have decided to immolate the cigars randomly and like picking out a new genre, in my case fiction, find a glob of gold in the minerals of muck.
IrvCigarBroker 