Romeo y Julieta Roundup

Posted on April 29, 2016 by atgroom under Romeo y Julieta, Roundup

Below, gentle readers, lies a mostly complete cross section of the exotic cigars released under the marque of Romeo y Julieta. It is exactingly ranked in descending order from zenith to nadir, and no Romeo cigar can be rationally purchased without first consulting it.

Notable absentees are the 2001 Edición Limitada Robustos, the 2004 Edición Limitada Hermosos No. 2, and the Wide Churchills Gran Reserva, all of which I was unable to obtain in sufficient quantity for this series. I will add them to this list in the event that they ever cross my ashtray. If you think you can help, by all means, please reach out.

Custom Roll

Posted on April 28, 2016 by atgroom under Custom

Today’s cigar is a closed-foot custom, about a Gordito size. It was a gift, and beyond what you can tell by looking at it, I know absolutely nothing about it. It came with a bunch of other cigars and no commentary. It has a nice, dark, oily wrapper. I pick the foot and take a dry inhale. The draw is very loose. Lit, it begins nicely. Sweet cream and coca. Touch of honey.

As a teenager, I never had a close relationship with music. I don’t think pop music was forbidden in the house I grew up in, but it wasn’t around very often. Certainly, I never stormed off to my room to blare rock and roll while my dad banged on the door, yelling at me to turn that racket down. My parents listened exclusively to news radio, and commercial television was forbidden on all but the rarest of occasions. There was a CD player in the lounge room, but as far as I know the only CD it ever played was a Best of The Seekers compilation my mother had, and that only on Christmas. I guess my older sister must have listened to at least some music, because she had a Radiohead poster in her room, but if she did she did it with headphones. People occasionally ask my what the first CD I ever bought was, and I can honestly say that I haven’t bought one yet.

In my late teens I developed a love of film, and through that I came to at least appreciate the cinematic quality that music can add to life. In my twenties, once I got a little disposable income, I started to go concerts. Without a strong relationship with any particular genre, I would go to anything that promised a spectacular or visceral experience. I went to KISS a lot of times. To AC/DC. Meatloaf. The Flaming Lips. Gorillaz. I saw Pubic Enemy three times at the Corner Hotel, a tiny, dank little room, where it feels good to be drenched in the sweat of a few hundred other humans while Flava Flav spouts nonsense. I saw Ennio Morricone conduct an orchestra. And naturally, in 2012 when Prince came to town, I bought a ticket. Matter of fact, I bought two.

My tickets were three weeks apart, on the first and last nights of the tour. I figured that if the first show wasn’t any good, I could always scalp the second one. I didn’t end up needing to. The first show was phenomenal.

The shows were in the round in a 15,000 seat stadium, on a stage shaped like Prince’s love symbol, and the real takeaway for me was that this was my first time looking at a real musician. Prince was mostly playing the hits, but he has a lot of hits, and the set list seemed to change at his whim, the band well drilled enough to follow his cues. He was a great singer, with a voice that moves effortlessly between a deep bass growl and a shrill falsetto, but his real talent was in his guitar, and his amazing, uplifting solos. I’ve heard Prince describe his musical genre as “inspirational,” and that’s exactly what it was. I felt the funk songs in my crotch, and the ballads in my heart. I took the lovely Shortcake to the second show, and she literally fainted during Purple Rain.

There was one show in Melbourne on that tour that I missed. On a Monday night at 2am he played one of his illusive secret shows, just Prince and the band jamming for three hours to an audience of eighty in a dingy jazz club. The next morning I read the reviews with envy, and made a note to find the secret show if I was ever in the same city as Prince again.

At the mid-point the custom cigar is dry, with flavours of sandy earth and straw. There is a strong cocoa element that reminds me of packaged cake mix, with the bite of dehydrated egg. It’s a complex cigar, to be honest – no sooner have I tasted cake mix then it switches to a fresher, more tannic sting. It’s pleasant enough.

In February of this year, Prince announced some shows in Australia. There wasn’t a lot of build-up. Tickets were on sale a week after the announcement, the shows the week after. He was playing four shows over two nights in Melbourne, and the same in Sydney. As luck would have it would be in the right town for both. The venues were small concert halls, 2000 seats or less, and the shows billed as an intimate, special experience. No band. No lights. Not even a guitar. Just Prince, a piano, and a microphone. Ticket prices were pegged at $100, $200, and $400. I figured $200 would get me a pretty good seat. I could take Shortcake again.

The day tickets went on sale was chaos, with the typical server congestion. I reached the front of the queue a few times, but by the time I did all the $200 pairs of tickets were sold out (as it happened, 90% of the venue turned out to be at the $400 price point), and each new search sent me to the back of the line. By the time I had come to terms with going alone, the best available seat was a $400 one in row X, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

As soon as Prince landed in Melbourne, I was all over him. I followed the Twitter feed of anyone with a slight association to Prince, or who might be in the loop of the Melbourne music scene. I spent my nights stalking the jazz bars and clubs on the lookout for a Purple light that might signal a secret show, and didn’t go to bed before 4:00am. Alas, it seemed that the rigorous pace of this tour – four hours or more solo singing a night for two nights in a row – left no room for secret shows.

As I drove up to Sydney an announcement pinged on my phone. Due to popular demand, they had decided to do the Sydney Opera Hours shows in the round. Seats in the boxes to the side and rear of the stage were now available. From Wodonga to Gundagai I contemplated it, but decided I had no choice. It was a lot of money for two hours of entertainment, but I had been losing sleep over Prince for a week. By Jugiong I had a $400 charge on my credit card.

My seat was in the second row of the stage left box. Prince’s piano, close enough that I could have easily thrown my wallet onto it, was lengthways on the stage. The people in the VIP row of the stalls were marginally closer, but seated at the piano he was facing me. I had the best seat in the house.

The set was all deep cuts, almost none of which I knew, but each one filled with pure, raw emotion, taking me back to the most brutal of my many heartbreaks, or to the ecstasy of new love. Prince’s mastery of his art was awe inspiring, as was his vocal range, his ability to put so much into every note, his ease with the crowd, and his charisma. By the second encore my voice was among the 2000 screaming for more, our roar reverberating around incredible acoustics of the shell roof. On stage Prince giggled. “I’ve never felt so welcome in Australia in my life.”

At midnight it was over and I was completely emotionally drained. My plan had been to get a cab the five kilometres or so back to the apartment, but in a Zen state I decided it was better to walk. I drifted through Saturday night, past the drunks and the scumbags, the strip clubs and the pimps and the thug cops. “On any other weekend that would be me” I thought to myself. “Why have I wasted my life on this garbage? Why haven’t I dedicated it to truth and beauty?” I wondered. “How will I ever achieved the perfection of someone like Prince if my life is half over and I haven’t even begun.”

Two kilometres out it started to rain, but I didn’t mind. I was a man of love now, and rain didn’t bother me.

Davidé is the physical embodiment of a creature of hate. His body, army honed, is a hard mound of muscle and scar tissue. On his back he proudly wears a tattoo of a naked woman riding the Nagasaki bomb. Across his belly march the silhouettes of a company of storm troopers. He was sharing my apartment, and I had left him with the only key, so had to tap on the window to get let in. Shirtless, he opened the door, and contemplated me with his cold sneer, ready to launch into some rant or other. I embraced him.

“Peace be on you, brother” I said. “Peace be on you.”

I keep waiting for the cigar to get bitter, as it has been loose the whole way down, and doesn’t seem to be aged particularly long, so I would expect a hot mess of tar to be its final notes. Not so. The custom ends with a nice sweet cream and rich espresso. I’d recommend you pick one up, but I have no idea how you’d do such a thing.

Romeo y Julieta Churchill Reserva Cosecha 2008

Posted on April 21, 2016 by atgroom under Reserva, Romeo y Julieta

Life has a funny way of working out. For this week’s dusky beauty I was in need of a sidekick. For the final cigar in my Romeo y Julieta retrospective I had lined up a Churchills Reserva and, much as I did a few years ago with the Monte Gran Reserva, I wanted to smoke it side by side with someone smoking its regular production equivalent. Davidé (the swine), was off in the tropics indulging his baser urges in some sweltering hive of scum and villainy, and nobody else seemed too interested. The weather was perfect and I was seriously smoking the two cigars simultaneously when a text message came through. It was my friend Bogus’ birthday, he was feeling depressed, and was wondering if I wanted to get a drink and talk. “I can do you one better” I replied. “Eat a banana and head over. I’ve got the sure-fire depression cure for you: nicotine and Vitamin D.”

“Holy shit,” my companion remarks, moments after lighting. “Now that is a delicious cigar.” The reserva at this point is just getting its legs, and is still a little bitter from the light, so I have a puff of the regular Churchills. The boy is right. The cigar is amazing. One of the sweetest, creamiest cigars I’ve ever had the pleasure of. Tastes like butterscotch. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. By two centimetres in the Churchill regular is black coffee, with dirty earth notes. The reserva is a much lighter (and, frankly, superior) version of the same thing: smooth coffee cream and cedar.

Bogus today is an upstanding member of society: he’s married with kids, runs his own business, and is deeply involved in the political fundraiser networking circuit. It was not always this way. I’ll never forget the first day we met. I was sitting in a university tutorial at the start of second semester, waiting for class to begin, when a gungy looking skinhead thug sat down next to me. He really had it all going on – heavily studded leather jacket, ripped jeans, boots, tartan flannel shirt, and he offered me his hand, saying “hey man, I’m so glad there’s somebody I know in this class.” I had never seen this person before in my life, and was about to say so, when the second words out of his mouth gave me pause: “I’m so happy today, man. It’s the last day of my suspended sentence.”

We became fast friends, and ten years later, long after his rebellion against society had ended, he sent me a text. It was Grand Final Day (the final match of the year for our home grown football code), which is a sort of public holiday in Melbourne, when your average male traditionally has a barbecue and watches the game, or go to a pub and watches the game. Bookish nerds like me traditionally stay home and play video games in protest. Bogus’ text was inviting me to a pub crawl. “Just me and some friends,” it read. “It’s okay but they’re a bunch of punks.”

Assuming he meant “punks” in the same sense as “kids,” I decided to dress in the most neutral way I could, so as not to affiliate myself with any football team. The final ensemble – a beige guayabera, chinos, and a calf-length chestnut coloured overcoat – looked good, but it was weird as hell. I looked like a moneyed eccentric, home from the equatorial colonies. When I walked into the pub and found myself in a room full of leather, tartan, Mohawks and piercings, I looked even more out of place; in a room full of non-conformist weirdos, I was the non-conformist weirdo.

The event turned out to be the annual Punk Crawl, a decades long tradition on Melbourne Grand Final Day, where a hundred or so punks trek around the CBD, occupying various bars. Outside each venue, and accompanying the walk between them, was a heavy police presence. I had joined the crawl at pub number three. We stayed there for about forty-five minutes before walking down the street to pub four, only to find that the cops had phoned ahead, and the owner had closed the place in anticipation. The thing about punks is that they’re anarchists. They lack strong leadership. With the planned venue closed to them, the crawl pretty much disbanded. Some punks went to the next pub on the list. Others went back to the place we had just come from. Some scattered to various nearby bars, while a final group stayed outside the closed bar, yelling indignantly that it was a free country and they were just trying to have some fun. For my own part I wound up around the corner at a university bar that did not feature on the official list.

The Churchills Reserva has a bit of tighter draw than the regular production model and, perhaps because of this, or perhaps my more practiced smoking technique, it is burning a good deal slower. Its flavours are light, with coffee and a distinct sour cherry note. It’s an artificial cherry flavour – red Starburst, specifically. By contrast the regular Churchills is much fuller tobacco, with bitter coffee and earthy tones.

There were ten or so of the punks that came with us to the university bar, and I was hanging out chiefly with Bogus and his friend Moby. Like Bogus, Moby wasn’t really a practicing punk any more. At one time he had been as punk as they come, with leopard print and ACAB (“All Cops Are Bastards”) tattooed around the base of his Mohawk. The Mohawk had gone years ago though, and he’d grown his hair out to cover the tattoos, which were now starting to show again as his hair thinned with the approach of middle age. He wasn’t quite as square as Bogus – he worked at a combat gym, selling custom made knives and non-lethal weaponry to security guards, hunters and martial artists. At first he eyed me with suspicion, but when I started to smoke my cigar (Upmann Monarchas), much to the distaste of the straights in the outdoor dining area, he started to come around. “You dress like a fascist” he told me, “but actually, you’re pretty punk.”

The Punk Crawl had been scheduled to end with a concert at the Grey Duke Hotel, a dive bar in a bad area that was known for its heavy metal shows, and that seemed as good a place as any to rendezvous with the main body of the crawl. We arrived about 8:30pm, just as the second act was about to go on. By all accounts the first act hadn’t been much good, but the second were shaping up to be better, and the place was starting to fill up, as the scattered groups of punks began to trickle back in. The band started to play, a few people started to head-bang, the beer was flowing, there were some cute baby-punk girls in little tartan skirts around – all in all it was a good vibe. Yes, the crawl so far had been a bit of a disaster, but now we were back together. It felt good to be punk.

Just as things were starting to come together, Moby walked up to Bogus and I with a huge grin on his face. “Well guys,” he said, “it’s been fun, but I gotta go.” “Where are you off to?” asked Bogus. “Oh, nowhere. Just things are about to get a bit rough in here.” He winked, and handed Bogus something. “Enjoy yourselves.” Bogus inspected the item Moby had handed him. It was a small aerosol can on a keyring. Bogus sniffed it gingerly, and recoiled. “It’s a pepper spray can” he said. “And it’s empty.”

It quickly became obvious that the contents of the can had gone into the air-conditioning intake. Forewarned somewhat, Bogus and I were two of the first out the door, but we were still exposed enough that my eyes and nose were streaming, a feeling like the worst hay-fever imaginable. Within a minute the place was empty. On the footpath outside punks were coughing. Punks were crying. The dance floor seemed to have gotten it worst. One of the cute-baby punk girls throwing up in the gutter, while her friend sat next to her, crying and hyperventilating hysterically. The punks were upset. “It was the bastard cops,” I heard one say. “They must have maced someone right outside the window.” “Nah,” his friend replied. “It was the owner. He saw we were starting to have fun so he shut it down.” “C’mon man,” said Bogus. “Let’s get out of here before the cops show up.”

We headed up the road to a different pub, Bogus disposing of the mace can in a storm water drain along the way, and had a beer on the deck and watched while fire engines, ambulances and cop cars arrived one after another. After a while Moby showed up and joined us. “Why did you do it?” I asked him. “Those are your friends, shouldn’t you stick together?” “Because it’s punk” he replied with a sneer. “Those poseurs just don’t get it. Of course punks pepper spray other punks. Nothing is more punk than that.

By the last two inches the Reserva Churchills has gone much the same way as its brethren: bitter coffee, rough tobacco and tar. It’s not terrible, and I don’t need to spit, but I do need to take more regular sips of rum. These are big cigars, and a lot of crap is going to build up in two and a half hours of smoking. You have to expect that they’ll end like this.

And so the verdict: the Churchills Reserva is a way better cigar than the regular production Churchills, but it probably isn’t worth twice as much. When compared to the wider cigars of the world, it’s good, but it’s not transcendental. You could probably find a better use for your $100 in an aged EL or commemorative box. Way better than a Petit Coronas though.

Romeo y Julieta Churchill Reserva Cosecha 2008 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Romeo y Julieta Cedros de Luxe La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2014

Posted on April 14, 2016 by atgroom under La Casa del Habano Exclusivo, Romeo y Julieta

Amongst the more inexplicable releases of 2014 was the Romeo y Julieta Cedros de Luxe, that year’s addition to the La Casa del Habano Exclusive line (which are not especially exclusive, either to La Casa del Habanos stores, or the year of production, and least of all in number produced). The Romeo y Julieta line can loosely be broken up into several lines: the numbered series, which come in tubes, are available in gas stations, and are smoked mainly by non-aficionados; the Churchill series, which have the classic name, command a premium price, and are smoked by both the aficionado and non-aficionado alike; and the Exhibición series which are the exclusive domain of the aficionado. Then there’s the en Cedros cigars, which fall strongly into the “sell well in Spain” category (or to put it another way, are smoked by nobody). Why Habanos felt that adding a Gorditio to the cedros line (a size that was last seen de cedros as the 2007 Escudos EL) was a good idea is beyond me, but so it is. Today one shall burn.

Readers are sometimes surprised to learn that I don’t really smoke all that much. Aside from the odd social event – where I’ll hang a cigar out of my mouth and not really think about the flavours – the cigars you see burnt in these pages are pretty much the sum of it. Because of this I am approximately the world’s most spoiled smoker, with a palate accustomed exclusively to ancient limited editions and other rarities. Despite being 2014 cigars, the Cedros de Luxe only finally materialised in mid-2015, making this example the youngest thing I’ve smoked in years. It’s got a real tang to it up front, like biting into a vine leaf. That note only lasts for a second on the palate though, quickly fading into a sticky, milky sort of taste, with a walnut bitterness. Tobacco strength is a light medium. It’s not bad at all.

It’s mid-morning on a Tuesday, and I have decided to call today a Vitamin-D break. I logged into the office chat-program first thing, and when somebody addressed a question to me I replied “I’m out of the office this morning, will get back to you this arvo.” Nobody seemed to question it. There is a cool breeze blowing, but the little park I’m in is sheltered, and it’s nice in the sun.

I picked up a coffee on the way over. The sprightly young waitress took my order, but told me to wait for the barista, and made small talk with me until he arrived. He turned out to be an elderly Italian man, who was delighted when I declined his offer of sugar. “Good, good!” he said. “The last guy, he want hot chocolate with two sugars! Two sugars! It’s like can of coke! He want to kill himself, I think.” I smiled along, and murmured the platitudes one murmurs when somebody rants passionately at you about something you don’t have a lot of stake in. While he was talking the waitress had started wiping down the large tables, and was bending deep to reach the far side. The barista caught me checking out her butt and winked at me. “I think maybe sometimes you like the sugar, eh?” I threw up my hands, and smiled. “Sometimes I like two sugars.”

The burn of the Cedros de Luxe is not great, the coal burning only in the centre, and leaving the wrapper untouched. It has yet to totally go out, but has required several touch ups to keep a semi-decent smoke volume going. The ash seems unusually white for a cigar this young. By the mid-point the initial tang has transformed into a dryer one, resembling the herbaceous element of a martini. Hendricks gin, if I’m not mistaken, with a tiny splash of Noilly Pratt. Dry is a good word to describe this cigar. It sucks up the saliva.

The park I am in is a little patch of green between office complexes in Melbourne’s desolate docklands, so on a sunny morning like this it is naturally deserted. A beaded man, of a similar age to myself wanders by, a large pipe between his lips. He does a double take when he sees my cigar, and nods to me. Brothers of the leaf. The man wanders down to the water and out onto a small pier there. As I watch he places his pipe on a bollard (the very same bollard that my dusky beauties have rested on from time to time), and takes several photos. I wonder if he’s writing a pipe website somewhere.

As the coal touches the final inch of the Cedros de Luxe the tang is stronger, the tobacco strength thickening to a full medium. It goes out, and I relight it, and puff vigorously for the last ten minutes or so, finishing it off. Surprisingly it never grows bitter. The final notes are very herbal, quite milky.

In theory, en cedros cigars will gain a cedar quality over time, but at this stage the Cedros de Luxe doesn’t really exhibit one. It’s not a bad cigar, undergoing several flavour transitions while I was smoking, even if those were more or less variations on the same three notes. Still, for what it’s worth, I’d much rather smoke another of these than head back to the office. I even rate it marginally higher than the Escudos, and certainly the Petit Coronas.

Romeo y Julieta Cedros de Luxe La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2014 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Romeo y Julieta Double Corona 125 Aniversario Humidor

Posted on April 7, 2016 by atgroom under Commemorative Release, Romeo y Julieta

There is an interesting bit of trivia about the Romeo y Julieta Double Coronas from the 125^th Anniversary Humidor. Romeo had two notable releases in the year 2000, the aforementioned humidor and, from the first generation of Edición Limitada cigars, the Exhibición No. 2. The Exhibition No. 2 has a 49 ring gauge and a 194mm length. The Double Corona has a 49 and an 180mm length. If you look at the 125 Humidor, the layout is very hap-hazard. The cigars are in four compartments, in uneven numbers. For the most part the compartments are the right size for the cigars, and are divided by double walls of cedar, but in some places a single wall is used, and one of the compartments is about 15mm too big for its contents. The rumour is that the humidor was originally supposed to contain Exhibición No. 2s and Romeos, but they messed up their estimates and accidentally made the humidors too small. The solution they came up with was to lop 14mm off the Exhibición and call it a Double Corona.

Once lit, the cigar exhibits a light mid-tobacco note that leaves a little lactic stickiness on the cheeks. There is a slight note of whiteboard marker. The aftertaste is grassy straw.

When we last visited with my friend Lance Hendricks, he was in Taipei, living out the fugue spiral of an unemployable foreign cripple. Things have changed. A few years ago he returned to Melbourne, occupied the garden shed in his parent’s house, and began anew the fugue spiral of an unemployable cripple in Australia. His primary aspiration in life seems to be to upgrade from the regular unemployment benefit to the ‘super-dole’ (the disability pension).

Somewhere along the line he managed to ingratiate himself with a crowd of people – mainly female – in their early 20s. To peers in his own age group he is a fuckup; no career, no wife, no kids, living with his parents, with nothing more to show for his life than a few thousand views on his YouTube videos. People in their early twenties don’t care about that stuff though. To them he is an artist, a free spirit, living life outside of society’s norms. They don’t care that he still lives with his parents. Half their friends still live with their parents.

I welcomed his new friends with open arms, delighted at the prospect of ani influx of new life to my parties, which had become a bit dead since all my friends got married and had babies. Besides, if the girls were impressed with him, imagine what they’d think of me and my myriad accomplishments!

It was a beautiful dream, but it perished fast. A few months after he joined their circle I hosted one of my blowouts, and sure enough, the girls were impressed. “Wow,” one of them remarked. “I thought parties like this only happened in the movies.” Deep in my host state, and resplendent in my white dinner jacket (an exact copy of the one Humphrey Bogart wears in Casablanca [I’d had a tailor make it for me in China]), I was shaking up a cocktail for one my friend’s girlfriends when Jill (one of the 20 year olds) asked if I could make her something. The drink I was mixing was fairly weak already (its intended recipient was known to get rowdy) but nonetheless, I diluted it a little, and split off a glass for Jill.

Some hours later there was a tap on my shoulder, and a guest informed me that a girl was throwing up in the bathroom. I went to investigate, and found Jill in as bad a state as anyone has ever been. She was face down in the empty bathtub, bleary eyed, throwing up, and babbling incoherently about how she was going to die. She refused my offer of a bed to pass out in, and didn’t want me to call an ambulance, so I summoned Shortcake, a nurse and fellow guest. For the next few hours we sat together in the bathroom, assisting Jill through her crisis. I missed out on most of the bash, but it wasn’t so bad, really; Shortcake is extremely charming, and I enjoyed the intimate moment with her, if nothing else. In the end we drove Jill home together and put her to bed.

A week or so later Lance came to me and said he had bad news. “You know that Jill chick?” he asked.
“Sure, how’s she doing?”
“Well… ahh… she’s telling everyone you spiked her drink because you were trying to rape her.” I was mortified, but what was I to do? The arrows of injustice had been cast. I had no forum to defend myself. The 20 year olds never came to my parties again. From time to time I would see them sometimes at his soirees, and to be honest, they always seemed to be fine with me, friendly and easy going, but Lance would assure me that they all hated me. “You should hear what they say behind your back” he’d say. “They basically think you’re a paedophile rapist creep.” Over time, I grew to reciprocate their alleged feelings. When Lance would ask me if I wanted to go to one of their parties with him I would reply “No. Fuck those two-faced pricks.”

At the mid-point the cigar is very light, with slight notes of cedar and slighter ones of balsa wood. There remains a slight, chemical trial on the back end that is reminiscent of PVA glue. I’m drinking a beer, which is never a great pair with cigars, but this particular beer is an especially strong hoppy thing that completely drowns out anything more delicate that the cigar might have to offer. For an aged cigar like this, where delicacy is everything, it was a terrible choice.

One evening, after some years of animosity between myself and Lance’s young friends, I found myself in a nightclub, and at the bar I ran into one of their number. Her name was Sara. She was twenty-two years old, and looked happy to see me. We chatted for a few minutes before she took my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor, where she gyrated against me, hot and slow. Soon we were necking, and not too long after that we were lying sweaty on my bed in a state of post-coital bliss. “Wow,” she murmured. “That was amazing. Exactly like I imagined it.” I looked at her quizzically.
“You’ve been imagining it for a while?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’ve wanted you for years. Since the first moment I saw you. I never thought it would happen though because Lance always told us you hated us.”
“What? I don’t hate you. He told you I hated you?”
“Yeah, all the time. He says you look down on us. You think we’re drug addicts and fuckups and you hate us because we’re poor.” I laughed.
“He always told me you all hated me because Jill told everyone I tried to rape her.” She laughed.
“What? That’s not true. I never heard that. When?”
“At that party of mine where she was throwing up in the bath.”
“Really? I don’t think she ever said that.” I laughed, as the nature of Lance’s betrayal became clear to me. That son of a bitch.

Sara and I continued our affair for some weeks, and together we would delight in Lance’s continued duplicitousness. Once she showed me one of his texts: “I know you’re having fun with Groom, but he’s not all he seems. Don’t trust him.” As the weeks wore on, it became clear that Sara was falling for me a little bit. Coyly, she would sound me out. “Do you like me?” she’d ask. “I like you.”

And then, as quick as it began, it ended. She stopped returning my texts. After a week or so of silence I took the case to Lance. “So”, I began, accusatorially. “Sara has stopped returning my texts… any idea why that would be?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That chick isn’t interested in you. She was just using you for sex, she said you were getting too clingy so now she’s with some other guy.”
“That’s not true,” I told him. “That girl is halfway in love with me. I know you’ve been trashing me to her, c’mon, be honest, what’d you tell her?”
He got all embarrassed and stammered out half an admission, but wouldn’t go into specifics. A few minutes later he made an excuse and left.

Finally, I sent Sara a text. “I get that you don’t want to see me anymore and that’s fine, I won’t hassle you again, but please, just tell me, was it something Lance said? What did he say to you?” The reply came a few hours later, at two in the morning. “He showed me your Facebook chat you two-faced arsehole.”

In the morning I scrolled through years of Facebook chat with Lance, and found what I think might have been the offending text. It had been sent two years prior, and at the time had seemed more flip than it did in retrospect. “Hey man, that chick Sara is having a party tonight if you want to come and hover awkwardly.” “Thanks, but I think I can live without an evening in a squat with a bunch of crack addicts. Besides, I don’t think I have enough clothes from Savers to fit in there.”

In the final few inches the Double Corona thickens up nicely, with burnt caramel and wood-smoke, and some nice, earthy vegetal notes. On the whole, it’s a nice, old cigar that I suspect is a few years past its prime. The same, admittedly, could be said about the Exhibición No. 2, but to me that cigar had just a little more elegance. Perhaps it’s the extra 14mm.

I’d take the Double Corona over a Petit Coronas, but under an Exhibición 2 or 125 Romeo.

Romeo y Julieta Double Corona 125 Aniversario Humidor on the Cuban Cigar Website

A Harem of Dusky Beauties

Monthly Archives: April 2016

Romeo y Julieta Roundup

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Romeo y Julieta Churchill Reserva Cosecha 2008

Romeo y Julieta Cedros de Luxe La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2014

Romeo y Julieta Double Corona 125 Aniversario Humidor