The day is pleasant, high twenties and humid, and I have spent much of it on foot – so much, in fact, that my pedometer has crested 25,000 for the first time in living memory. Now, however, I have reached my destination. I am in the back corner table of a nice suburban pub, my friends and I well shaded beneath an umbrella. The beers are cold, and there are no other patrons to bother. It’s a fine afternoon for cigars.
The dusky beauty in question is the 2003 Romeo Edición Limitada, the Hermosos No. 1. From what I recall, these were well received in 2003, but thirteen years changes a cigar, so in 2016? Who knows. 2003 was such a mixed bag for ELs – the phenomenal Cohiba DC, the reviled Monte C, and the not-especially-memorable Partagás D2. The Romeo could go either way.
I’m lighting the cigar with a Bic lighter – there was a plane journey before my walk, and I didn’t like to bring a torch lighter in case it was confiscated – so it takes a little while to coax a coal from the Bic’s fitful fires. Eventually I get there. Perhaps a symptom of the slow light, the first puffs have no heat to them, and no bitterness at all. The tobacco is extremely light, the flavour slightly lactic, slightly herbal. All those things are marginal. Mostly it tastes like nothing. I wonder if perhaps this cigar is a little old.
The friends I’m with are old friends, school friends, and as we puff and laugh away, an ancient anecdote comes to mind. The year would have been around 1998, and I was in year 9, the youngest of the four forms at my high school. I was pimple faced pubescent with hair that was just marginally too long (by year 12 it would be a greasy mop that frequently earned me uniform citations for crossing the collar limit) and a voice that still cracked occasionally. My parents had become friendly with the parents of Fabian Swann, a classmate of mine. Fabian and I were largely ambivalent toward each other, but I guess it was convenient, so the Swanns had brought him over to my house, notionally so that we could do our homework together, while our parents attended the school’s Parents Trivia Night.
Fairly predictably, not a lot of homework was getting done, but Fabian and I felt that we had to at least make some show of it, so we were spreading our books out on the kitchen table when something fell out of Fabian’s diary. “Oh yeah,” he said “check this out.” It was a proto-selfie, taken on a disposable camera some weeks prior at school camp. The subject was one of our classmates, Stavros Dimitriadis. Even by the standards of a teenage boy, Stavros was enduring a particularly brutal puberty; he was overweight, with pale skin that acted as an ideal canvas to extenuate his acne, a big, nobly nose, thick glasses and braces. Stavros always copped a lot of shit (it didn’t help that he had an identical twin brother, lived above a fish and chip shop, and proudly wore the Christian fish symbol on his blazer lapel), but at the moment in question he was undergoing an especial moment of fame. A few weeks prior, at the aforementioned school camp, we had gone caving (essentially writhing through foot high tunnels in close quarters with your classmates). Stavros was one of the last of the class to exit, so we were all standing around in a circle watching when he popped out of the ground, his glasses fogged up, and wearing a miner’s helmet with a light on it. Somebody yelled out “it’s a mole-man,” and that was it: Stavros would never be known as anything else. Being still relatively fresh, any reference to moles, mole-men, or Stavros had the class in stiches.
The photo that Fabian produced was about as unflattering as any that has ever been taken: low angle, it captured both Stavros’ double chin and his nose, and the sun gleamed equally off his greasy skin and his braces. “Let’s put it on a chick’s body,” I suggested.
The year being 1998, my family internet connection was restricted to a 28.8 baud modem that connected to a server at my dad’s work (he worked at a university). He had cautioned me repeatedly that every site would be monitored by their IT department, so an AltaVista search for something like “female body” was completely out of the question. Instead we leafed through a coffee table book until we found a picture of Chloé, a rubenesque nude that famously hangs in a pub in Melbourne, and scanned her. Using a trial version of some editing software that I had gotten on a shareware CD, we successfully planted Stavros’ head on Chloé’s body. The editing was awful, but good enough: the dichotomy between the pale nude’s body and the Greek boy’s greasy face was hilarious.
We printed out two copies, and the next day at school Fabian had one in his folder, and discreetly we began to show our friends, who all found it just as funny as we did. It was all going swimmingly until Cameron Sprague got a hold of it and stuck it up on the whiteboard. The whole class pissed themselves except Stavros, who snatched it down and fled the room in tears. Half an hour later the year-level coordinator came to get me.
The cigar at the mid-point has thickened considerably, although it is still only barely a mid-strength cigar. There are a few vague notes, some floral elements, the occasional lactic hint, but mostly at the moment it is dominated by a Mānuka honey taste stronger than I recall finding in any other cigar.
They only knew about me, but in the hopes of a lesser punishment, I immediately rolled on Fabian. It didn’t work. After a lot of shouting I was given a one-day suspension, a week of detention, and I had to have my parents sign the offending picture. I thought my parents would be the worst part of the punishment, but in the end it wasn’t too bad. They yelled at me a bit, but mostly they seemed mildly amused.
After I had served my detentions the incident died down. Stavros seemed to forgive me. Classmates would reminisce about it occasionally, and ask if I still had a copy, but alas, a condition of my parent’s punishment was that I delete the files from the computer, and the signed copy that I handed to the coordinator I never saw again.
There was something of an epilogue some years later, however, when Miss Kok (Miss Kok [she insisted it was pronounced “Coke”] too was the butt of a lot of our jokes, but also our pubescent fantasies: she was blonde, busty, wore a lot of singlet tops, and did a lot of jumping, leaping and jiggling around in her role as a drama teacher) asked me about it.
“Hey Alex, do you still have that picture of Stavros on the girl’s body that you made in year nine?”
“No, they made me destroy all the copies. How do you know about that?”
“Oh, we had that up in the staff room for weeks – that was hilarious.”
In the last few inches the Hermosos No. 1 firmly establishes itself as mid strength, but as it does the honey fizzles out and is replaced by a sort of chemical tang, not unreminiscent of high-quality fly spray. As it progresses the tar gets stronger and stronger, until I’m basically just smoking for the nicotine. It is neither bad nor good.
Overall, the Hermosos No. 1 is a fine cigar, and what notes there are are delicate and delicious. In 2016, however, there is not a whole lot to it. I suspect it may be five years too old. If you have a box and are saving them for something, now is the time.
Still better than a Petit Coronas though.
Romeo y Julieta Hermosos No. 1 Edición Limitada 2003 on the Cuban Cigar Website