Buttheads

We all shake our heads at the repercussions of this. Christ, is there no justice?

Our last stop is Tosca, where owner Jeannette Etheridge sits by herself at the end of the bar. Conrad greets her with a big hug. Jeannette's nephew Peter Ridet is a motorcycle mechanic by trade but has custom-designed the cigar humidors for Auntie's bar. The larger of the two is recessed into the back bar, and is a beautiful work of art, each drawer covered with inlaid sheet music of the aria Tosca. Copies of Conrad's cigar and martini books are displayed inside.

Conrad and I sidle up to the bar for a couple of beers, and he motions the bartender to bring over the portable humidor, a handsome purpleheart-wood contraption also built by Ridet. The Tosca logo is beautifully inset in sterling silver on the lid. Seduced by its polished elegance, we hover over the thing, gently pulling out and pushing back each wooden tray of cigars, like drunken jewelers appraising a new acquisition.

In The Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar by Zino Davidoff, perhaps the world's ultimate cigar snot, the author writes in 1969 that "a well-chosen cigar is like armor and is useful against the torments of life. A little blue smoke mysteriously removes anxiety." There have been quite a few well-chosen cigars this evening, building up layer upon layer of armor, but if Conrad and I have even one more puff both of us are going to turn green and be rushed to S.F. General with angina. The torments of life are definitely left behind, however.

The warm wooden bar of Tosca becomes our throne for final thoughts, the muffled thump of the Palladium disco next door barely registering in our ears. The blue smoke of fine premium cigars has lightly brushed our souls, carrying us over the threshold of anxiety into the twilight forest of dreams, where the climate is always relatively humid, the soil rich, and the tobacco leaves green and strong, thrusting upward to the heavens of man's innate, inevitable potential.

In two years it will all pass. America will have rediscovered another vice to soothe its restless psyche. S.F.'s newest craze will be restaurants that feature elk meat. Barnaby Conrad III will be promoting his luxurious coffee-table book called The Art of Venison. And I'll no doubt be attending the Hyatt Regency's "Big Carnivore '98," an open-flame feast sponsored by Marvin Shenken's Flesh Aficionado magazine.