Near-Misses With Your Lit Cigar...

[Robusto]

Have you ever dropped a cigar?
Lost it?
Worried about an inferno?

Sounds like a cheap advert beginning...

Most smoking-related house fires, according to my firemen muso mates, start in bed. Or they start because people fall asleep, or because they are pissed - and very often due to a combination of both.

I do love to smoke a great cigar in bed when I can get away with it. I never smoke when I'm tired. And I never get drunk.

That leaves me with the car window situation and I bet this has happened to a number of us.

I was driving home late after playing a few months ago. I usually time cigars to be over by the time I get home.

I admit to being a bad boy. I do not use an ash-tray in the car, and simply flick ash out as I drive along. When I'm at home, I like to find a good respectful resting place for a butt. Usually by a bush in the garden. Back to nature, and all that.

When driving, I cannot make such choices. Eventually the butt is lobbed out, and I prefer an empty road with nobody behind me and to be driving at speed because I really like to see the sparks fly and bounce behind me as the cigar tumbles, skips and dies on the road.

On the night of my burning, I was very close to home and chucked the final centimetre of my beautiful stogie out of the car window under a nearby railway bridge.

Except I didn't.

I realised the butt had bounced back and was on the car floor somewhere.

I arrived at home soon afterwards and was desperate to find it. This was about 0100. I couldn't see or smell it at all.

I carry a lot of costly musical equipment in the car when we play gigs so had to set about unloading keyboards, mixing desk, amplifiers, monitor, seat, stands, and so on, onto the pavement next to my house late at night.

And still I didn't find the butt.

After a lot of faffing and night-whispered swearing, I put everything back in the car in its jig-saw place, had a final sweat, scratched my head and decided to give up and go to bed.

I slept very lightly indeed because I thought all my equipment would be in ruins in a fire. I propped the windows wide open up in the attic where we sleep to hear spits and sparks...

But it didn't catch fire, and I concluded that the cigar must have flown out of the window and that I must have been totally mistaken.

It was MONTHS later when I was trying to get a 50p coin out of a space between my driver's seat and the car wall that I discovered the long-dead butt of my Montecristo wedged in a really awkward and hidden position on the plastic moorings you get below car seats. I knew exactly when and where that sod had been lost, and dumped it in the garden flower border without thinking about its reincarnation!

Fortunately no bad came of this, but I heard Johnathan Ross (UK talk-show host et al) talking about driving in his sports car and losing lit cigars on the floor in front of him and having a mad scramble to retrieve his smokes. In Q last year they showed some pictures of him posing to camera and knocking back a monster Cohiba so he should have been able to find one of those fat bastards beneath his pedals!

Has anyone else had a 'moment', or maybe a fright, with a lost cigar?

[smokiejoe]

I havent lost my cigar,but you know i had an incident with my bloody horse running off with it in its mouth and havin a good chew,but apart from that i have burnt my arm several times whilst welding on cars.The cigar doesnt quite fit under the mask and the cigar tends to burn through my overals and ends up burning my arm,.what a bugger.

[larrysputnik]

Generally I don't smoke in my car. Mostly because I most enjoy a cigar with a good scotch or a cold beer. Driving would be disastrous.

However, I remember when a friend of mine was driving and smoking and he threw the cigar out the window only to have it fly right back in and into his lap . He quickly brushed it off onto the floor to avoid getting burned and it fell near the pedals. Unfortunately this was about the same time he remembered that he was in the car he was borrowing from his parents and they would be pissed to find any damage caused by a cigar. So he frantically attempted to reach down to the floor to get the cigar before it burned the floor mat and failed to navigate the turn in the road. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there was a telephone pole that stopped the car for him. The car ended up totaled and a costly lesson lesson learned: Never, ever take your eyes off the road when approaching a turn.

Similarly, there is a hysterical scene in the movie Big Lebowski that is very similar to this situation, only "The Dude" is smoking a joint, not a cigar. Very funny though.