• This entire feature article "Cigar Blues" is available in Acrobat pdf.
• Author's historical introduction
• Actual feature article as published
• Illustrations

Written February 1978 and published in Drummer 22, May 1978, with photographs I had collected previously on sex safaris, including two of my original photos. As editor, I tried to approach each issue like a concept album for a rock group, say, Sargent Pepper, or Tommy, or most particularly and exactly for me in all my writing about the Titanic 70s, the Eagles’ Hotel California which is the total soundtrack to life in San Francisco on 18^th and Castro and Folsom Street. To invent Drummer-specific topics, I looked for the unexpected something that lay beneath the surface of gay masculinity emergently waiting to come out into gay popular culture which was inventing itself by the minute.

            This was the first article on cigars in the gay press.

            Cigars seemed to me something reserved to straight macho men, because I grew up in a seminary boarding school where most of the priests and seminarians smoked cigars. I figured to transfer that to gay culture. So I wrote this introduction to cigars. (In 1970, I had asked my playmate, Lou Thomas, to introduce cigars into his Target Studio shots with a theme titled, “Tokers and Takers.”) To demonstrate the power of the press, within a month of this Drummer issue hitting the stands, the first cigars began to show up in leather bars. Immediately there was passion for and against cigars. There were fights and resistance. One guy said to me , “Why do you smoke that horrible thing?” I said, “Crowd control.” As he ran off in a snit, I said, “See what I mean?”

            Cigars fit into leather and S&M, and then into the bear culture. I’ve often wondered why, with gay men’s interest in smoking as fetish, publishers with money troubles don’t go to the tobacco companies for advertising. Even if a person hates tobacco, smoking is still a free choice. Actually, combining cigars and sex reinforces the pleasures of both. Many guys who hate cigarets find they can justify the sensuality of a cigar because they smoke only during sex. In 1989, Chris Nelson shot me for his photography book, The Bear Cult, with a cigar, and in one of his rapturous photos of that elegant shoot, the billowing smoke all but conceals my face, which is, of course, one of the bits of shape-shifting magic behind cigars. Cigars also figure prominently in my own photo book from the same publisher, Jack Fritscher’s American Men, as well as in many of my Palm Drive Videos, because cigars make models immediately interesting by suggesting a backstory to the actor’s persona.

            As a professional note, ‘Cigar Blues” is actually fiction I wrote in the disguise of a feature article. I interviewed no one; there were no letters; and “Dan Willoughby,” at the conclusion, is actually Dan DuFort who lived on Willoughby Street in Los Angeles where, at that address, on August 16, 1978, he introduced me to the bodybuilder, Jim Enger, who came over for the evening in his LAPD uniform, and stayed with me for the next thirty months in one of the most intense and passionate personal erotic affairs in a decade of incredible sex.

            That made Dan DuFort indelible in my life.

            On his own, Dan DuFort won second place in the Gay Games physique context. I shot him on video doing his posing routine on the front steps of San Francisco City Hall, right in front of the middle door, as tourists streamed awestruck around him. I had previously shot him in my Palm Drive video, Gut Punchers, which was the first gut-punching video.

            My last face-to-face encounter with Dan DuFort occurred when I drove to Los Angeles in 1990 to give my lecture on Robert Mapplethorpe to the Avatar group. What happened that week in LA is a film noir. What happened was a literal odyssey of operatic sex and death and disappearing dead bodies and traded identities. The details are in my Journal piece titled “LA Is Burning: June 26-July 2, 1990.”[“LA Is Burning” is available privately on request.]

            At that time, Dan DuFort had lost both his mother and his job as a wig comber for Phantom of the Opera, and was living in a sad little storefront just off Santa Monica Boulevard, one step up from the street. He was so totally caught up in tobacco as a symbol of masculinity that he was smoking four packs of cigarets a day. After that visit, I kept in touch by telephone. Then he lost his phone. Only he could call me. He used pay phones. Then the calls ceased. I stop to weep. Dan DuFort disappeared completely in 1992. Without him, the narrative line of Some Dance to Remember, and the narrative line of my life, would have been quite different.–©Jack Fritscher, May 31, 2002

Editor’s Note
Two Drummer Pioneers Together Again:
John Embry and Jack Fritscher

            The publishing details of “Cigar Blues” are the feature was written by Jack Fritscher who also shot the photographs on pages 8 and 14. All the other photographs are from the Collection of Jack Fritscher: page 10, both bottom photographs, as well as two photographs of Nick Nolte, including photographs by Lou Thomas from Target Studio with Thomas’ permission.

            In the ongoing fitful collaboration between the two Drummer pioneers, Jack Fritscher and John Embry, “Cigar Blues” was reprinted twenty-one years later, with Jack Fritscher’s permission, as a cover feature by John Embry in his Manhood Rituals #3, 1999, pages 4-9 and 58-59 with six photographs shot by Jack Fritscher, and a Versace ad from the Collection of Jack Fritscher.

            In his editorial, John Embry wrote: “It’s like deja vu all over again. We’ve been pouring through the first 100 issues of Drummer [John Embry was involved with only the first 99 issues]...a task pleasantly filled with powerful memories of other times and people and circumstances.”

            Embry also included in MR a half-page Palm Drive Video display ad, page 59, featuring photographs by Jack Fritscher of Palm Drive models, Dave Gold and Jack Husky, both of whom appeared frequently in Fritscher photographs in both Drummer and many Brush Creek Media magazines such as Bear and Classic Bear Annual. John Embry’s company Wings Distributing, particularly when managed by writer Frank Hatfield, who was also a famously convicted bank robber, sold hundreds of copies of Palm Drive Videos over the years.
–© Mark Hemry, editor, July 1, 2002

What’s longer than a man’s dick and thicker than a Texas finger? Cigars: Coronas, Panatellas, Maduros. Advertising dictates that a man doesn’t smoke his cigar--he wears it! So, along with homomacho boots, a down-filled vest, and a CAT ball-cap, what goes best with an open beer can in the cab of your buddy’s new 4-wheel pickup? Answer: a good tasting, aggressive cigar bit down hard between a hard-driving man’s teeth.

            Some guys never think of cigars as erotic. They ought to think again while they whistle with The Eagles “Everything All The Time.” Some guys say, “Cigars? Never.” Today’s never is next Saturday night’s fetish.

            When you think about it, what besides cock better fits a leather/western/uniform man’s face? Cigars, as symbols and for real, are pleasures the sensual hardass man can use for a very good olfactory time.

NONSMOKERS’ SURPRISE

            In their first cigar encounter, even guys who smoke nothing but grass end up surprised that their nose has a sensuality beyond sweat, smegma, poppers, and coke. A cigar, experienced from inside a scene, is a totally different trip from the cigar your dad smoked in your family’s old Studebaker with the windows rolled up. (Depending on your particular fetish: maybe not totally.) When you’re a man, you put away the attitudes of a child. You’re not afraid to sophisticate your head.

            Cigars actually taste and smell terrific when the right man seduces you into their pleasures. Give a cigar a go once. Forever after you’ll get hard fast at the sight of a young, blond trucker stopped at a traffic light with a butt clamped in his perfect white redneck teeth. You’ll feel a deeper urge when you watch fresh USMC meatloaves strutting down the boulevards of Oceanside celebrating their first leave by treating each other to some hot-buddy cigars. And then there’s those locker-room jocks jawin’ down on an A & C Grenadier.

QUARTERBACK’S BUTT IN GEAR

            Oakland Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler says: “Cigars are for victories. At least that’s how it seems to me. Because I’ve never felt like smoking a cigar after losing a game. No matter how far ahead we were at halftime, I could never light a cigar up before the game was over. That would be too cocky (Stabler’s word) even for me. Since I’ve been playing pro ball, I’ve smoked a lot. I’ll tell you true, a cigar’s one beautiful smoke.”

            Stabler could sell his butts mail-order.

COP CIGARS

            One cop-freak in Milwaukee, which has the most handsome young foot patrol in the USA, hangs out in coffee shops frequented by the best blue knights. Hard young cops are as partial as homosensualists to cigars these days. Some of them swing out of their squad cars, half-smoked butts in their faces. They drop into a diner, order some coffee, lay their cigars in their ashtray when the food arrives, eat, and, half the time, leave with their butts abandoned. The cop-freak eases past their booth and scoops up the genuine, authentic cop-butts.

            Authenticity, before all, is the essence of any true fetish.

            At home, he bags the butts in his Seal-a-Meal, storing the Baggies for a good night’s fetish jerk-off: rubbing the cigars on his cock and balls, shoving them up his ass, wetting them in his mouth, lighting them up, pulling into his body the same rich, sweet smoke the cop only hours before had inhaled into his dark and hairy chest.

            Perhaps, the cop, somewhere off in the night, feels an energy charge rush down his spine. He is, after all, the backup receiver of the fetish communication.

            “Cigars,” one man says, “are my main turnon. I’ve been smoking cigars off and on since I was 14. The first hardon and jackoff session I ever had was from watching a good-looking actor on a TV program smoke a cigar. The sight of a straight guy with a cigar in his mouth and several more big ones sticking out of his shirt pocket never fails to get my cock stiff. I can get turned on just standing in front of a cigar counter watching what kind of guy buys what kind of cigar. Cigars are a whole expressive attitude. Sometimes I light up a cigar and stand in front of the mirror and jerk off.”

            The man smiles a grin of bone-deep satisfaction.

            “I like big, thick, long cigars: Maduros, Emperors, Coronas, and Magnates. My cigar-smoking sex is with a partner who also turns on this way: rolling a cigar in my mouth that’s been up his ass and vice versa; licking the spit off his cigar after he’s rolled it in his mouth; transferring a cigar back and forth from his mouth to mine while we smoke it, inhale, and kiss each other man-to-man with mouths full of smoke. You get the drift.”

MEAN TOKERS

            Any scene you can think of, you can bet some guy somewhere is beating off to it. All you gotta do is find him. Some tokers are natural takers. Smoking is, after all, an essentially aggressive act: people pushy enough to light up little fires and blow breathy smoke in public places.

            Two cigar-buddies wrote wanton ads, and the best filth of the homomacho world beat a path to their doors.

● W/M jock, 27, good-looking cigar smoker, wants submissive males 25-50 to light my fire, lick my grimy boots, pig out on my sweaty asshole. Into uniforms, with stogie, with heavy humiliation. Beg for my sweaty pits. Suck my cum-filled jock. Eat my butts. Be my ashtray.

● Oiled bodybuilder seeks mutual macho cigar lover to puff away while I pose for you as I smoke a big, fat cigar. Into mutual oil, cigar, and muscle scene. Not usually heavy s and m, but will stub butt out on willing butt of very willing depraved muscle slave.

            Is this why Newman and Redford smoked cigars in The Sting? Is this why O. J. Simpson and boxer Leon Spinks prefer to be photographed with cigars? Is this why Nick Nolte smokes cigars heavily on and off the movie set? Cigars are a measure of image.

            Any erotically adventurous homosensualist will say: “If you can name anything I haven’t done, it’s only because I haven’t had the time–yet.”

CIGARS LIKE CHAMPAGNE: AN ACQUIRED TASTE

            Sometimes having a secret fetish is a lot like being a closet case. For a long, lonely time you’re the only freak in the world. Then comes the night you discover a buddy who, in the deep of the dark and the heat of his passion, confesses to a kink as closeted as yours. And there you are: Instant Brothers. No longer alone and feeling weird.

            Sometimes a guy has a great rap on why a certain fetish intrigues the hell out of him. One of the most honest is a California biker who does a cigar “take” worthy of a man who has the courage of his perversion.

            “I’m a totally dedicated cigar freak. Right now I’m smoking my favorite--Garcia y Vega Gran Premio. It’s the biggest, best-tasting cigar I’ve found yet, but I keep looking for bigger ones that have as good or better flavor. I can smoke these motherfuckers all day long, and frequently do.

            “I was into cigars before I was out of grammar school. My folks owned a drug store in San Jose then, so getting them was no problem. I used to have a couple of buddies who smoked with me, but for some reason I had sense enough to now that it was just a teenage kick for them while I was getting sexually turned on. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was shoving them up my ass and smoking them while I jacked off.

            “Then I moved to Santa Rosa, got my first Harley, and used to get my kicks by having a few beers and riding the Harley through town with a big cigar in my mouth and pissing in my Levi’s as I went along. In case you haven’t guessed, I’m also a piss freak!

            “I have a friend who is also into smoking Gran Premios and when we get together, he usually wears only boots, chaps, and a leather vest. He likes to smoke cigars and drink beer while I play with him. He’s a real professional cigar smoker-really digs it and does it well. I love to watch him smoke, and he knows it and loves to be watched. (He also has a bike and likes to ride around with a big cigar in his mouth to attract attention.) By the time he has finished three half-pints of beer (I get it second-hand), he is usually pretty far down in his second cigar, and he likes to fuck me in the ass while he finishes the second cigar. He chews the ends, rolls the cigars around in his mouth, inhales–really turns my ass inside out just watching him. He also likes to flick the hot ashes on me, spit tobacco juice on me, belch while I’m kissing him, and fart while I’m rimming him.

            “Then we switch roles and I do the same thing to him. We have talked about getting into snuff but haven’t done it yet. Have to leave something to look forward to. I know a few other guys who are into smoking cigars that have been up someone’s ass, but not too many.

            “I can turn on to any kind of sex with a guy into cigars, whether he is smoking them, I am, or both of us are. I dig being fucked while smoking a cigar, especially if the guy doing the fucking is smoking one, too. And the other way around is just as good. I like to suck off a cigar smoker, and dig getting sucked off while smoking.

            “I have met some guys who are into smoking two or more cigars at a time. This can be a fuckin’ turn-on too.

            “In addition to big, fat cigars, I like the really long, slender ones. I also personally prefer the dark ones to the lighter ones, but I’m not that particular. Any cigar smoker turns me on. Age, race, build, whatever are all immaterial if the dude is into cigars. I have to admit it’s a fuckin’ turn-on to see a young dude puffin’ on a stogie, though!”

            Typically, for a homosensualist, the fetish item itself is preferred to actual flesh. Some men, in actuality, do not hold up too well when pressed. Personal ads are often idealized lies.Very often they cannot, or will not, deliver in action what they promise in fetish attitude.

BISEXUAL BLOWS GAYS SMOKE

            When I asked my oiled bodybuilder for some leads on a mutual cigar smoker, he recommended a hot and free-swinging bi-guy in Southern California. We met in Hermosa Beach at that seaside restaurant where supposedly Leonard Cohen saw Suzanne take his hand. In that mixed crowd, alone in a corner booth, Doug told how cigars were his only connection to gay activity.

            “I suppose I can be honest in saying I am a little frustrated in trying to satisfy my fantasies and sometimes I feel like I’m the only guy in town with my little secret fetish.

            “Cigars and cigar smoke get me hot. Whenever I see a guy smoking a cigar or with one hanging out of his mouth, I go crazy. Especially if the guy is in leather or is a super-macho type.

            “As far as my experience into my trip, I’ve met only one person. I met a guy in Palm Springs. He was 42 years old, attractive, balding, and heavily tattooed. He was about 6’5” and 280 pounds. He had a big gut. He was more on the straight side than gay, but the two of us got on fine until he moved back to Wyoming.

            “I guess our scene was pretty much of a role-playing situation. He liked to sit on the toilet and have me suck his cock for hours. He would hang his cigar out of his mouth while I went down on him. When he took a drag, he liked to wet-kiss me and exhale his hot smoke into my mouth. What turned me on the most was while I was on my knees servicing him with his fingers. And he would talk to me and tell me it took a real man to smoke a cigar, and I agree.

            “He liked to fuck me with a cigar in his mouth, and when he sucked on my nipples, he held his cigar between his fingers and played with my other nipple. We liked to sleep together. We had a good time and he was a good trip. I sure miss him.

            “The only other adventures I’ve had are just macho trade types who would hang cigarettes out of their mouth while I sucked them off, usually at rest stops.

            “I want to emphasize that I am bisexual. I do not turn on to the gay lifestyle. I like very macho men who don’t look or act gay. Believe it or not, I’ve taken a lot of straight guys to bed. Most of my sex is with married or bisexual men.

            “I am completely french active. I have, at times, had fantasies of having a cigar-smoking man go down on me and me perhaps fucking him. But the situation has never happened where this could have occurred.

            “I do have one reoccurring fantasy. At my place of employment, the president of my company, who is a very naturally elegant and tailored gentleman, always has a long, expensive cigar in his mouth. He is very refined-looking and very much a real man. Whenever I see him, I fantasize on what it would be like to be with him alone while he smoked his cigar.

            “Another thing: on occasion I go to redneck bars and watch truckers and cowboy types with cigars. Being shy in a bar, I don’t make out a whole lot. But sometimes, when it’s late enough and some cigar smoker is high enough, I get to get it on with what a lot of times I just have to be content looking at.

            “Sometimes, too, I offer a guy in a straight bar a cigar. I always carry two or three in my shirt pocket. I get hard holding the match up close to his face, watching him puff and pull on that big cigar. He has no idea, at that seemingly innocent moment, what he’s doing for my sex life. That is really and truly a CIGAR RAPE.”

CIGAR CHAIN LETTERS

            Some guys trade cigars like good Scouts trade comic books. Before a butt is completely burnt out, six or seven men may have smoked up to an inch apiece of it before they mail it on to the next guy. The cigar itself usually arrives in a well-wrapped box. Rolled around the long brown cylinder that grows shorter as it makes the cigar-chain rounds is a letter of erotic instructions.

            A lineman for CILCO (Central Illinois Light Company) sent along the following directions with a cigar burnt half-down on one end and well chewed on the other., He likes to drive his panel truck while he holds his burnt-out butt in his teeth:

                        Hey Stoker:

The enclosed cigar has been lovingly prepared for your jerkoff by a generously endowed guy who, like you, loves to stroke and cum while smoking a cigar. So take out your cock. Put on your cock ring. Grease up. Light the cigar. Doesn’t it smell great? Take a couple of long drags as you start stroking yourself. Then, think of me and how I got off on that same cigar. From my mouth to yours. The hands that I jerked off with touched that cigar and now you’re touching it too.

I love guys who smoke cigars, all kinds, including the fuckers who stick their meat in assholes. But I like big meat, regardless: thick, huge pricks with nice, long, uncut heads and a deep-set rim around the head. I love to wrap my lips around the head and twist and twist and drive the guy horny mad. Then I piston him till he creams in my throat and I taste his delicious cum mixing with the taste of our cigars. Cum and cigars–ain’t that a double dip!

Hope you’re enjoying your stroking and smoking. Putting a cigar in your mouth is like having a prick there. Fuck it in and out a bit, holding that cigar like a he-man stud. Try putting your fingers around it as you slip it in your mouth and let the lit part be toward the palm of your hand. Then take it out of your mouth and watch the prick-end smoke by itself.

Wish we could be together! I’d like to suck you while you smoke. Hope you enjoy smoking the same cigar with a guy who’s sucking you. It’s great. Between sucks, when you’re getting hot, hold the cigar out to him and let him take a couple of drags and blow on your cock as he goes back to work. Then you can kiss while mutually smoking the same cigar and smell and taste each other’s cigar breath and moisture.

Are you creaming yet? If not, keep going and cum! Now, take out a fresh cigar when you’re hard again and stroke and smoke some more. Finish about a third of it, then shoot. Then mail the cigar to me and tell me how you enjoyed it. I’ll smoke another third and send it on to another cigar buddy and that way we’ll complete the mutual jerkoff round.

By the way, I’m eight inches uncut. I’m medium thick with low-slung balls. I like to stroke and J/O and smoke a cigar on the phone. We could really get each other hot. Do it once a week. You can call me collect any evening or weekends. Keep trying if you can’t get me the first time. Have it greased and hard and horny and tell me all about your technique. We’ll shoot together over cigars. How about it? Do it soon. Send me your cigars and cum. Here’s to lot of mutual cigar jerkoffs.

Yours in thick blue stogie smoke,

–Eddie

VICTIM/CELEBRANT OF BLOODLUST: BODY MODIFICATION, SCARIFICATION

            On Ringold Alley, south of Market Street in San Francisco, behind The Brig bar, is a loft set up for heavy scenes by a guy who came to The City back in the Summer of Love. He worked his way from the Haight to Folsom and he brought his astrology and his reincarnational feeling with him.

            He’s into cigars.

            He’s into knives and needles.

            He’s into cosmic endurance .

            “I’ll tell you why I need, want and prefer trips,” he says. “In my last existence, I was tortured.”

            “To death?” I ask.

            “By men with cigars. By men with knives.”

            “Where?” (I get told a lot of shit.) “When?”

            “Germany. I’m sure. The late 1930’s.”

            “Sounds like a drug fantasy.”

            “This is reincarnational memory. I remember the looks on my executioners’ faces. They held cigars right in their teeth. I wasn’t more than about nineteen. Their hands seemed gigantic to me. Hard. Disciplined. Cold. They held me down on a cement floor. One by one each solder took his cigar from his mouth. I was naked. One man burned me with his cigar. I refused to scream. Another took a puff. His cigar glowed very hot. He burned me. I would not scream. I could tell them nothing.”

            He massaged his crotch.

            “They smiled and laughed. They liked what they were doing to me. The smoke around their faces and hair was blue and thick. They tied me stretched to iron rings in the floor. They made a contest of torturing me. They called the game THE FIVE-MINUTE CIGAR. They were young soldiers. Gaming. Every five minutes the whole night long, every five minutes, they burned me, then cut me. Burned and sliced me. In time with the tick of the clock.Every five minutes. Before dawn they ground out their butts on my body and stabbed me to death. Finally I screamed. I died that time looking into their smiling faces.”

            “This sounds,” I say, “interesting. But like one too many acid trips.”

            “My actions,” he replies, “speak louder than my words.”

            He leads me to the rear of his loft, into a special workroom he has built. The cubicle is small, dark, and cold: not unlike the room he described in his story. He motions me to a stool in the corner. He positions himself before a large mirror. He stares straight into his own image, conjuring his other self, stripping himself slowly as his intensity increases.

            A man torturing himself is an incredible sight.

            I sit silent, an observer at his private blood ritual. From the sight of his muscular torso, he must work on himself at least once a week. He is a beautiful man: marked, burned, and cut with intricate designs. His self-imposed disfiguration has become part of his integral beauty.

            In remembrance of his old blood spilled in that cellar, he takes deep pleasure in the slow lighting of his cigar, holding it, thick, brown, and smoking, in his mouth, rolling it side to side, tasting it on his tongue, hot, spit-thick, and heavy. He breathes the smoke deep into his throat. His cock hardens.

            He takes iron pleasure in pushing multiple needles through the skin of his belly and chest, nipples and foreskin. He holds the glowing red cigar tip, hot with his passioned puffs, against the needles through his flesh, conducting the heat from the cigar down the steel needles into his skin, cauterizing the pierced meat of his body. His cock, pierced and warmed, grows large in his endurance of the pain.

            He lies back, puffs, inhales the smoke deeper, like a blue fist down his throat, smoking now as his old killers had smoked then, until, with one final glowing red puff, he holds the smoldering cigar quickly against the shaft of his cock. He shoots, his spilling load sanctifying, making bearable his remembered agony. In this way, his head copes. He joins what of the reincarnated past he cannot change. Only in the energy of his present lust is he strong enough to match the energy-drain of his last, past agonized death by cigars and knives. “I am, he explains to me later,” a victim and a celebrant of bloodlust.”

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: FETISH ESSENCE

            Someday smoking, like jerking off, may be illegal in public. One good consolation: prohibition improves mystique. Fetishes, offbeat by essence, are always better as a low-profile trip. (Where would the fun of, for instance, rubber be if everybody wore rubber in public instead of under their three-piece suits like they’re supposed to?) Smoking, after all, is a National American Fetish. I mean, where the fuck is Marlboro Country? Inside that best of all sex organs: our heads. That’s where the fetish connections happen. Smoking in and of itself has nothing to do with sex, but advertising tells us different. Advertising programs the connections in our heads. Smoking, males learn is what Real Men do.

            The essence of a sexual fetish is that the fetish is not a mindless habit. A fetish demands full erotic attention. Habitual cigar smoking is too mindless to be a fetish, although cigars can be a habit with the man who then becomes, precisely because of his habit, the object of the cigar fetishist’s full sexual attention. In the following pas de deux, the cigar-smoking bodybuilder has a straightforward cigar habit; my erotically attuned friend, Dan DuFort [who introduced me to my bodybuilder lover, Jim Enger], a homomuscular bodybuilder, has a cigar fetish.

            After a recent physique contest in LA, iron-pumped Dan, who works out with The Big Boys at Gold’s, pointed to one of the runner-up contestants meeting his girl on the steps outside the auditorium. Standing with her on his hip while talking to his body-buddies, Mr. Muscles pulled out a cigar, fired it up, and gave attitude like the winner he very nearly was that night. His group lingered for almost twenty minutes.

            Dan moved downwind to inhale the cigar smoke blown carelessly away by the bodybuilder.

            Fetishists thrive on the fact that you can do almost anything you want in public because, when you come right down to it, everybody else is so wrapped up in their own trip they have little time to really notice what you’re doing anyway.

            When the physique star and his girl broke away from their group, we followed them to the vicinity of his car. When he unlocked her door, he wanted one more hit off his cigar, now burned down to a short butt. His huge bicep pumped up big as he curled his cigar up to his lips for the last drag. He inhaled deep, then dropped the butt to the concrete.

            Dan said under his breath: “God! Please don’t let him grind it out with his boot.”

            God heard his prayer.

            Mr. Muscles drove off. Dan closed in on the butt like Galahad on the Grail. He took his prize home and did unspeakably worshipful things in the dark. Love is, after all, where you find it.© 1978, 2003 Jack Fritscher