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Home > What's New > Peter Weller's Cigar Paradise: Somewhere, and the Meaning of No Cigars
Peter Weller's Cigar Paradise: Somewhere, and the Meaning of No Cigars
Posted: Monday, May 19, 2003
By Peter Weller Two people have come in. It is a private place; a room in a small hotel in a town described, metaphorically, in a terrific book as "nowhere." Yet two people have come in. I am sitting in a study the size of checkout stand; sitting at an antique secretary the size of airplane dinner tray. There is a second sitting room across the lobby. (A lobby of four feet. Should we call all this "quaint"? ) The deuce of it is the couple has commenced arguing politics of the Iraqi war in a foreign tongue. Slavic. (I think.) And though their lingo is "foreign" to the country, it is indigenous to the town. Do you know where I am?
Two thirds of the populace in the country of this nowhere town, as recently as 1999, thought the city was situated outside their own borders. I have yet to have a provocative conversation in this town. Seems the folk aren't interested. Not a bad thing. Yet, now I am listening to one. In Slavic yet, I catch the names "Saddam," "Bush," "Blair" and "Chirac." This is a town with several small typical tobacco stores that will sell a five-pack of Monte 4's, but I have yet to find a heater of magnitude, and I have been looking for three days.
For the dearth of smokes, it is a town of several smoky female Art Nouveau nudes adorning buildings in neo and real Baroque. It is a "made-up" town with one of the world's largest public squares facing a brilliant sea. Not the dynamic of Chicago, the wind blows here in this city conceived by princes who imagined a seaport, au privet. Yet no one stopped on the grand tour. Nor are there now busloads of tourists from Omaha or Manchester. And nary a cigar of note.
I have come to this town because George Brightman (formerly of this magazine and still the most astute of smoke aficionados north of the tobacco patch) gave me a small book on December 19, 2002, the night before I departed N.Y.C. for Venice. (No, I am not in Venice.) Next morn, I promptly buried the small book in luggage on the way to the airplane.
Sitting in my digs that last night in the Apple, Brightman and Matt Paratore, owner of New York's cool breeze bistro and cigar establishment, North West, assisted me, over two Hoyo D.C.'s apiece, with an edit for a Ph.D. candidacy paper on a late medieval fresco cycle in the Basilica of San Antonio of Padua. I had just finished three November weeks in Syracuse, New York, researching said paper, this after immediately finishing a six-month sojourn in Toronto, shooting the Showtime/Columbia Tri-Star epic series "Odyssey V." For the duration of my 21 November days in Syracuse, I never once saw the sun even peep in that town. In a small hotel room on campus, the manager would open up the main floor bar into which I would haul books from the library across the street, and write through three or four Churchills of all brands until 3 A.M., on one occasion sleeping for three days in the very clothes in which I had not only spent each day writing, but in which I had exercised, smoked and eaten Indian food. On the morn of the third day of that particular marathon I, in that very apparel, met my boss, Prof. Gary Radke, for the daily research powwow at 8 A.M. I wisely refused to remove my cap, barely affixed to my pate, for the 80 directions in which my hair was defying gravity. Nor, under pretense of "having a chill," did I dare unzip my parka in the boiling office, fearing that should I even open the thing a millimeter, the stench exploding from my corpus might screech forth like toxic gas escaping a hot air balloon and thence throw Prof. Radke into absolute convulsions, such that he, Radke, a la some 50s English horror flick, would clutch his throat, and, eyes bulging, drop to his knees, topple over sideways -- feet punting the desk legs -- and asphyxiate.
"I believe he is dead, Constable Dithers," would sayeth the coroner.
"From what, Dr. Cosgrave?" returneth the Scotland Yard chief.
"Odor, Dithers."
"Odor, Cosgrave?! You jest. I pray 'tis not so."
"'Tis, 'tis, 'tis, Dithers!"
"Calm, Cosgrave, calm. Odor from where?"
"From that chap over there with the hair like Billy Idol's uncle."
"Whew! By cheek what a reek! You are correct Cosgrave. Book 'im, Murder One."
"How, where and the weapon?"
"Blimey, Cosgrave. This a board game, what?"
"Sorry, Dithers."
"No worries, Cosgrave. However, to answer your question: It was…asphyxiation… committed by (wannabe) Professor Weller. In the Renaissance office. With the… B.O."
"Got it."
"Good. Turn over the cards, Cosgrave. I think I've won."
No, thank grace, Prof. Radke (a dear friend and academic council as far back as '98, when I began the pursuit for my Master's degree in Italian Renaissance Art History with his S.U. summer course in Italy) did not gag and choke. As I found new friends in Syracuse (now the home of NCAA BBall champs!) I also found lovely cigars with entertaining locales to smoke them, like Awful Al's, a handsome and funky wine bar/smoke shop adorned with garage-sale overstuffed sofas and a healthy selection of Hondurans and Dominicans. At the other end of the "hang" zone is the upscale bistro Pascale's, where one not only eats and drinks exceptionally, amid jazz from singer/pianist Ronnie Leigh, but one can light up an OpusX in the bar after most of the culinary clients have finished dinner. (The new New York law may change this). And thanks to Nancy Radke, (wife of Prof./victim) I stumbled on a culinary phenomenon. Mouthwatering beef and chicken at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Coming from Texas, my knee jerked a yard when I heard Syracuse folk expound on the merits of barbeque in… New York? As that food genre began in Texas on cattle drives, it was facile to doubt the power and authenticity of a New England version. Indeed, if one is fortunate to pass through Hamilton or Stephenville or Fort Worth or any myriad of West Texas towns in the Southern Great Plains, or even motor up through the Plains to Montana, one can munch on the real deal barbeque in hole-in-the-wall joints, many times with the cow, pig or bird roasting on the spit right in the middle of the place. But Syracuse, New York? I thought not. Yet Dinosaur humbled me on my first visit with Gary and Nancy Radke (who co-wrote a cookbook called Dinosaur Bar-B-Que with owner John Stage). Stage and his partner Mike Rotella sojourned through the southwest (had to be Texas), improving their goods and putting them to the test at biker meets. The establishment is a real honky-tonk, and the moment I entered I thought I was in Fort Worth. My only complaint is the damned chicken-fried steak is only available on Tuesdays. But a Punch D.C. never tasted so rich walking back to ho'tayl (Texas pronunciation for 'hotel') after a feast at Dinosaur.
Nancy Radke is also the U.S. liaison for Parmigiano Reggiano, the authentic cheese from the city of Parma, Italy (see next article). It seems the seventeeth century French playwright and actor Moliàre lived a long life after forty eating only this cheese. If it weren't for Nancy's gift of a small wheel of the Parmigiano Reggiano (the actual name as the cheese locale includes both towns), and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, the work in Syracuse may have very well had me sticking the university library's pencils in my ears right in front of the Fine Arts Dept. stacks boss, Randy Bond, whose assistance lightened the research load less the whole three weeks feel like a stretch at Sing Sing. The work buried me and, despite the precise and elegant reconstruction of the old downtown (they should bring back the Erie Canal), the jazz, the friends, the eats and drinks, the good smokes and places to puff, and the basketball team, let's just say…Syracuse ain't the city in which I wish to retire or expire.
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