Great Moments

Doug Richardson
Published in: December 1, 1999

Published November/December 1999

A Backyard Lair by Doug Richardson I'd smoked it down to the band. A three-year-old Partagas Serie D No. 4. Five inches of Cuban confection before eight in the morning. Go ahead. Argue that any high-octane Habanos and a triple-shot latte before noon is a smoker's equivalent of a speedball. But I wasn't on the job yet. And last I heard, in my home state of California, it wasn't illegal to smoke in my own backyard. At least, not yet. But I'm certain, somewhere in the Golden State, an evil cabal of tobacco-loathing prohibitionists is working on it   One of the benefits of my profession is that I can choose where I work. I make my wage as a screenwriter and novelist. What's the difference? I'm a novelist on the days I deny being a screenwriter. Sure, there's the cachet of the office on the "studio lot," buildings named after Hollywood icons, movie stars walking past your window, lunching with aliens (not illegal) at the commissary. I did that. But unless your name's above the movie's title,   which mine clearly is not, smoking at the studio is verboten. Hence, the christening of the slab (you'll see what I mean).   That morning, the concrete crew was waiting on me. The same went for the general contractors, who we'll call Sean and Mark. Sean was smoke-free, having sworn off tobacco for a year on a hundred-dollar dare. Go figure. Mark, on the other hand, is a cigar opportunist. As an enticement for promptness, I'd been plying him with quality smokes for the better part of three weeks. It was a serious miscalculation of Mark's palette; he'd often follow the Cuban I served him with a Hav-a-Tampa (he preferred the pricier ones with the wooden tips). I'm 95 percent certain he thinks Ramon Allones is my pool man.   But back to the waiting construction crew. Nobody quite got what I was doing with that Partagas robusto. This was my pagan dance. Like an Indian shaman anointing a hallowed ground with sacred herbs and offerings, I was there to satisfy the gods of Sancho Panza and Simon Bolivar. The crew stood and watched. I was showing them something they hadn't seen before, which in L.A. is pretty hard to do. The time clock clicked as the concrete sat on the truck in imminent danger of coagulating into 20 square yards of useless peanut brittle, and all waited for my cue to start the damn pour. The architect? Yeah, maybe he would have understood. He used to design cigar boxes before he moved on to kitchens, hillside houses and backyard offices. My office. So, here I was thinking, the architect would have gotten this rite. Too bad I fired him. He would have finally proved useful as a translator.   I finished the robusto and ever so respectfully laid the remains at the epicenter of the foundation. If I were in another business, there might have been a couple of producers laying there alongside it. With a slight gesture, I beckoned the concrete crew to begin their pour. They came, they played Tejano music, they spilled the concrete over the deceased Serie D and filled in the foundation to what would eventually blossom as five hundred square feet of custom-cool workspace. My room, my happy lair, my all-smoking, tobacco-friendly cocoon of creative goddamn control. I'll be taking my meetings there. I'll ask, do you smoke? You don't? Then please indulge me. This is my office. After all, it's just a cigar. OK, it's not just a cigar. It's a slice of sanctity wrapped in Connecticut shade. Trust me when I say it settles my brain. Primes the neuropathways for the oncoming flow of ideas. You sure you don't want one? It'll make you smarter. It makes me smarter.   Six gut-scorching months of inconvenience and 87 handwritten checks later (those of you who've been through home construction know where I come from), and I'm finally kissing my wife and son good morning and good-bye in one sweet move before I trip out the back door for my 20-pace commute (an Angeleno fantasy) to my own personal word factory. Today's journey into the outer limits of my imagination begins the way it usually does: with a cigar. Something domestic (I can't bear to waste a Havana when most of my senses are on loan to a movie studio). A lot of guys would start the day with a corona or panetela. Me? I want a heater. Torpedo or Churchill. With enough exhaust to overwhelm my puny Honeywell smoke eater and to give the room the hazy ambience of a sci-fi movie. That, and it must stand a handful of relights. And I'm always relighting.   Once I put the dialogue to paper and the characters start conversing, they're in charge. At least until the phone rings or my three-year-old comes stumbling out of the house to serve me a Diet Coke from the office fridge. My boy, Hank. He'll sit in my lap, crudely tap out his name on my keyboard, and, if Mom's not looking, ask for a sniff from my cigar. He likes the aroma. And maybe, somehow, I'm planting some sweet associations in his memory for the day he thinks he knows everything and doesn't need me anymore. But one day he'll catch a whiff of goodly smoke that brings him back to a time when the house, the yard and my office were his world. But I digress.   Back on the job. And the relight is my restart. A sensory cue that jolts me back to that bookmarked page where I last left that unfinished scene or some pop, plain-wrapped prose that will eventually be a next novel. Guaranteed, the smoke returns my focus to the scene at hand. If all goes according to plot, I'll finish my morning exacta in time to grab a quick lunch, return calls from the perfunctory to the more demanding, then sneak off to one of my other offices, today, The Big Easy. No, we're not talking New Orleans, but the retro-cool, loungy, Studio City cigar emporium. First-class service and a stellar humidor would be enough of a draw, but it also serves as a haven for a colorful rogue's gallery of Southern California smoking personae. Here, I keep a private locker. Yet I'm just as likely to walk through the door, snatch a Snapple from the fridge, and ask tobacconists Eric or Pete, "What's smokin' good?" Believe me, these guys know. Or I'll just look at what's in owner Dodd Harris's hand and ask for one of the same. A notorious quipster and gruff beyond his years, he still indulges me. If I'm buying, it might be something short and pricey, or it might be some true-burning, satin-drawing bundled beauty that these guys have unearthed. Whatever the flavor, it cures my creative-afternoon ills as well as anything with an embossed band and a double-digit price tag.   It might not look like it, but I'm working again. To the untrained eye, I'm sitting around and shooting the breeze. But the truth is, I'm back on the job, collating sound bytes from the constant schmoozefest that includes everyone from the local LAPD, show-biz wannabees and real-dealers, enigmatic wallflowers and professional procrastinators to ambulance chasers, armchair philosophers, pensioners, sundry character actors and the occasional industrialist who'd rather spend an afternoon with his fellow smokers than with a coterie of pin-striped lawyers. The talk is a free-form mix of politics, world events, art history, local meteorology (is it gonna be sunny and 70 tomorrow or will it be sunny and 75?), trash talk, romantic conquests (both real or imagined), and the genteel communion shared in the haze of a smoke-filled room. Of the group, Dodd is the only one who truly knows how much dialogue I crib just from listening to this everlasting banter. And some of those important cell-phone calls I pretend to return? Half the time they're merely me excusing myself from the gabfest to leave some of those stolen pearls on my voice mail. I'll either catalogue them mañana or fold them into what I last left simmering on my word processor.   They're a talented gang, the boys at The Big Easy. When they read this they're going to want 10 percent.   Doug Richardson co-wrote the screenplays for Die Hard 2 and Bad Boys. His most recent novel is True Believers.