In the pungent blue haze of an Owings Mills tobacco shop, the men and their cigars take refuge from a hostile world.
Banished from many shopping malls, most restaurants, even their own homes, the coterie gathers for a cigar-tasting at Fader's Tobacconist like followers of some underground religion. For three hours on a Saturday afternoon they puff and schmooze. Smoke drifts out the door, past the wooden Indian who gazes upon a nation where it seems that even the president is not free to enjoy a stogie in the White House.
"You can walk into a room with an unlit cigar and someone will say 'That stinks.' I'm serious," says Frank Elam, a cigar manufacturer's representative. He's standing behind a counter offering gratis the Punch Grand Cru, a Honduran cigar that sells for $2.80.
It's tough out there for cigar smokers.
The odd thing is that the species of cigars Mr. Elam hands out this afternoon is getting lots of press lately. These so-called premium cigars -- handmade of high-grade tobacco -- have been making a comeback after decades of cigar industry decline. Although the cigar business overall is flat, premium cigar sales are up, their image polished, their new fans young and successful, their virtues extolled in a year-old high-gloss magazine, Cigar Aficionado.
All this at a time when finding a place to fire up a cigarette, much less a big, fat Honduran smoke, is more difficult than ever. New smoking bans are sweeping the nation. The American smoker slides deeper into the untouchable caste, and the cigar smoker occupies a still lower rung: the pariah's pariah. Even President Clinton, who enjoys an occasional cigar, apparently can't smoke in the White House.
Never mind a good five-cent cigar, what America really lacks is a place to smoke one.
Starting young
Lee Livov, of Pikesville, started smoking ci-gars when he was 15. That was 60 years ago, when a man could light up a corona about any place he liked. These days, Mr. Livov says he wouldn't dare pull out a cigar in a restaurant or any other public place. "You get those looks, I don't like those glaring looks," says Mr. Livov, a retired shoe-store owner.
He's standing by the counter at Fader's where Mr. Elam has just handed over a Punch Grand Cru, describing it as a vintner might a fine Bordeaux: A light-tasting, mostly Honduran blend with a Glittle bit of Nicaraguan leaf, a bit of Dominican. Unlike the four-for- $1.50 cigars sold at 7-Eleven, which are marked "contains non-tobacco ingredients," premium cigars are made entirely of natural tobacco leaves that may be aged for years. They can sell for $5, $10, even $19 apiece.
