Live, Laugh, Smoke Cigars!

From Our Amigo RODRIGO

Why I do this… (make and sell cigars)

There I was, in a hospital bed staring up at a blurred ceiling and in excruciating pain…

My wife was sitting beside me. Crying her eyes out… and in the most convincing tone I could muster, I told her “everything will be all right…” (and I honestly believed that!). She said “no it won’t George… you have no job, your health insurance expires at the end of the month. You’re ruined and you’re going to go bankrupt and our family is going to suffer for a long time. We’re going to lose our home, and it’s all because of your selfishness and your stupidity. The kids and I would be better off if you had died”.

Yes she actually did say that. And in that moment I knew that all I had was my hope and my desire to get back up and walk again.

Hope and desire.

Two extremely strong human emotions. No doubt you’ve had your own low point in life where hope and desire were probably the only things that got you through your ordeal. Hope, desire, a lot of self love and a ton of gratitude for the little blessings in life that suddenly mean a whole lot more to you than you ever realized.

A month before this all happened I was flying high… or so I thought. I had decided to quit my corporate job and focus on my cigar business 100% (dream come true!). I had also established the first Club Leaf & Bean, a private cigar club in Pittsburgh. It was my pride and joy and the most fun I’ve had since I started making cigars back in 2010 when I met my cigar father William Ventura and my cigar brother Henderson Ventura. These two men are truly family to me, I’m not just saying that. They helped me make my dream come true when I had nothing to offer them I will forever be grateful to them.

It took me well over a month to get well enough to leave the hospital and rehab center. I remember going in two days after my birthday on September 15 and coming out with all of the leaves fallen from the trees here in upstate NY.

During that time I did receive some visitors besides family… First there was Doug, then Peter, then Frank. All of them avid cigar smokers and what we call “BOTL’s” (Brother of the Leaf). So many people in the cigar community reached out to me to offer their support via email, twitter, facebook and I was lucky to have my friend Shar in Vegas keep my brain occupied with long intellectual business conversations over the phone and I also had my business partners Gregg and Mark holding down the fort at Club Leaf & Bean. My long time friend Shahzad emailed me a $100 dollar gift certificate to Starbucks. When I finally got better, every time I ordered a coffee with that gift card I was reminded how special it was to have friends and how blessed I was. It was really touching and amazing how this community showed their support. My cigar industry buddy Lou Rodriguez (no relation – we think) sent me some Opus X. Even though I couldn’t smoke it I was so happy just to look at it. The amazingly beautiful band, the perfect wrapper, the aroma. Perfection, craft, passion, nature, art, history… all in one.

When I held that cigar I knew I had to keep pressing on no matter what.

I knew that the community was behind me. I had to keep moving forward. I tried to design the boxes of the Corona Project with some help of my wife’s cousin Vincent, a recent design grad, but I couldn’t get my head wrapped around it. Nothing felt right and at that time I was also dealing with the reality that my wife and I were inevitably heading for divorce. So I did what I could, from where I was, with what I had in order to survive and keep my sanity.

Henderson Ventura is a true tobacco man and a rising star in the industry. Henderson made me some blends that I never did anything with but I thought it would be a fun project to make them again and ship them right off the rolling bench so my customers could see how cigars change during the aging process. I was just happy that a core group of smokers bought the cigars and were into the whole concept. It really was amazing that with the help of Henderson and my partners I was able to do that whole concept and promotion from a hospital bed. I didn’t even have my own laptop at the time so I wrote every thing by hand and then rolled my wheelchair down to the computer room at the rehab center and typed out the emails to promote the idea. I still can’t believe I did that with all the drugs I was on. The nurses thought I was crazy, up all hours of the night but what did I care? Not like I had to get up and go to work in the morning.

I started smoking cigars twenty years ago when my oldest daughter was born.

I smoked before then too but I didn’t really know how to enjoy them. And I smoked alone mostly… and believe it or not, it really wasn’t until after my first trip to the Dominican Republic when I stumbled upon the Leaf & Bean in Pittsburgh that I understood what it was to really belong to the cigar community.

Leaf and Bean… or “Da Bean”, was and is a special place. You see even when I was in Houston with some great shops like Santa Barbara Cigars and Stogies, I was always a “walk in and walk out” customer… but Leaf & Bean changed that. I remember arriving at Gregg’s shop and I was greeted by Lisa, who we lost to cancer way before her time. She had the same welcoming smart-ass “Roseanne-esque” demeanor of a lot of the folks that I knew back home and it felt very natural for me to be there. She invited me to sit down for a smoke with the guys and I spent the next three years visiting that shop on an almost daily basis.

The people were wonderful… you know what I’m talking about… guys like Larry, Kevin, Mark, Tim… always quick with a joke and a light of the smoke :)… we were all family when we were there and that’s what made it special to me especially because I was working away from home and had no one outside of my co-workers at Halliburton to hang out with. They soon started frequenting the shop too and the circle expanded with my buddy Randy, a driller and a good ol’ boy from Mississippi finding his own passion for cigars and enjoying the connections that came from them. Some great stories involving Randy and Eddie Ortega and Erik Espinoza but I’ll leave that for Island Jim to tell some time

(enough typing for now… stay tuned for part two)