Book - Len Deighton's Cookstrip Cook Book - Zippo pipe lighter & cigar end cutters

In Mexico City in 1962, I was the definition of a nerd even though the word had not yet been invented. I was going to Mexico City College (recently I found out that William S. Burroughs studied there in the 50s) and studying engineering (not successfully). I decided to start smoking a pipe to give me some sort of class. I did not smoke cigarettes as back at St. Edward’s High School in Austin my school friends had handed me a Marlboro which exploded. They laughed and gave me another one. It exploded, too. 

I started smoking a brand that was considered the best in its time. It was called Edgeworth. Little by little I adopted all the mystique and tradition and started buying more pipes. The formula is that you never smoked the same pipe twice in a day so you needed as many pipes as you would smoke in one day and multiply that by the pipes you smoked in a month and resting them for a week.

 When I was in the Argentine Navy as a conscript form 1965, 66, 67, I was the only sailor allowed to smoke a pipe at his desk (at the US Naval Advisory Group). The American non-commissioned officers provided me with tins of Edgeworth. It was back in Mexico that I enjoyed a Scottish blend called Three Nuns advertised as “None Nicer”. While I was sort of a purist I rarely lit my pipes with a wooden match but with a my brass Zippo lighter.

In the late 60s my mother taught in Veracruz so I began to smoke thin cigars called Flor de La Costa. It was one evening in the late 80s when I was in the Mayan ruins of Palenque. that I had a magical night. By evening it was unattended so I decided to spend the night inside the main pyramid. I was attacked by mosquitoes but saved by those Veracruz cigars. In the early 70s I taught at a Jesuit University, Universidad Iberoamericana. In the photo below I am smoking a pipe made of pyrolitic rubber/plastic. I was allowed to smoke it in class.

In Vancouver by 1975, in the late 70s I started working with a urbane writer called Ben Metcalf. He was all about Hemingway, France, good wines, single malt whiskey and expensive cigars. I started smoking Monte Cristo Claros (15$ a shot and Americans when they came to Vancouver bought them) and H. Upmann, both of Cuban origin. It was the fact that I was smoking the Cohibas (also Cuban), when I photographed Robbie Robertson smoking one, that we connected and I got my fine portrait.

Robbie Robertson - October 1994

It may have been about 23 years ago, when I was in my Kerrisdale dark room and I became very dizzy as I was smoking a cigar in the unventilated room when I told myself, “This is stupid.” And I quit pipes and cigars. Rosemary stopped putting breath mints on my bed side table.

Few reading this might know why the Montecristo cigars were called by that name. Years ago Cuban women rolled cigars on their leg thighs. This is how Cuban cigars were made. They were entertained by a reader. Their favourite book was The Count of Montecristo.

And most reading this will understand how stupid I must have looked shooting punk bands at the Commodore while smoking a pipe.