I am the biggest video game nerd when I'm at the cigar bar.
Old men, sports, and Doki Doki Literature Club.
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For most of my childhood, I believed that smoke was attracted to light. While my mother read the latest Danelle Steele or V. C Andrews novel, her cigarette smoke would loft quickly, fade, and then magically reappear above the end-table lamp next to her, rising, seemingly, from the bulb itself. The wide, cylindrical lampshade billowed smoke from its top like a giant, overweight, parental version of the cigarette itself. A father teaching his child. This is how you exhaust the room, son. The cigarette offers a meek, thanks dad, in the form of a narrow line of smoke. I could watch these lessons for hours. The smoke was mesmerizing.
Eventually, I learned that the smoke didn’t actually follow the light, but rather light simply allowed me to see the smoke. Around this time is when I began hating my mother’s smoke. She took notice. She retreated to the bathroom when she needed to light up. The light’s control over smoke was a farce. The magic was gone.
My new disgust extended beyond our living room. My single mother worked at a bar and often had me in tow in lieu of a babysitter. There, I’d retreat to the back storeroom where a single Playchoice-10 arcade cabinet, despite my lack of quarters, kept my attention for hours with its varied attract modes. But more importantly, the room’s lack of beer taps and waitstaff kept the smoking patrons at bay.
I became militant. I forced coughs when passing strangers with cigarettes. I stomped on butts left to smolder on sidewalks. During our occasional restaurant meal, when the host would ask if we preferred “smoking or non” I’d interject with “non” before my mother could answer. I did this despite my mother never having been a during-dinner smoker. I guess I simply saw the world as a battlefield between smoke plums and my own opinionated breath. I took every strategic advantage I could.
Then one day, my mother quit. As easy as a light switch, she stopped smoking. The battlefield had turned in my favor.
The victory hardened my resolve, though I remained intrigued by my enemy; I stayed entranced despite the war. I entered my high school years amid friends who took to pot and cigarettes without question. While I didn’t escape their company, like I did my mother’s company, I did decline any invite to partake. That was my line, I suppose. As long as I wasn’t imbibing, I was free to watch the smoke without feeling like a hypocrite. I was free to imagine a world where smoke was magical again.
I dabbled in incense for a few years in high school. I'd puppet the smoke with my breath, twisting it upon itself with every exhale. The scent was fine enough, but it was the lighting and the manipulating—controlling the magic—that intrigued me. When I breathed, the smoke fought for survival. When I held my breath for long enough, the smoke would regain control; it survived only when I was slowly dying.
A rich, pseudo-villain named Camp, from the 1994 movie Ace Venture: Pet Detective, collected fish. At one point, in a moment of vulnerability, he says about his fish “No matter what is going on in my life, I can always watch them swim and be completely at peace.” That line stuck with me. For years after hearing that line, I searched for my own version of Camp’s fish, a switch I could flip to calm me. The incense got close. Unfortunately, though, incense was easy to ignore. Light it and walk away. Small distractions weakened the smoke’s allure. I needed something I couldn't walk away from.
In college, I lived in a deteriorating eyesore of a home across the street from campus. The basement walls had long-ago cracked along the entire perimeter. One connected horizontal wound collapsing the foundation, like how an aluminum can might buckle to the weight of a stomping foot. When it rained, crawfish took refuge in our basement, ushered by thin streams trickling in through the walls.
The state of the home’s interior was reflected on the outside, from cracked stone stairs to wooden siding more worn of paint than covered by it. But there was a porch, objectively just as dying as the rest of the house, but I claimed it as a refuge. When paired with a couch rescued from a neighbor's curb, that porch became a proxy of sorts, to my childhood living room, made whole when I discovered cigars. I had found my aquarium. I would watch my tobacco-wrapped fish spew smoke for hours, fighting cool spring breezes, brisk fall winds, icy winter chills, rare summer drafts, and of course, my own teasing exhales.
On this porch, I wrote much of my first novel. On this porch, I made friends. On this porch, I lost friends. On this porch, I created hangovers, I slept off hangovers. I studied. I ate. I watched the world move for four years of my life. All these things knotted among spindles of magical cigar smoke.
The best part: I couldn't abandon a cigar like I could a stick of incense. Incense reacted to my breath. A cigar depended upon it.
Not everyone appreciated the magic. My wife detests the smell of a post-smoke me. I get it. I’ve dated a smoker. It’s not pleasant. So, I groom myself appropriately, taking a shower and brushing my teeth following a cigar, but her anger persists. Even when she outwardly ignores my retreat to the back porch for a conjuring session, I feel her disapproval. Call it cosmic osmosis or call it simple guilt, but her disapproval does contaminate my enjoyment. I needed distance.
I found respite at the local cigar lounge. Outwardly, this place was a perfect sanctuary. Chairs so comfortable, they tempted sleep. An entire room stocked with cigars, lest my own wand run dry. Nooks and crannies perfect for peaceful reading. And, best of all, a building full of like-minded cigar lovers…right? Not quite.
My identity is both honored and challenged at the cigar lounge. My favorite spot within the lounge is seated inside a small den area toward the back of the building, but to reach this treasure, the dungeon first forces me through an uncomfortable gauntlet.
Upon entering the building, I’m always struck by the density of old, white guys. Cigars are not cheap. Seeing them enjoyed by such a lopsided survey of society doesn’t speak well of how far we’ve come (I hope) on our collective journey toward equality. Taken as a core sample, people with disposable income to spend on lighting leaves on fire are still very white and very old.
The gauntlet then presents three giant televisions mounted to the walls, each always broadcasting sports (usually golf), news (usually Fox News), and more sports (sometimes, golf again, but a different tournament). I tiptoe onward.
Once through this initial chamber, I move on to the hall leading to my favorite reading den. Now, don’t get distracted by the vending machine. You might be looking for restorative health items after that first golf-and-news battle, but this machine is a mimic. A broken coin return door vomits all change across the tile floor in loud plinks. You might have a refreshing Diet Coke in hand, but you’re scrambling across the floor for quarters and dimes, as those quarters and dimes ding and clang their escape loud enough to draw stares from the rest of the dungeon enemies. Poisoned by embarrassment. Rather than replenish your health fully, the Diet Coke only satiates what the vending machine has zapped.
Ignore the machine. Head for the hallway. But never relax. The hallway is lined with framed portraits of lingerie-and-bikini-clad women posing with cigars. Cigar Girls, they are called. Their presence makes me uncomfortable, for sure, like dungeon bats watching, waiting for me to invade their proximity. They coexist with photos of soldiers posing with cigars, holding banners advertising their military regiments. Such de facto absolute positivity is always uncomfortable for me. Nuance has molded me into the hero I am today, a cautious hero. A good presented as an absolute is always hiding something. So, again, I tiptoe onward.
Once safe, I reflect. It’s strange being here. With so much of the cigar lounge being the antithesis of what I am, being here feels like a compromise. But not a strong-enough compromise. After all, I keep coming back. So I have to question: If I’m the type of person to love this problematic thing, then am I problematic? Am I the company I keep? Am I all about half-naked women and big guns?
We all have our tolerances, I suppose. I don’t buy Ubisoft games anymore because of the company’s alleged rampant misogyny (except, I will buy used Ubisoft games). I avoid any game with microtransactions because of their overtly predatory nature (except for franchises I love). I don’t play dating sims because they are boring (except for Doki Doki Literature Club; more on this below). So, at the cigar lounge, I morally disengage because I love the comfortable chairs and the swirling smoke so much. But something else magical happens: the cigar lounge conflict actually forces me to temper my own personality more, to become a beacon of outside influence. I become a bigger video game nerd at the cigar lounge than I am anywhere else; a “take that” to the machismo and carnality.
A visit to the cigar lounge is a rare opportunity for me to curate an outfit. My Triforce t-shirt? Absolutely. When I arrive and park, do I ensure my rear-window stickers—icons from Undertale, Limbo, Stray, Breath of the Wild, and Ghost of Tsushima—remain visible? Of course. And that laptop I’m writing this on right now? You’d better believe the room can see my Annapurna Interactive and What Remains of Edith Finch stickers decorating the rear of its top cover. If I am the company I keep, I’ll at least keep a filter in place.
My resolve gets tested. Recently, I accessorized my gamer battle outfit with a Nintendo Switch. I happened to be playing a game called Doki Doki Literature Club, which, from the outside would appear to be a pervert’s dreamland. Buxom anime girls vie for your—the player’s—attention using typical dating simulator flirt mechanics. Converse with the girls. Learn their personalities. Then overanalyze the hell out of the burgeoning relationships to arrive at a win state, which, uncomfortably, means gamifying emotional manipulation. To score is to “score.”
I played the game more hunched over than normal, shamefully shielding my screen from any potential onlookers. The absurdity of my paranoia isn’t lost on me. The cartoon girls on my screen are no more fake than the posed Cigar Girls lining the walls around me. In fact, the girls on my screen are more real. They’ve been given backstories and personalities. They exist as part of a dialog with the player. The girls framed along the walls are all monologue.
Doki Doki Literature Club is unique, though, as it ultimately plays out as a commentary on its own genre’s problematic aims. The emotional manipulation common to dating simulators is presented here as the seed of a horror story, not a romance story. Innocent courtship implies shared give-and-take, a dance of sorts, a melding of personal lives and communities. Doki Doki Literature Club dismisses the romance of voluntary community and instead explores forced community. These are relationships you become a part of because you feel obligated; these cartoon anime girls develop unhealthy dependencies on you.
Emotional walls are natural, and healthy courtship means confronting those walls. But with Doki Doki Literature Club, are you navigating around walls or around landmines?
Then an old, heavy, white guy with a cigar bouncing from his lips, lumbers by. I crouch deeper into my chair, shielding my Switch screen further. The man pays me no attention, but even the possibility of embarrassment reddens my ears.
Modesty is denying permission to express feeling good about yourself. Lowering yourself to raise others. Don’t do this. Wait…am I talking to Monika or to myself?
The old man passes. I uncoil. I relax. I turn again to my game. And then, as if trying to prove my place in this world of leather chairs and modeled women, I take a puff from my cigar and press A to see what Monika has to say about the next Literature Club meetup. I’m a beacon of two worlds colliding, two communities melding.
The old man inserts a five-dollar bill into the vending machine. He chooses a canned drink. The drink falls. His change falls, and because the coin flap is missing, the man’s change spits out across the floor. I could have warned him, but I like being a part of an inside joke. I like the badge that signifies my belonging. I admit, I also like this small victory.
I exhale slowly. The smoke rises in thin curls. “I can always watch them swim,” I think. “I am at peace.” The sexism, the celebration of war, the sports, the Fox News, it all mutes behind the smoke. Why not simply enjoy a cigar somewhere else, in my own backyard for example? Well, I do, as often as the weather allows (I even have a hammock beneath my porch, which is my true heaven), but these chairs. Damn, they are comfortable. And these enemies, I need to be near them. And Monika, she deserves to be seen as much as any of us do.