Why We Pipe: An Introduction

By John Brownlee

The only reason any one takes on a ridiculous, anachronistic affectation is to get chicks. Or boychiks, if you swing that way. Which I don’t, but please don’t tell the many effervescent queers trolling the byways of Yahoo member pages, looking for fellow “pipe smokers.” We won’t be sharing a peace pipe any time soon, but it’s nice to hear that chomping on the long, lucite stem of a briar six times a day has granted me some carnal attention, even if it’s carnal attention to an orifice I’m so shy about having plunged it’s somehow creeped three inches up my backside.

Though I did my best to posture dramatically – the mysterious poet; his black overcoat flowing around him like the dark mist of his own sexual gravitas – upon the ruddy steps of Harvard, pipe smoking did not make me sole deity in the solar system of paired, areolae-poled orbs that I hoped. Actually, women thought my pipe smoking affectation (adopted when I was 20; a humanities major; about to go on my second journey abroad) ridiculous. It should be noted this was also the period when I bought my first velvet smoking jacket and my first fez.

But like many absurd affectations you adopt in college (tattooing, genital piercing, communism) pipe smoking has wound its way deep into my psyche, like a tar-soaked tapeworm. Seven years later, I’m not chemically addicted; I don’t shake and shiver when I have to go a couple of weeks without a pipe. This happens surprisingly often: after you find yourself more annoyed by the comments about the “uniqueness” of your pipe smoking than smugly pleased by your own originality, you steadfastly avoid smoking in public. But there’s an aesthetic addiction. This co-dependency between writing and smoking, reading and smoking, relaxing and smoking. You could leave it behind your body in a blink, because pipe smokers don’t inhale, but it infuses your mind like nicotine threads through a cigarette smoker’s lungs.

I’m not going to bother to look it up, but within the pipe-smoking community, they cling to one page of a ‘70’s era Surgeon General’s Report like a small Christian cult to a page of Apocrypha. This report indicates that “moderate” pipe smokers (6-8 pipes a day; it’s accurate to translate that to hours) live, on average, longer than non-smokers. Chalk it up to relaxation. Of course, every report since then has contradicted that statistic. On one hand, there’s politics involved. But on the other – even though pipe smokers know that puffing on a pipe is far less harmful than inhaling cyanide-laced cigarettes through your lungs and into your bloodstream — we’re all terrified of losing our tongues.

But what are the pleasure of pipe smoking that make that small risk worth it? For one, there’s the tobacconist. The tobacconist is dying almost everywhere in the world, but he still exists in America more than any other place. I don’t mean a bored looking Paki selling you cigarettes at the gas station. I mean a tobacconist. They sit on three-legged stools, oiled with the grease of their own ass for decades. If they’re old, they’re ancient, like wizards; snuff and flakes of tobacco powdering their beards. If they are young, they’re the kind of guys who only wear plaid shirts, who wear suspenders, who are extremely opinionated about jazz. Who play banjo in a blues band that meets every Wednesday night on their porch. Robert Crumb caricatures. But they practice one of the few American arts.

Most people don’t know this, but America has the most varied and flavorful tobaccos in the world. There’s perique; an extremely spicy and nicotine heavy tobacco from Louisiana. A bowlful of perique will leave you in a panic attack – no hyperbole, it can’t be smoked pure. It will also prolapse your bowels, which is why it’s only ever found diluted in tobacco blends. There’s virginian tobacco. It’s sweet; it burns your tongue; it’s so red sometimes the stem of your pipe drools blood. And dozens more besides. America is the greatest country in the world for tobacco, pure tobacco, the type you stuff in your pipe to enjoy the smell and taste of. And tobacconists specializing in mixing and curing these different types of tobaccos into different tasting blends flourish in America over any other country. Tobacco is cheaper, more plentiful and more varied in America than any other county in the world. Tobacco blending is smoking jazz – America’s gift to the world. The greatest tobaccos are American; the greatest tobacco blenders American.

But pipe tobacco has been caught up in the crusade against cigarettes. Tobacconists are a dying breed, pandering mostly to cigar smokers. Outside of the deep south, there aren’t many who still mix their own blends. Cigarette smoking probably won’t ever die, because huge companies stand behind it. But tobacconists? Pipe-smoking? Caught up in the same wave of vilification, it’s taking the poison second-hand from big cigarette tobacco’s lips.

Which is a terrible shame. Because tobacco is delicious. If you smoke a cigarette, you barely realize it; it’s a cancer stick, saturated with the chemicals that make your system kick and writhe. You only taste your addiction. But pipe smoking is the purest form of tobacco smoking there is. When you stuff a pipe, you stuff it with pure tobacco… no chemicals added. And you can smell and taste the sweetness, or the slight plummy aftertaste, or a thousand other flavors besides. You can taste the sugar in the leaf, or the pepper of the natural nicotine. My favorite tobacco is latakia – it was invented when Turks began burning fires of camel dung and spice under bails of tobacco stored in barn lofts. It tastes exactly like it. It’s heady. It’s spicy and sour. It’s delicious.

And pipes themselves are works of art. Pipe carvers are artists. From the random whorls of a briar block’s grain, carvers give shape to utilitarian elegance. Some men’s pipes sit in their mouths their whole lives. Right now, I am sucking a meerschaum that I bought in Turkey in 2000. The tar and nicotine has been sucked into the meerschaum’s milky porousness, tinging it amber. It’s called a patina: the flush deepens with every smoke. This one pipe symbolizes in color my whole past with it. It also has a fire-breathing dragon carved into it – carved into it when it was still a lump of soft clay, clawed by peasants out of the muddy hills of Eskeshir.

Oh sure, pipe smoking can be disgusting. The back of my bottom front teeth have brown, filthy veins of cancer-soaked tartar that concretes about three months after every dentist’s cleaning. Threading a pipe cleaner (you know, what kids use for craft projects; cleaning smoking pipes is what they’re actually for) through a pipe smoked over the course of an entire day causes the mouthpiece to spurt a revolting oily tar.

But there’s a reason Sir Walter Raleigh was drenched with beer. Please don’t mistake what I mean by this – smoking tobacco, in its purest form, is flavorable. The spicy, velveteen sensuality of hot smoke running over your tongue is real. Tobacco smoking is delicious. It isn’t merely a habit or an addiction. When you smoke a pipe, it’s ethereal gastronomy.

About five years ago, I moved to Ireland, and I wasn’t yet out of my smoking in public phase. I was walking by Belgrave Square, which is halfway between Ranelagh and Rathmines (small boroughs of Dublin, on the south side), and I was smoking a pipe as I walked (a “second” – the industry term for a cheap pipe which is absolutely fine structurally but which contains some small imperfection in the grain of the briar that prevents it from being sold for hundreds of bucks). I passed a squinty eyed, greasy haired girl… it was my third day in Ireland, and I was happy for breaking the umbilical, so I smiled at her. She passed, seemingly without seeing it, but then whirled around in a whoosh of her head-to-toe vinyl jumpsuit and hissed, “Yeh! Yeh look like a FEKKIN’ CUNT.”

Tell me something I don’t know. But it’s worth it.