Popination Fumigation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: T Devon Pub.
I’m breaking a rule again this week—I’ve already talked about it in an earlier post. But this is an unusual place for me, a place I do popinate to somewhat frequently, and it is actually called a pub. Plus, it snowed this weekend and I was therefore unable to get to anyplace new. Besides, I’m thinking more and more that every single one of those pubs that I only briefly mention in Popination I and II, back when I only thought this was going to be a two-post vocab word series, having no idea the interest it would spark, and…well anyway.
I don’t know if you’d call this week’s Popination Place a pub (despite its official name), or a tavern (I’d personally call it a tavern), but it’s not the type of bar you’ve seen in my Popinations till now.* They don’t call themselves a saloon, either, though they’re much more like that than anything else. It does have a similar crunchy vibe to the Outback Saloon, which you’ve heard me mention before, and I find myself relaxing and enjoying the vibe here in much the same fashion as I do at Outback.
*Except for the few paragraphs I mentioned them in at the end of Popinations II, before I knew this was going to become an ongoing series. So let’s talk a bit more about this lovely Popination Place of mine, eh?
NOTE: some of this material has been yoinked from as-yet-unpublished memoir, NEXT TIME. I thought it apropos. So.
There’s a marvelously diverse crowd at T Devon: it seems pretty rough when you first walk in, but it actually contains multitudes. There’s the Bud Light and cigarettes and pool guys, who are kinda sweaty and loud, but there’s also that Burberry sweater lady with high end scotch and a big cigar that probably is worth more than my laptop. They have a back patio and some rough pool tables, Nagel prints in the bathrooms, but there’s also a wall of humidor-ready lockers with a whole myriad of regulars’ regular equipment, whether it be fine wine or the kind of smokes you’ve never smelled let alone imbibed. And they come by often.
It’s also a place that’s got a pretty ethnically diverse clientele—like I mentioned before, you can sit there for a couple hours over a whiskey and stogie and see all kinds of different people, from different cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, just to judge by the looks of them.
Obviously it’s no longer cool to be a smoker. Even vaping (which I despise, as a Gen X member in good standing) isn’t really considered a thing that makes you cool anymore. Which. I suppose that’s better for the health of all of us, but. Smoking has been a pretty big part of my life, though never weed, as funny as that is, me being from Boulder. Weed just puts me to sleep, so I have nothing against it necessarily, it’s just not for me, at least recreationally. But smoking cigars was a pivotal part of the beginnings of my relationship with my partner again, after so many years. We began at the late great Robusto Room, moved to the notorious and fabulous Las Palmas, and have now settled in with the Third Place that is T Devon Pub.
Close, but no cigar
T Devon is a cigar bar, and so I wasn’t sure if it counted for inclusion on this list of popinations. But I do go there kinda frequently, and I do socialize with my partner and the friendly regulars, and drink whisky, whenever I do. So let’s call this an honorable mention.
A cigar bar?! Ah yes, lest ye think too highly of me, I do like to partake in the occasional smoke. In the ‘90s, I smoked much more often than occasionally: in the mid to late ‘90s, I was a member of Frequent Flyers dance company in Boulder, an aerial dance troupe with a long and glorious history. After rehearsals or classes, the regulars and biggest stars of Frequent Flyers would stand around in the parking lot, chatting and debriefing, and smoking. I wasn’t a smoker at first, though I had earlier learned how to smoke in a two-person play I was in about a writer and Bette Davis.* But I hung out with the smoking dancers anyway for the social time. I didn’t like the taste of cigarettes, is why. The smell wasn’t bad, it actually reminded me of a boyfriend I’d dated for a summer back when I was only 14. The dancers would often ask if I wanted a smoke, and I always refused. At one point, they asked why. I responded, “Oh I don’t mind it, I just don’t like the taste.” One of the dancers smiled, a mad gleam in his eye, held out his dark brown cigarette, and declared, “You’ll like this!”
It was a clove cigarette. And he was right—I loved that spicy, Christmas-cookie flavor. I smoked cloves from then on through the next couple, almost three, years, and even branched out into pipe tobacco. 2-3 smokes a day. And so, after a hard evening of training, coaching, or rehearsing, no matter the weather, our little group of dancers would stand outside, grab the cold metal railing with our aching hands, and then we’d stand around and chat for a bit in the parking lot of the studio, in a little smoking circle. We would often plan our night’s social outings there in those smoking circles.
Cigars weren’t really my thing, but the fragrant aspect and how hard they are to smoke is similar, and cigars were a thing for the men I swordfought with around this same time (see below). It was also the smoke of choice for my late paternal grandfather, Grandpa Rudy, a tough-as-nails Chicago Pole who had a den in his Wisconsin cabin that I drool to think of now. He and his den smelled pleasantly of that caramel-like scent of cigars, and I have fond memories of him. I liked him, and he liked me, which wasn’t a dynamic the rest of my family tended to share.
I did end up having a relationship with cigars again, not long after this aerial dance circle—during this time I was also doing swordfights each weekend with the Band of Young Men from my stage combat training and the Renaissance Festival. We’d also been in hours of hardcore training right around this time, and performances, unlike the autumn shows of the dance troupe, were in the summer.
Right before the opening day of the Faire, my sword bros and me all gathered at a local bar after rehearsal, to celebrate the beginning of a beautiful combative summer. The teacher of the alpha of the Band of Young Men was there too—the teacher of our teacher. At the big half-circle table there was me, the teacher’s teacher, the other two elites sword bros in the Band, and two other men who were on the opposing “team” (theatrically). Each man ordered cigars and rum or whiskey or brandy. I had only rum, as my smoking habit hadn’t yet begun at that time. We all toasted our swords and the upcoming gig. Then each man passed me their cigar, having dipped it first in their spirits. It was a ritual, they said, to have a girl bite the cigar end instead of cutting. It would bring them luck. That was how I first learned how to handle a cigar: by biting that of everyone in the gang.
*A play called Me & Jezebel, it was a trip—I think the director cast me because he didn’t think anyone else could handle the role. I say it was a 2-person show, but my part consisted of both narrator and character 1 of 2. It was…a lot. I never left the stage, from open to close of the show. Once, I happened to foolishly look down at my cigarette during a particularly sad monologue, wherein my character was talking about her beloved grandmother who’d passed away. A local newspaper’s theatrical review of the show marveled at the beautiful depth of acting I did in that monologue—even real tears. Well. Nobody told me what happens when you let cigarette smoke blow into your eyes. Anyway. I was also a great actor, so I’ll take the good review. Ssh.
T Devon
But! Back to T Devon: Dive bar? cigar bar? Are cigars upper class, or for rednecks? I notice the reddest of the necked men at T Devon tend to smoke cigarettes. I’ll not question it, but just enjoy it as often as I can. Man, suddenly I could really use a smoke…
T Devon is not my first cigar popination, though—there was another that was really my partner’s place more than mine, which unfortunately went the way of the Pandemic Dodo: it closed during lockdown and never opened again. RIP Robusto Room. There’s also the rough jewel that is Las Palmas, just East enough of downtown Denver to be in a very crunchy neighborhood. This place, though, boasts the only certified cigar hand-roller in Colorado, and the smokes there are beyond belief. My partner and I used to go there pretty frequently until the main man, Mike, would plonk our Jamesons-on-the-rocks in front of us the moment we walked in the door. That guy. He had some amazing stories about his time as a bodyguard, and I don’t care which were true, I’m believing all of them. A towering hulk of a man, with a certain calm demeanor that makes me think he’s the kind of guy you do NOT want to cross, and you better believe he remembers your face, no matter if you only popped in once ten years ago. I haven’t been to Las Palmas in forever—I should go back soon.
A Fragrant Offering
The Christ Hang ended up being a particular specialty of mine during my tenure with the aerial dance troupe, Frequent Flyers. What’s a Christ Hang? Well, how it works is: you stand on the bar of the trapeze, just like you might stand on a swing. The ropes, though, go behind the shoulders, from which you wind your forearms around the ropes behind, and then forward until your hands grip the ropes at the end of a spiral-like wrap. Then, you step back, off the trapeze bar, letting your feet float in midair and lifting the bar. You end up hanging in a harness of rope, wrapped under the shoulders and arms wide, looking kind of like a crucifix. If you’ve got a little upper body strength and don’t mind a little rope burn, it’s not a hard position to hold.
Thing is, before you take that step off the bar, your hands don’t feel like they have a very good grip. It’s because, before you take your body weight off that bar, they don’t. The ropes are too taut. Once you step off, the ropes give, and they cling perfectly around shoulders and arms to hold you up. But you can’t feel that when you’re still standing there, solid and safe.
There was one piece I remember form the troupe I was in, that focused on religious themes, with the one central apparatus being a sort of padded seat with very long, very thin ropes fastened to a single point—sort of like a lower, wider, softer trapeze or a strange swing. One of my pivotal parts to that piece involved me hoisting myself high on those thin ropes, holding a Christ Hang with arms nearly parallel to my shoulders (a real crucifix shape). I held this for almost two full minutes, as the other dancers did group worshipful movements below. I don’t know if I felt more like the prow of a ship, or the crucifix art hanging high over a church altar. I hadn’t been to church in years back in the ‘90s, and wasn’t religious, though the “fragrant offering” of Christ’s sacrifice was an image I carried with me even then. I still think of that long-held position, how the thin ropes bit into my arms more harshly than those of a trapeze, and how it felt to let my lat muscles sink into that pain with my own weight. I think of it especially when I’m in Denver’s gorgeous Episcopal cathedral each week nowadays. How my feet floated free above the padded pew that I lifted with my breath and my strength. How it hurt. How good that felt.
The feeling of aerial dance is difficult to describe adequately to one who hasn’t tried it. It’s a feeling akin to what I imagine a daredevil, a tattoo addict, or a skydiving enthusiast feels: it hurts, it’s dangerous, even when you do it well. But along with the pain, the rope burns, the bruises, the calluses on hands that can only develop through popping blisters and tearing off bits of flesh, is an exhilaration close to ecstasy. The pain of the techniques is the pleasure. Not in spite of the pain; because of it. I had a similar experience in martial arts later—with that kind of extreme physical training, the pain is part of what makes it feel so good.
I still dream that I can do it. I wake up from dreams where I’m doing all of it again (and often my dreaming brain ameliorates it with thinner ropes, one handed grips, and more) and I feel wry, wistful, a little sad. Part of me wishes I’d kept with it all those years so I could still do it like the others that are still there and active from that time that I was. Most of me, though, knows very well I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the company’s updated skill requirements, and I would never give up my post-aerial years in the martial arts for anything. But still.
I tried aerial dance again just before the pandemic hit, more than 20 years after my vampiric stardom. I took a beginning level class as payment for my appearance in the Vampires showcase, and was astonished how hard it was for me. I shouldn’t have been surprised: not only was I in my late 40s instead of my late 20s, the rigorous and regular training just wasn’t there, and hadn’t been for years. They kept saying I’d get used to it again if I kept with it, but I don’t know. I really don’t think it’s anything within my wheelhouse anymore. Though I do have a picture of me in a Christ hang from that brief lesson. It wasn’t as good as it used to be: I could hold myself up just fine and the rope burn felt great. But I couldn’t lift my arms very far at all—they stayed at an acute angle from my shoulders, barely lifted. The trapeze bar was only halfway up my shins. The small and barely not teenaged instructor took a picture for me, after I got her approval to do this move that was not on the beginner list of techniques. In it, my face shows the joy, and the effort. But that’s it. I have to let go of it, I know I do. I have to step off the bar, metaphorically this time.
It feels like regret. I remembered; my body remembered, how to do all of it. I just couldn’t. What happens to the champion when he actually really literally can’t get up this time? What happens to immortals when they become mortal?
Of course, clove cigarettes are exponentially more damaging to the body than regular cigarettes, which is why I stopped after a while. I quit my habitual smoking practice, including loose tobacco, in the early aughts, and only relatively recently have taken up very occasional cigars, as a rare treat. But there it is—another beautiful, tasty, sexy form of self-destruction. It’s how I do.
