Smoke Inn Blog Smoke Inn Cigar Talk
Obviously, you’re gonna look at the pictures I’m attaching to this story way before you read anything I’m writing. But after you stop laughing, just read the story….
Al Goldstein was just bout the most bizarre customer we ever had… well, except for maybe Moondog who I already wrote about!
Al was a fanatic cigar buyer. How many cigars he smoked a day I really can’t say, but there is no way on earth he could possibly smoke even 10 percent of the cigars he bought. He was a big celebrity in the 70’s and every newsstand had his Screw magazine front and center. The thing about Al was that he wasn’t just a fanatic cigar buyer, he was a fanatic buyer of anything and everything.
We got pretty friendly with Al and me and LaVonda would occasionally go out to dinner, or go to his townhouse off Madison Avenue, and while there he showed us his humidor—a walk in closet lined with cedar and literally HUNDREDS of mostly unopened boxes of cigars. Anytime I would tell Al that some brand or some size cigar was being discontinued he would buy all that we had left. It was like a disease… he had to own whatever it was that people could no longer acquire. It didn’t matter if it was a Montecristo or Connecticut Munimaker.
At his town house Al showed us entire rooms overflowing with stuff he was enamored with, and we found out that besides Screw magazine he also published a magazine called Gadget, and another called Chocolate. Can you imagine the looks on our faces when Al took us into an entire room that had nothing but scales! Al was always fighting his weight, and he would weigh himself on what had to be more than 50 scales of all different types in that room every single day… sometimes more than once a day. I shoulda known way back then that the guy was completely nuts!
One meal with Al that stands out in my mind was at the Four Seasons restaurant. He had invited me and LaVonda there, and after we placed our orders, he told the waiter that he wouldn’t be eating anything!!! He was on a total fast! Talk about a weird meal. Me and LaVonda are eating, and Al is just talking. Who on earth invites people to dinner when they are not going to be eating anything themselves?
Another room in Al’s house had Gadgets… hundreds of different electronic gizmos that did G-d knows what. Many of them were still in boxes that had never been opened. And on the roof was the biggest train set I ever saw in my life… not in the number of cars, It was the size of each the cars! These were the kinds of trains you see at a carnival where you could actually sit on them and ride around! Al did everything in a big, big way. I knew he had started out as a photo journalist, and he said he had been in the Press Pool at the White House at times, but he never really earned any big money at that, and the idea and the launch of Screw magazine changed his life around financially—although his mother was outraged when she found out what he was doing and they hardly spoke thereafter.
Al bought the very first box of Farach pre-embargo Cuban cigars at our auction at the 7th Regiment Armory. Realizing that ABC, NBC, CBS, and every newspaper under the sun was there to cover the story: The first Cuban cigars to be sold in the United States in over a quarter of a century! Al told me he was going to buy the first box auctioned off no matter what it cost because it was the cheapest publicity he would ever get. And he was absolutely right! He bought that first box of 25 Farach Joyas (a corona in a glass tube) for over $2300 (hey, this is 1983 money – more like 10 grand today!) and got himself on every major TV News Show, and the front page of the New York Times and over 2,000 other newspapers nationwide. And our company was prominent in all those shows and newspapers too! We were a nationally known entity in one night! I still have copies of all those newspaper articles, and even though a lot of the information in the articles was wrong (you just can’t believe everything you read in a newspaper) we were freakin’ celebrities!
I have an article that Marvin Shanken, the editor and owner of Wine Spectator, wrote in 1984 about that auction and I’ll attach the picture to this story.
Shanken was one of the buyers, and I think that our auction was the inspiration for his 1992 launch of Cigar Aficionado Magazine. Me and Marvin don’t talk anymore. We went from helping the magazine get started and going to dinners with Marvin and his wife Hazel (a really lovely woman—how she remained married to that man is truly mystifying to me) to not speaking at all. But that’s another story for another time.
Well, over the years Al’s Screw Magazine, which was selling an incredible 140,000 copies per week, faded and folded, and his other magazines Gadget, Chocolate, Cigar… YES Cigar! —the first magazine ever about cigars! I was on the editorial staff (I’ll rummage around and see if I can dig up a copy, I’m sure I have it somewhere in my endless piles of junk) … anyway Cigar folded too. And there were others. I think one was called Bitch, and others with similar attention-grabbing names… but the most outlandish of all was his X-Rated version of Cigar Aficionado which he titled C*nt Aficionado!
Al also had a live TV show called Midnight Blue that was on late night TV for years, but outlandish statements and off the cuff remarks about different people and personalities resulted in who knows how many lawsuits for slander and libel. And without going into detail about his fortunes, Al ended up broke and homeless, sleeping in the laundry room of the 2nd Avenue Deli in New York City, a place where he had been a huge customer for years. That was when we got a call from Al. We hadn’t heard from him in a few years, and the last time we spoke he was living in Florida and running for the sheriff’s office down there… but that had to be at least three years earlier. Anyway, Al told me he was broke, and where he was living. I couldn’t believe that a guy who had once been so successful and had so much money could be reduced to this.
Anyway, Al asked me for a job at our 5th Avenue store, (I couldn’t believe it!) and without hesitation I said “sure, you can start tomorrow”. As soon as I hung up, I told LaVonda about the conversation, and she said, “We have a big event Friday night at the Meadowlands, why don’t you invite Al?” So, I called the 2nd Avenue Deli and they got Al on the phone for me (he didn’t even have a phone of his own right then) and I invited Al, but he said he had no way to get to New Jersey, and I said “don’t worry, I’ll send a limo for you”. Well, we had a VIP. area where we and our executives stayed during the event, and Al joined us there. He looked terrible, a shadow of his former self. This was October of 2004, and the only reason I can pinpoint the date so well is that we had a big screen TV in the VIP lounge and the seventh game of the ALCS between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox was on… I’m a die-hard Yankee fan, and they had won the first three games of the series to take what seemed like an insurmountable lead, but the Red Sox had come back and won the next three games. So, this game was for all the marbles. The Yankees started Kevin Brown, a pitcher they had stolen from the Dodgers with the biggest contract ever given to a Major League pitcher, and Brown gave up 5 runs in the first two innings. And then the game got even worse, so bad that I had to stop watching. The Red Sox completed what has to be the greatest comeback in history and the Yankees had folded up like a cheap suit.
Anyway, Al stayed the whole evening and ate like a starving man… and let me tell you, Al could eat! Remember, I said we had gone to dinner at the Four Seasons and Al ate nothing? That was when he had just come back from some sort of Duke or Rice diet program. I assumed that meant Duke or Rice University. He had lost 165 pounds there! Anyway, Al had a big problem with food, but that night I could understand why he pigged out so badly. Al spent the night eating, and cursing, and telling all sorts of embarrassing obscene stories, and we really started to question the wisdom of having him work in our store. What would our customers say when he opened his mouth and all that bad language came pouring out?
Well, as it turned out, Al Goldstein, during his brief tenure working at our place, was probably the greatest cigar salesman that ever lived! He could sell anything to anybody, and customers absolutely loved talking to him… even those who had no idea he was THE Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine. Well, because he was dead broke, we advanced him two weeks salary and that’s when I fully came to grips with the knowledge that Al was completely nuts! I got a call from Mary, who managed the store along with her sister Chantal, two of the sweetest human beings you will ever have the good fortune to know. Mary told me that she had given the advance to Al, and he had immediately bought a gold Dunhill Lighter with four hundred dollars of the money! A dead broke, homeless guy living in the laundry room of the 2nd Avenue deli, and he buys a gold Dunhill lighter with the first money he’s seen in… for how long—I don’t know.
Well, to make a very long story just moderately long, not two weeks later Al is caught stealing four books at Brentanos, a bookstore just a block or two up the street from our store on the corner of 5th Avenue and 46th St. where we had put him to work. And because he was who he was, the story was in every NY newspaper!
It was hard to do, but I had to fire Al. So, we gave him two weeks’ severance pay and said our goodbyes. He wasn’t mad, he understood it was his fault. Well, I think maybe everything turned out okay because I got a call from Al just a couple of days later, and he told me that Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine had given him a job for $500,000 a year! Whether that was true or not I don’t know, but that was the last I heard of Al until I saw an article in the Daily News that he had passed away in a nursing home in Brooklyn. Had I known he was there I would have gone to visit him. He was a good friend to us while he was “in the chips” and we had even been to several of his five weddings, so visiting him while he was “down” would have been the right thing to do.
Anyway, it seems that a day doesn’t go by that some event involuntarily triggers something in my mind that reminds me of one of the many interesting people that run the gamut of kings, princes, barons, movie stars, politicians, sports heroes, and so many others that have crossed our path in our years of retail business.
Maybe I should write a book!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Smoke Inn, its employees, or its affiliates.
