This Is The Art of Cloud

In the Beginning

I smoked my first Hookah with my parents at their house about 15 years ago.  The experience was… nightmarish.  I felt sick, my head was spinning, and I was convinced I was going to die.  I swore off the stuff and promised myself I would never take another hit again.  Let’s mosey forward six years to 2001.

I’ve just graduated law school, gone through the bar exam (hell!), and quit my job.  Life is full of promise and I’ve got a travel bug that’s been digging around my skull and tugging at my heart since I was just a young lad.  I decide I’m going to take an epic round-the-world trip.  I begin to plan every destination I want to hit and end up with more than 40 countries that I want to visit.  Now being the savvy young law school grad that I was (a Juris Doctor no less) I decide to focus instead of selling my body for the mountain of cash I would need to make the “dream trip” happen.

I reduced the list of countries I wanted to visit to England, France, Germany, Holland (AmsterDAM-you-know-what-I’m-talking-about!), Belgium (why?), Spain (España en Español), Italy, and Persia (sounds more exotic than Iran so humor me).  For the purposes of my story here today, every country except for England and Persia is irrelevant here (although there are some saucy stories to tell my friend… very saucy and spicy; like a strong curry, without the inevitable gastro-disturbances).

I landed in London, England, on September 4, 2001 and went to stay with my friend, whom we had nicknamed Reza Hercules (the guy is ripped ladies and for the purposes of this discourse we’ll call him Hercules).  Now Hercules was what I like to call a man about town. He knew the best places and better yet, the best ways to get into the best places.

One of his favorite places was a place called Abu Ali, a small Hookah café in the heart of London’s Edgware Road.  This place reminded me of where the people that would take me hostage would eat and drink immediately before taking me hostage; I feel like George Clooney should do research for a movie there or something… very cool place.  It was very simple, full of Middle Eastern men, who looked at us with suspicious eyes as we took our seats outside.  It was late summer in London so the temperatures had spiked to a balmy 53 Fahrenheit (11.6 Celsius)—that’s right my round-the-world-sort-of trip started with my nuts freezing.  Ladies… it’s never too cold if you know what I mean—Booyah.

Hercules told me some friends of his would be joining us and that they would be ordering Hookahs.  He asked me if I liked Hookahs, and being that one had almost killed me, I answered that I was aware of them, but that I didn’t like them.  He asked me why, and I recounted the tale of my father and the Hookah.  Hercules laughed and told me I should try it again and see how I liked it—he promised the results would be different.

So, when his friends arrived, we ordered one Hookah for the four of us and lit up.  They each took turns puffing and passing and finally the hose reached me.  I paused only for a moment before I took my second plunge into the world of Hookah.  It was amazing!  The flavor was different, I didn’t feel sick, and we kept our blood pressure up by drinking sweet tea and eating pastries.  It was a new world for me, and the seed was planted for Sparx…  Also, I realized that my dad sucks at making Hookahs, but I still Love him.