Making New Friends at the Cigar Club

On Friday nights, from 5:30 to 9:30, my “Cigar Club” is open to friends and colleagues for drinks, smokes, and conversation. I’m not always there, but Frank is.

Frank is more than just the bartender. He’s the person who greets everyone when they enter, remembers what they like to drink, laughs at their jokes even when they aren’t funny, and counsels them when they are feeling low.

Frank is also the reason that, when I am there, I usually don’t come downstairs to join my guests until an hour or so after they begin arriving. The buzzer first sounds almost always at precisely 5:30, and continues to buzz every five or 10 minutes. I glance at the monitor on my desk to take note of who is visiting, then I get back to whatever it is that I was working on.

Most of those that come early are “regulars,” so I don’t feel any obligation to entertain them. I know they will be happy chatting with Frank while they settle into their favorite barstool or couch or seat with their favorite drink without my intervention.

I spent about 10 years during my college and graduate school days in and out of the bar business. The business knowledge I acquired was invaluable later in my life, but the social education may have been even more useful.

Among the things I learned was that the best results are had when you introduce someone brilliant or fascinating to a group in a way that demands their respect. If you can pull that off (and it depends significantly on the quality of the catalyst), what you will have is a fascinating and even edifying conversation.

I engineered such an event last Friday when BN, a young real estate baron I know, brought in an artist friend of his who was renting BN’s nearby warehouse to serve as his atelier. I had heard about him – that his “name” was rising quickly among the low-echelon art collectors that religiously attend Art Basel every year in Miami.

The regulars that evening happened to be men of roughly his age that I know from the martial arts world – muscled and tattooed, but good souls with open minds. And so I let them know (even though I hadn’t yet made the judgment) that they were in the presence of an artistic genius.

The fact that he, too, was a student of Jiu Jitsu and that he was about their size (over six feet and two hundred pounds) and had two sleeves of tattoos, one of which reached to his left ear, made my job even easier.

After getting the attention of my regulars, I asked him how he had gotten into the art business. His story was exactly right to win the respect and even admiration of his audience. I may have some details wrong, but here’s the basic plot…

He was working as a humble waiter in various restaurants in Delray Beach while improving his Jiu Jitsu skills, when the owner of the dojo he attended mentioned to him that he was planning on commissioning a large mural for one of the walls of the studio. On impulse, he said that he happened to be a mural artist and would do the work for a small fraction of his normal fee. What he didn’t say, he told us, was that his only experience as an artist had been scribbling in a pocket-sized notebook that he carried with him. He secured the job, and to no one’s surprise but his own, his mural pleased not only the owner, but his students. Thus, a career was launched.

I was in awe of his gumption – that he gave himself permission to take on a job for which he was entirely unqualified and continue to accept commissions while he in the early stages of learning his craft. I was equally struck by the fact that he was able to generate art that would be accepted into Art Basel in less than a year.

I told him so, and he invited me to walk over to his atelier and see some of his work. I did and was immediately charmed and impressed by what I saw – the artwork as well as the eclectic mess of a studio he had put together.

I asked him if he’d be willing to do some sort of mural on one of the sides of my building. He said he’d be “honored” to do “something cool” for me and that I could pay for it with future invitations to the Cigar Club for him and a few of his friends. We shook hands on that.

Driving home that night I was thinking how lucky I am – at my age – to be adding 20- and 30-year-old entrepreneurs and artists to my circle of friends.