200 Cigarettes Quotes

Passengers drank and smoked. Both; a lot. This was a significant source of profit for Cunard. The company laid in a supply of 150 cases of Black & White Whiskey, 50 cases of Canadian Club Whiskey, and 50 of Plymouth Gin; also, 15 cases each of an eleven-year-old French red wine, a Chambertin, and an eleven-year-old French white, a Chablis, and twelve barrels of stout and ten of ale. Cunard stockpiled thirty thousand “Three Castles” cigarettes and ten thousand Manila cigars. The ship also sold cigars from Havana and American cigarettes made by Phillip Morris. For the many passengers who brought pipes, Cunard acquired 560 pounds of loose Capstan tobacco—“navy cut”—and 200 pounds of Lord Nelson Flake, both in 4-ounce tins. Passengers also brought their own. Michael Byrne, a retired New York merchant and former deputy sheriff traveling in first class, apparently planned to spend a good deal of the voyage smoking. He packed 11 pounds of Old Rover Tobacco and three hundred cigars. During the voyage, the scent of combusted tobacco was ever present, especially after dinner.

During her lifetime, people across the globe furiously debated whether [Blavatsky] was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin; in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son, and an apostle of asceticism. She smoked up to 200 cigarettes a day and swore like a solider.

Part of the lore of the Mirage poker room was the four-day $600-$1,200 game Ted played with Hamid Dastmalchi, the 1992 World Champion and a man similarly possessed of a cast-iron constitution. At the end of it, Dastmalchi was taken out of the Mirage in an ambulance. Forrest joked that it was all the bad beats he showed Hamid, but it may have had more to do with the estimated fifty packs of cigarettes Dastmalchi smoked during the game.

MICHAEL: Well … I suppose the first would be, pick the right people. If you do, it makes everything else so much easier. And once you’ve picked them, trust them. Everyone here knows that the till is open. If they want to borrow $2 for cigarettes or $200 for rent, they can. Just put an IOU in the till and pay it back. If you expect the best of people, they’ll give you the best. I’ve rarely been let down. And when someone has let me down, I don’t think it is right to punish those who haven’t by creating some new rule or policy.

The only cigarettes allowed in the Dominican Republic were those made from tobacco grown on Trujillo’s plantations and manufactured at his 1,600-man cigarette factory. Although Dominican tobacco is good when used in making cigars, the people wanted what they couldn’t have and that was American-made cigarettes, which were impossible to get on the island. It was also more profitable to raise sugarcane on the available land, so that also hampered the amount of tobacco grown. Noticing the bumboats around the stern, I shouted down to them, asking what they were selling. It turned out that they were buying and were willing to pay $50 per carton for the same American cigarettes that we only paid twenty-five cents a pack for. At that time we were allowed to keep the ship’s store open in port, so the arithmetic made sense. I quickly bought five cartons at $2.50 each, and started lowering them down in a bucket. Each time I lowered a carton of Lucky Strikes, $50.00 came back up. Not bad, and all went well, until I got to the fourth carton and the bucket came up empty. The scoundrel, on his bumboat, was heading back to the port with a carton that he didn’t pay for. There were still other vendors in boats looking to make a deal, but by now I couldn’t buy any more cigarettes because the ship’s storekeeper had figured out what was happening. Knowing that it would deplete the cigarettes left in the ship’s store, he dropped the wire screen closure. Okay, I knew what to do…. I went to the carpenter’s locker and carefully slit open my remaining carton and filled the empty carton with sawdust before resealing it again. Down went the carton and up came $50. With that, I closed up shop, knowing that the guys in the bumboats would figure out what had happened and would try to get even. I wound up with $200 and 10 packs of cigarettes, less my unforeseen expenses. Not a bad day’s work.