Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
The room is dark. Large fabric prints hang on the walls. It smells, not quite like incense. It is pleasant. Reggae plays loudly.
“I figure I have to play Bob Marley at least once while you are here,” Cloud 9’s manager says.
A group of people is behind a portable screen in one corner – they visit often. Across from them, another group is splayed out over giant pillows on the floor. One man goes it solo, and a couple behind my friends and me appear in their own little love bubble.
My friend comes to this realization: Cloud 9 kind of looks like the basement in “That ’70s Show,” but with more mood lighting.
I was hesitant to enter Cloud 9, the hookah lounge and tobacco shop on Wells Street in Fort Wayne, under the same ownership as The Bean Café and Teahouse next door. “Would everyone think I’m a pothead by default?” I wondered.
Some do enter and ask about marijuana, manager Patty Richards says, but the stuff in the hookah is just tobacco. Flavored tobacco, but tobacco nonetheless.
The extent of my hookah knowledge comes from the caterpillar that smokes one in “Alice in Wonderland,” so Richards and a few hookah Web sites explain how it works: The flavored tobacco, called shisha, is placed in a small ceramic container at the top of the hookah and covered with a metal screen or piece of foil. Cube-like pieces of coal sit atop the screen and indirectly heat the tobacco. A hookah is essentially an overgrown glass pipe. Smokers suck on hoses attached to the hookah’s base. The sucking pulls heat and flavor from the tobacco and mixes it with water bubbling from the pressure in the hookah’s base, producing the smoke-and-vapor mixture that is pulled through the hose by the smoker.
While business at Cloud 9 ranges from nearly empty to having to wait for a seat – especially on Fridays, when live bands play in the lounge, Richards says – others haven’t fared so well.
The Twenty Past Four & More, located on Broadway, had a hookah lounge for about two months, but it closed two weeks ago because it didn’t get much business, says Kevin O’Dor, the tobacco store’s assistant manager.
Richards says she thinks the two closest hookah lounges to Cloud 9 are in Indianapolis and West Lafayette, so the Fort Wayne lounge really has something of a niche market.
Cloud 9 patrons range in age from 18 to 60-something, Richards says, and often when older patrons come in, they comment to Richards, “These aren’t what they used to be.” The implication? That when they were younger and smoking a hookah in the ’70s, it might not have been tobacco in that ceramic container.
Younger patrons often visit for the social aspect of it. The four Fort Wayne men lounging on the overgrown pillows come pretty often. Two, Trevor Walker and Sam Sims, both 18, say they frequent Cloud 9 twice a week.
“I think it’s a very relaxed, mellow atmosphere,” Walker says. “There’s music and always someone to talk to.”
Plus, he likes the taste of it. Walker and his three friends are smoking a coconut and pineapple mixture. For one, Kenny Zuber, 19, it is his first time smoking a hookah.
“I’d smoked cigars before, and that left a weird taste in my mouth,” Zuber says. “This is all right.”
Richards walks by and overhears a question; Zuber had wondered how Cloud 9 got around the smoking ordinance in Fort Wayne.
If a business sells a certain amount of tobacco-related products, it is exempt from that law, Richards says.
Legally, patrons could smoke cigarettes in Cloud 9; however, the management doesn’t allow it. Cigarette smoke smells disgusting, and some people are allergic to it, but hookah vapor doesn’t have such a foul smell, and fewer people have allergies, Richards says.
Hookah smoking is a tradition in the Mideast, Richards says. Merriam-Webster Online dates the term to 1763, from the Arabic “huqqa,” which is the bottle of a water pipe. It can also be called “narghile” or the Persian “ghelune,” according to the Web site The Colors of India, an Indian history and culture site.
While by no means healthy, smoking a hookah is better for one than a cigarette, Richards says.
Not only does shisha not include all the additives of cigarette tobacco, but it also takes longer to smoke; four people can share a hookah for an upward of 40 minutes, she says.
Because of the duration, it’s more difficult to become addicted.
People mainly smoke for the social reasons, both Richards and Walker and his friends attest.
It’s not an addiction, and the vapor is remarkably smooth, as this reporter can say for certain. I had never smoked anything – not even a cigarette – so I expected to hack up a lung after taking a puff or two from the Cloud 9 hookah.
I didn’t cough at all; I simply enjoyed the delicious coconut-flavored shisha.
