World's biggest ash

It was already three inches long and still growing when I called Val out on the porch to give it a good long look.

“Are you not impressed, babe?”

She just stared. Her incredulous face meant it was time for the next step.

“Get the kids! They gotta see this! And bring the camera!”

How can a man who feels awkward eating a banana in public be so proud to suck on a cigar?

I was in the midst of growing the world’s longest cigar ash and wanted witnesses.

The achievement’s been a dream of mine since I was a young reporter in Nashville and heard a story of a legendary attorney who used to distract jurors by growing a cigar ash that refused to fall.

I was told he’d insert a straightened paper clip right down the center of the cigar. The wire would somehow unite the ash into maintaining its pre-fire form.

The attorney would flamboyantly puff away on the cigar and stare at the ash as it grew to preposterous lengths. The gawking jurors became too pre-occupied by the spectacle to pay any attention to the prosecution.

I’d since heard the attorney was the great Clarence Darrow and the setting was the Scopes Monkey Trial, upon which one of my favorite films, “Inherit the Wind” (1960), is based, but this interesting Straight Dope piece debunks the contention.

I’d given the attempt meager efforts over the years, but this time I was determined to grow a 6-inch ash.

The effort had me recalling a smoke from a few years ago when an early curfew meant my companion had to ditch me in a smoky tavern on Pittsburgh’s South Side. I didn’t have my friend, but I did have my cigar.

I clipped it, lit it and began to commune with all the ghosts in the smoke. I would never dream of bothering a stranger with my smoke, but this was a smoker friendly bar and at that moment I was a friendly smoker.

So I was a little taken aback when a cigarette smoker next to me said in a challenging voice, “Just what is it you like about cigars?”

I surprised him with my answer. “It’s an hour-long commitment to idleness.”

A good cigar is too expensive to hurry or throw away, I said. The smoke has a way of inoculating you against bores and chores alike. You can’t go pick up the kids, you can’t clean the gutters, it’s just you and your cigar.

I told him to check out the great 1995 cigar-smoker Harvey Keitel/William Hurt flick, “Smoke,” a movie that teaches viewers how to weigh smoke. It relates how tobacco pioneer Sir Walter Raleigh weighed an unsmoked cigar on a balance, then lit and smoked the stogie, careful to preserve all the ashes.

When the cigar was done, he set the dead butt amidst the ashes, subtracted the one from the other, hence, the weight of smoke.

I was thinking about this on the back porch as I chased ash immortality.

I was closing in on my fourth inch when it began to occur to me I’d made a serious error. I’d been so consumed with setting some kind of record I forgotten my commitment to idleness.

I was puffing away like a locomotive, not at all my usual leisurely pace.

I was smoking the cigar so aggressively I was becoming light-headed. I started feeling woozy and sick to my stomach, the way I feel when I realize the weekend’s going to involve things like yard work.

Feeling faint, I set the half-smoked cigar down on the porch and let it expire. I sat there in the cool evening breeze to recover and mull my errors.

For a man so concerned about his masculinity, I’d really sucked the hell out of that thing. Rather than let it lead me, I tried to lead it.

Oh, well. No big deal.

For guys like me, being a half-ashed failure in the pursuit of an extra inch or two beats being exposed as a man who comes off half-cocked.

Monkeying around with bananas

I mentioned to a friend a while back that I felt self-conscious eating a banana in public, like I was afraid someone would snap a picture and invite cruel captions.

“I don’t know what you’re doing with your banana,” he said, “but you need to just bite it.”

Since last year, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about how to eat a banana than most people. That was when our 4th grader came home and said, “Look, here’s how Mr. Walker says monkeys eat bananas.”

She took a perfectly good banana, turned it upside down and squeezed the scab until it was nothing but peel and pudding.

Then she handed me the mess.

I don’t know how she expected me to react to her little demonstration. Perhaps she was hoping to engage me in some discussion of evolutionary quirks.

Instead I said, “What the hell are they teaching in school these days? Get your ass in your room and don’t come out until Mommy and me are good and drunk!”

I eat probably a banana a day. I love ‘em.

Here’s a fact: The flabby aerodynamics of a banana peel make it impossible to heave one more than 20 feet from a second story window across a tavern’s gravel parking lot.

That’s what I do with all mine. They degrade so quickly no one’s ever said, geez, how come there’s always a hazardous number of banana peels in The Pond parking lot?

I guess we can blame the Stooges for the mistaken belief that stepping on a banana peel can knock the legs out from under dimwits.

It happened all the time with the Stooges and it happened with the old battle ax played by Ethel Merman in the near-perfect 1963 screwball comedy, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

But I’ve never seen it happen in real life. Seeing it happen to someone like Trump’s way up there on my bucket list.

I don’t know whether or not monkeys eat bananas upside down or not, but I know adding monkey to anything improves everything.

I was thinking about this as I was listening to a string of great rock monkey songs -- and wouldn’t that category improve the Grammys?

There’s “Monkey Man,” by The Stones, one of their finest; “Shock the Monkey” by Peter Gabriel; “Punish the Money” by Mark Knopfler; and the cheeky “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” by the Traveling Wilburys.

Delbert McClinton has “Monkey Around.” Chorus: “You made a man into a monkey, now that monkey’s gonna monkey around!”

I saw Bruce Springsteen monkeyin’ around with a backup singer the very night I heard him sing his great monkey song, the obscure “Part-Man, Part-Monkey.”

It was 1988, the “Tunnel of Love” tour. I remember seeing him actually making out on stage in between songs with a bandmate -- and it wasn’t Little Steven.

I know what you’re thinking: Shocking! A rock ‘n’ roll singer kissing a girl who wasn’t his wife!

Yes, my prudish friend, I remember thinking the exact same thing. At the time he was married to the luscious Julianne Philips, an ‘80s vixen who had more hair than the floor of an unswept beauty salon.

The on-stage woman with whom he was making out? Patti Scialfa, Springsteen’s wife since 1990.

“Part-Man, Part-Monkey” references the Scopes Monkey Trial and comes down squarely on the side of the chimps. And who can forget “Inherit The Wind,” the Spencer Tracy movie about the historic trial? Outstanding.

Val and I just watched another great monkey movie, 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” starring James Franco. We loved it, as did 83 percent of America’s critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

In it, the Franco character has a super-intelligent chimp for a chum. It turns out as well for him as it did for that crazy Long Island lady who owned Travis the pet chimp who attacked her friend, mauling her so badly she needed a face transplant.

It’s a horrific story and I always feel shame for chuckling when recalling the tabloid headlines that read “Furious George!”

So there you have it, a comprehensive story about bananas and monkeys.

Or as Troy McClure said on “The Simpsons” when he performed the musical version of “Planet of the Apes,” it has everything from “chimpan-A to chimpanzee!”

And now it’s time for me to peel and eat my banana. But first I’m closing the drapes.

I think we’ve all had enough monkey business for one day.