How the Internet Birthed a Young Vape God

There’s this trick that today eludes the Vape God. It’s called the double lasso.

It’s a marvel of fluid dynamics and spatial manipulation that conjures an ethereal cloud of hot vapor that just sort of floats there, like a just-discovered deep-sea creature with no eyes and 24 dicks on its face. The trick goes like this: It starts with a thick, milky O about a foot in diameter, expelled from the Vape God’s mouth. Then he blows a smaller, faster O no larger than an Entenmann’s doughnut through that, which unravels and envelops the original loop in a sheen of translucent smoke. But that’s not enough. This is a goddamn double lasso, so an even tinier smoke doughnut is threaded through the first two, which creates a resplendent Turducken of filthy dankness.

It seems to require the lung capacity of an 800-meter swimmer and the larynx control of Mariah Carey, when she could still hit notes that made dogs perk up. Controlling the speed of the double lasso is important, too: The faster the first O is expelled, the better its viscosity, but fire it out too fast and you have to chase it across the room like a Vape Noob (which is just embarrassing). “It's all really momentum, the way you hit the O,” the Vape God says, contorting his mouth like a koi. “You really gotta hit it perfectly.” It is, to borrow one of the Vape God’s favorite phrases, really sick.

But pulling off the double lasso is also very hard. The Vape God has only achieved the feat a handful of times, and never clean enough for his liking. Today, after a few minutes of halfhearted attempts in front of a stranger (me), perfection escapes him. (“It’s mad hard.”) The Vape God deflates with a shrug and reverts back to his alternative form, a Millennial.

He is Austin Lawrence, 21, and the co-owner of Vertigo Vaporium, the finest slanger of vape-related paraphernalia in the great American city of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lawrence is about 6-foot-3, with spaghetti limbs. His face is model-gaunt, with a handsome bone structure that serves him well on his Instagram, where he has amassed 320,000 followers. His complexion is pale—in my notes I wrote, “nouveau rap-goth”—which suggests Lawrence doesn’t spend much time in the sun. Twin earrings sparkle from his earlobes, like faint S.O.S. signals crying out for help in the distant, blueberry-flavored fog (Lawrence's favorite flavor; tastes “really good”).

Real quick about the Instagram-fame stuff: Lawrence's whole thing is making crazy vape videos that get insane shares on social media. There’s the one where he blows smoke onto a countertop, flicks his wrist, and sends a literal double-helix tornado up to the heavens. In another, he spits out a triangle—with corners! Pointy and shit!—that shimmies like a geometric amoeba before it vanishes. His aptitude at this specific thing is surreal—a frightening reminder that time waits for no one and we all become old, washed, and out of touch with whatever the kids are smoking. It’s a captivating form of self-expression. “Kind of an art form, kind of,” says Lawrence.

As far as Lawrence can tell, he’s the most famous tricker—the vaper’s preferred term—on Instagram. When I ask him who his peers are, he pauses to think. “I only follow a couple of trickers,” he says. “Lucid_stease. Isaacvgod. I like them a lot.” (These names were written as gobbledygook in my notes.) He pauses again, trying to recall who else is out there. The mere thought of competition, too, seems to elude him.

While it’s fair to say that Lawrence is not the only tricker documenting his craft on social media, he is, at the moment, arguably the most famous. A few months ago, Drake, a rapper, posted one of Lawrence's videos on @champagnepapi. Upon learning that Drake was following him on Instagram—“I go to his page and search my name and I'm like freaking out. I'm like, ‘Hoooooo-ly shit!’”—Lawrence mustered up the courage to slide into his DMs.

“He was hookah-ing at the time, basically,” Lawrence says. “He was like, I've never seen the machines you were using. Then he said, yo, could you hook me up with a vape?’ I told him, I'll hook you up with a starter kit or whatever.” (Let’s briefly pause to reflect on the perfection that is Drake asking a 21-year-old for a vape in the DMs. Amen.) “And then he was like, yoooooo, should I just fly you out?”

The Vape God had never been to L.A.

What did you say?

“I was like”—and here Lawrence gesticulates with his spaghetti arms to indicate that his mind had just disintegrated—“um, helllllllll yeah?”

And off to Calabasas the Vape God flew to hang out with Drake in his mansion.

Smoking is at an odd inflection point right now. Everyone not named Michael “Mike Pence” Pence seems to understand that cigarettes kill you. And yet, despite our better faculties, plenty of people still do it. This is in addition to the Gulf of Mexico–size dissonance between the image seared into our brains of how cool we think we look while smoking a cigarette versus how we appear in reality. In my twenties, I used to think I was Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love, when in actuality I was just a guy with a ratty pack of Marlboro 27s in his basketball shorts, standing outside his apartment in the middle of January.

My grandfather smoked, and I thought he was the coolest man on the planet. Boxer. Navy engineer. Had open-stomach surgery once on a submarine in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no anesthetics and a bottle of whiskey. As far as I can tell, he didn’t ride motorcycles, but he could probably build one out of PVC pipes. The man was a living, breathing Dos Equis commercial, and he smoked for close to 60 years before he died. Even after he was gone, his bedroom still smelled like Halls and Marlboro Reds. In the two years after his funeral and before my thirtieth birthday, for a variety of reasons, I quit smoking. I would be lying if I said there wasn't a part of me that missed it.

Lawrence quit smoking three years ago (Marlboro Reds) because he was tired of waking up with his throat feeling like a crematorium. He had stumbled on this hot new thing on the Internet called vaping (the e-cigarette kind; not the weed kind, which goes to show we really need new terminology), and so did all his bros. His mom wasn’t happy at first, though she says she eventually came around to it because it’s supposed to be safer than cigarettes.*

Lawrence's obsession with tinkering his mod and doing tricks snowballed from there. He started out as a computer-science major at Rutgers, then switched to ITI (basically computer science with less math). Before his transformation into a Vape God, he spent most of his free time playing video games: He was heavy into Runescape, a proto-MMORPG where you fight orcs (spelled “orks”), but also Halo and Call of Duty (which he calls “cod,” like the fish). He doesn’t get much time to game anymore. The vaporium, which opened its door in November 2015, takes up all his time.

Truthfully, he’s kind of a nerd about this stuff, and approaches his craft with the rote discipline of a Ph.D. student. Or maybe a pro Starcraft player. Tricking occurs every morning right after he wakes up, for three to four hours every day, when his mind and imagination are most pliant. “I’m really just messing around, trying new stuff. Trying to do like crazy stuff,” says Lawrence. “And at night, I'm trying to do really clean stuff that I know will do well for video.” According to my math, he’s at about 4,000 dedicated practice hours on the Gladwellian 10,000-hour scale for mastery. Then it’s a 20-minute drive to open the store at noon.

From the outside, Vertigo Vaporium is another glass storefront on an already anodyne stretch of collegetown block, flanked by Paylesses and Chipotles. Inside it’s long, spacious, and dark like catacombs. Or a Hamptons sex dungeon. The walls are a few swatches below black-black to make it easier to see the smoke on video. Young Thug is mumble-singing from an unseen sound system when I realize there’s no air conditioning on; this, I’m told, ensures that the air is still and the delicate jellyfish and force fields retain their shapes when Lawrence is practicing.

It’s here that the Vape God shoots most of his videos with his older brother and Vaporium co-owner, Jared. Location tags: always on. (Vape Gods need to market their goods and services, too.) Jared films everything on an iPhone and edits later, usually splicing in music from guys like Future, Travis Scott, and more “underground stuff” like Pouya. Their video output varies, but it’s usually two or three a week, depending on the degree of difficulty. Nailing a trick cleanly—say, the double jelly, which looks like a double lasso to me but is assuredly not—can take three days. A brief sample of his comments: "Dude used magic to summon a jellyfish bro..."; "How do yu do this"; "song?"

Clearly, Lawrence is very, very good at what he does, and it’s maybe more remarkable because he’s making up a lot of it on the fly. When he first started in 2014, he “was just watching reviewers on YouTube and learning how to build vapes and stuff. No one really had tutorials for O's or anything.” Now, to the untrained eye (me), the Vape God appears to be pretty goddamn miraculous at blowing O’s. Big ones. Smalls ones. O’s that aren’t actually O’s at all but are tetrahedrons. Lawrence claims it’s all in the technique that he stumbled on by accident.

Here’s the dirty open secret: An opaque, well-formed O requires a sharp, percussive cough that emanates from deep within your diaphragm, like a kick pedal hitting a drum. (Alternatively, a T-shirt cannon.) "As you get more of your cough, it starts to come from here"—at this point, he stands up straight and points to his sternum like a chorale instructor—"but that's all part of the process." Jared tells me that he and all their friends can’t really replicate how, exactly, Lawrence blows his O’s. Perhaps the Vape God’s biology is uniquely suited to blowing smoke in interesting ways.

The Vape God has this other favorite trick that guarantees a couple thousand faves on Instagram. It was inspired by another vape legend, Leonardo DiCaprio.

“We were watching Shutter Island one night,” says Lawrence. “Have you seen that? Leonardo DiCaprio is in a stranded house. There's a huge storm, so he has to go inside. And him and his dude are smoking a cigarette, and he does the craziest, nastiest French inhale I've ever seen.”

I tell him I have not seen Shutter Island, but would not be opposed to watching it on a plane.

“And I was like, ‘Noooooooo. Fucking. Way.’” Lawrence's mind is blown again. “Seriously, I started French inhaling for, like, forever after that. It hurts. It stings. The best French inhale to date. I'll never top it.”

I ask him to demonstrate the trick, which he calls the Bane, as the intended effect resembles a Bane mask. The Vape God takes a hit of his mod, gathers himself for a beat or two, and barfs up a rushing cascade of smoke that slips through his teeth and is siphoned up through his nostrils. I can confirm that it is crazy nasty.

Drake is at an odd inflection point right now. He’ll drop a perfectly nice track like “Passionfruit,” then the next day he’ll do something low-key corny, like get an image of Sade tattooed on his side. (Allegedly!) Before he connected with Lawrence, Drake appeared to be deep in a freshman-year hookah phase, often posting photos of himself smoking out of a mystery pineapple that would seemingly materialize from another dimension. (Imagine being the crew member whose sole job was to pack the pineapple for the club.) He is a fascinating 2017 paradox: Drake isn’t so much an arbiter of taste as he is a cultural omnivore with a late-onset Jamaican accent, who absorbs whatever influences, some questionable, are in his orbit. If the fuccboi complex is an autoimmune disease, Drake is inoculated by the sheer force of his own steadfast Drakeiness. He is a unicorn. A cool try-hard with the enviable ability to co-sign just about anything.

But he’s also rich, so I asked Lawrence what the inside of Drake’s mansion is like.

“I don't even know how to describe it. To me it wasn't even a house! It was just like insane. The craziest house I've ever seen. For sure.”

I pressed on for details.

Did you see his pool? Do you think it was bigger than Kanye’s?

“It was insane! I didn’t get a tour of his house, though.”

Hmmm. Weird.

So what did you guys do?

“Did some tricks for a couple of hours. This was at night.”

How was Drake at blowing O’s?

“Yeah. He’s actually pretty good.”

I wasn’t getting much intel. Maybe the powers of perception are not in the Vape God’s wheelhouse, which is fine. So we switch gears and Lawrence tells me that shortly after Drake posted his video on Instagram, his follower count exploded by 50,000, like, immediately. He had to turn off his notifications due to battery drain. Admittedly, it’s on Drake’s Instagram that I first learned about Lawrence, and where I had to ask myself: Wait, wait, wait. Did Drake just help make doing vape tricks...aspirational?

Here’s one more way to think about this: Austin Lawrence is in rarefied air, joining Nicki Minaj, Barack Obama, and J-Lo as one of the few beautiful living creatures on God’s green Earth to have graced Drake’s Instagram page. What a time.

The first patent for an electronic cigarette was filed in 1963 by a guy named Herbert A. Gilbert, who used an electronic battery to heat tobacco. His idea didn’t really go anywhere; Big Tobacco wanted everyone to keep buying cigarettes. In a cruel bit of irony—or possibly subterfuge—the warehouse where Gilbert kept all his prototypes burned down, and it wasn’t until his patent expired 20 years later that nicotine inhalers began to see some success. In 2003, after his father died of lung cancer, a Chinese pharmacist named Hon Lik saw the first real commercial hit with an electronic cigarette that used ultrasound to transmute liquid to vapor. These days, modern vapes range from sleek pens to mods so ornate they look like what would happen if Mountain Dew sponsored a steampunk orgy and gave away dildos. Even Apple—Apple!...arbiters of painfully trendy, headphone-hole-plugging minimalism—has a vape patent.

A thought crosses my mind that cigarettes could, in the not-too-distant future, be relegated to smaller, niche markets—like vinyl or Rollerblades or something. Twenty years from now, will we view cigarettes the same way we consider bloodletting an appropriate medical treatment for dysentery? What if, as a culture, we’re just a Tim Cook “one more thing…” and an iVape Air away from a cigarette-free tomorrow?

I ask the two Vape Bros what they think the biggest misconception is about vaping.

“A lot of people say vaping's douchey,” says Jared. “The people who are like, ‘Vaping's stupid, vaping’s gay’ are the first ones who are like, ‘Yo, let me hit your mod.’” He estimates 90 percent of his friends who try it end up liking it.

Lawrence perks up and chimes in. “How could you not like blueberry-green apple? You're smoking candy!”

Toward the tail end of our interview, the Vape God hands me one of the mods floating around the shop to try. He asks if I’ve ever hit a vape before. I tell him I did once, drunk, with some pithy variation of “Yo, let me hit that.” He tells me that the flavors are pretty wild now: peanut butter rum; butter and toast; granola bar. The juice he’s loading into the thing is a combination of blueberry and green-apple Fun Dip. A festive treat.

I press a button, inhale, and attempt to blow an O, but the shape that gurgles out of my mouth is feeble and incoherent—a Rorschach O from a Vape Virgin. A part of me wonders what my grandfather would’ve thought about all of it: the combination blueberry and green-apple Fun Dips; the quasi-steampunk thing you have to keep in your back pocket; the tradeoff of rebel cool for a sexless—but allegedly safer—nicotine fix.

After I fail to blow anything that resembles a letter of the English alphabet (maybe Farsi), the Vape God seems to take pity on the Old struggling before him. He tells me I’m not bad, dude, seriously, but the faint wobble in his tone betrays the kindness of his edict.

I...do not feel the least bit cool. I feel ancient and a smidge closer to death, the crushing vastness of what I don’t understand in the universe looming over me like a doomsday asteroid the size of Nebraska. It does taste pretty good, though. Sort of like Fruity Pebbles.