I guess it’s time for me to write about the smoking ban in New York City. Yeah. “Yay.” I haven’t addressed it before — or, to tell the truth, paid much attention to the press about it — on purpose, because I preferred to remain in sweet, smoky denial about the entire thing. “Oh, it’ll never happen,” I scoffed, trying to sound dismissive, a Camel Light trembling fearfully between my fingers. “The bar owners of the city will never allow it.” Then Mayor Bloomberg signed it into law on New Year’s Day.

A ban on smoking. In bars. In New York City. I don’t even know where to begin.

Bloomberg, like so many of the former smokers who turn evangelically pro-lung after flushing the last of their own Marlboros down the toilet, seems to have only the best intentions — protecting the health of bar and restaurant employees, as well as of the non-smokers who patronize those bars and restaurants, by eliminating secondhand smoke from their environments. It’s nearly impossible to argue that that’s a bad thing, at least in theory, and I won’t try, because I, like so many current smokers who also qualify as sentient beings, understand that smoking is not healthy, for those who do it or for those in close proximity to it for long periods of time. Smokers don’t smoke with the intent to cause harm, after all, and even those of us who have elected to hold out for tissue cloning instead of quitting understand that it’s a harmful habit, and often an everyday unpleasant one as well. It’s expensive. It’s smelly. We know these things, and we try as best we can to avoid inflicting them on those who find it distasteful. God knows we don’t begrudge anyone else clean air. I mean, I won’t lie to you. When I watch old movies and I see Clark Gable smoking all dashingly on a bus, I seethe with envy. Jury duty sucked, but a big old leaded-glass ashtray in the middle of the jury room table would have gone a long way towards changing my mind about that. I wish I could smoke everywhere, but that isn’t the world I live in, and I think that’s a good thing. The majority of public spaces should stay smoke-free — the movies, the office, the public transit system.

Not the bar. Not in New York City. Fuck that.

Why? Oh, well, now let me see. Ohhhh yes, that’s right. Because. It. Is. A. Bar. A BAR! It is not a health club. It is not a nature preserve. It is not a cardiac care unit. It is — sing it with me if you know the words — A FREAKIN’ BAR. Now, let’s review why we go to bars, shall we? “To watch TV”? Bzzzzt! We can do that at home. “To eat salty snacks“? Bzzzzt! We don’t refer to these establishments as “salty snack houses,” do we? No, we do not. “To order an overpriced, watery diet cola”? Bzzzzt! Anyone else? Yes. Yes, that’s correct. We go to bars TO DRINK ALCOHOL. We do not go to bars to help the needy, or to attend a hatha yoga class, or to study. We may occasionally go to bars to watch football, or socialize with friends, or even chow the odd handful of pretzels, but we do all these things in the context of DRINKING. Now, let’s move on to a word association exercise. When I say “drinking,” what’s the next word that pops into your head? Yes, that’s right: “PROBLEM.” Drinking dehydrates you, beats up your liver and kidneys, kills your brain cells. It impairs your coordination and affects your judgment. It is implicated in all manner of criminal violence — assault, date rape, vehicular homicide, et cetera. The United States Congress once viewed alcohol as a societal ill so grave that it amended the Constitution to prohibit its sale and consumption. Prohibition failed, of course, but you see my point. I enjoy drinking, but while my own acquaintance with doing so “responsibly” and “in moderation” is distant at best, even the judicious glass or two of wine with dinner recommended by Reader’s Digest is not going to elbow broccoli and oat bran out of the wholesomeness pantheon, so it seems odd at best to expect an establishment which exists in order to furnish alcohol to serve as a citadel of good health.

In other words…hmm. How to put it? Ah, yes. It’s A BAR, for fuck’s sake! If you want sparkling clean lungfuls of untainted air, why not visit the Yukon, or the Alps, or the spa at the Beverly Hills Hilton, or another locale that’s, oh, I don’t know — NOT A BAR? Did you not see the sign out front? No, not the lighted Guinness symbol — the other one? The one above the door that says “McSwiggan’s”? What, may I ask, did you count on finding when you came through the door — a row of Nautilus machines? It’s not “McWorkoutigan’s,” okay? It’s not “McOxygen’s.” It’s a bar. It’s going to have a pool table, it’s going to have a passel of assy late-nineties That Guy music on the jukebox, it’s going to have a dark scarred wood bar and a sporting event of some sort on the TV, and it’s going to stink of thirty years of sloshed beer and cigarettes. Demanding a smoke-free environment in a bar is like demanding the ability to eat off the floor in the bathroom of a bar. I love the concepts of “sanitary surfaces” and “enough toilet paper” as much as the next woman, but because I did not just fall off a turnip truck and land on my HEAD, I understand that I cannot look forward to finding such things in the bathroom OF A BAR, and if the scary pink soap and the invisible haunch-prints of strangers and the stench of bile and piss horrified me that thoroughly, I would put on a pair of Isotoner slippers and an adult diaper and DRINK AT HOME! Don’t like sitting on a stool instead of on a couch? Find a bar with couches, or DRINK AT HOME! Don’t like fending off the advances of the gin-breathed hooligan sitting beside you? Tell him to fuck straight off, or DRINK AT HOME! Don’t like the smell of smoke? Put on extra perfume, or wear a gas mask, or — hey, DRINK AT HOME! Bars get smoky! SUCK IT UP!

Okay, okay. I know. You want to hang out with your friends, you can’t fit everyone into your apartment (which doesn’t have Harp on tap anyway, or a pinball machine), you didn’t ask to get asthma as a kid, you get sick from the smell…I know. Just because you can’t tolerate smoke, it doesn’t necessarily make you a sucky baby. I get that. But non-smokers have the whole rest of the city. Museums. Cinemas. Stores. Restaurants. Why not hang out at a restaurant, one with a liquor license? Most restaurants don’t allow smoking anymore, haven’t for years now. You could just sit and…oh, you don’t want to order food. Good point. All right, well, then why not let the bars themselves decide whether to allow smoking? Leaving the option up to the individual owners seems like the best, most workable solution for everyone. Proprietors of non-smoking bars would do a land-office business; even smokers want to go out and not come home reeking of ashtray now and then. And for those of us who absolutely cannot manage a vodka tonic without a smoke in the other hand, we’d still have bars that allowed smoking. Groups of friends divided between smokers and non- can alternate nightspots, and letting bar owners decide whether to go non-smoking offers options to folks in the food-service industry who can’t stand working in a smoking environment, the primary reason Bloomberg gives for the ban in the first place. Part of me wants to refer said folks to the section above — if you can’t abide smoke, maybe bartending isn’t the job for you, uh duh — but maybe you can’t find a different job for whatever reason, or you own the place and it’s giving you emphysema, and if that’s the case, the option to work in/run a non-smoking bar is crucial.

Its proponents can tell themselves otherwise, but the smoking ban is going to cause significant upheaval. From what I gather, it’s not a total embargo, but the loopholes — dedicated rooms for smokers with special ventilation systems, that sort of thing — will probably prove too expensive and disruptive to implement for most existing bars, so most of them won’t bother. So, bar patrons will stand out on the sidewalk, blocking foot traffic and littering and violating noise codes. Bars don’t want to deal with that shit, and their neighbors don’t want to deal with that shit either, butts all over the sidewalk, horsy laughs drifting in the windows until three in the morning. And smokers especially don’t want to deal with that shit, obviously. I just want to sit here with my pint and smoke. I don’t want to get up, put on my coat and hat, grab my bag, stand outside in the freezing cold without my drink because of the open-container law, and come back in to find my seat taken. Yeah, it’s laziness, but I feel that it’s justified. Again…it’s a bar, not an operating room.

So, unless the weather’s warm and we can go to outdoor café or a bar with a back patio, we’ll start staying home, or going across the river to Hoboken, or clustering at the “smoke-easies” that decided to take the fine and the hell with it. Yeah, a bunch of us will look around and decide that it’s a sign, and quit. A bunch of us will grit our teeth and switch to shots and set up shop out front.

But a bunch of us will just stop going out in the city, and on that note, let’s remember that it is in fact New York City of which we speak, and not San Francisco or Los Angeles or Seattle. “Quality of life” has a different meaning here. Songs about San Francisco talk about golden sun and wearing flowers in your hair, and songs about L.A. talk about cars and blondes and recreational drug anomie. Songs about New York city talk about fucking fighting to live. Hitchhiking to get here and hustling for the rent money, getting shoved on the street by cops and crazy people, breaking down on the subway, working your ass off, going without food for days, still telling your family to get bent when they want you to come home — so many lyrics about dirt and filth and roaches and drugs and honking horns and air pollution, but in all of them, that strange hard pride, because when you say that you live in New York City, you mean that you live here, but you also mean that you haven’t died here, that despite the city’s best attempts to run you down flat and beat you hopeless and kill you right on out of here and back to where you came from, you survived. You ate the Ramen, you went to the auditions, you breathed the bus fumes, and you didn’t go home, because you are home. It’s a little harder to find a seedy strip joint nowadays, but it’s still a tough town, and “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” is its signature line. “If you can make it here, you still can’t smoke indoors”? Excuse me, but — fuck no. It’s NEW YORK CITY. If you can stand to walk around outside in the summertime when the entire city smells like a rotting big toe, I think you can stand a couple hours of cigarette smoke, and if you can’t, maybe you would do better in California. Seriously. If that’s the worst thing the city throws at you over the course of a given week, count yourself lucky and get over it. New York City has a reputation to maintain, and “like a bio-dome, but with taxis” ain’t it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that smoking is bad and irritates a lot of people. A truth less universally acknowledged, because it isn’t “the thing” to defend smoking or its practitioners, is that a fiat like the smoking ban is also bad and also irritates a lot of people. For starters, it legislates behavior, but without a sensible understanding of that behavior. Lots of behavior is legislated, of course — it’s why I’ve never actually carried out my numerous threats to put my foot up various asses — and if we use the “your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins” standard, then certainly we should legislate smoking, too. My right to smoke ends where your lungs begin. Fair enough. My issue with the smoking ban, though, is the unilateral determination as to where your lungs begin. If I have the option of going to a smoking bar, and you have the option of going to a non-smoking bar, well, my right to smoke doesn’t interfere with your lungs, and your lungs don’t interfere with my right to smoke. Smokers would cheerfully settle for half the bars in the city, or a quarter of the bars, or ten percent, or “only the Irish bars and the annoying theme places in Times Square, and then only after midnight,” but no — evidently, nothing but a total ban will do. Apparently, then, Bloomberg isn’t using the “your right to smoke ends where my lungs begin” standard, but rather the “if I don’t get to smoke, neither does anyone else, so neener” standard, or perhaps the “I’ll decide what’s good for you, little missy” standard, and neither of those standards is appropriate when dealing with voting adults. Let us decide, please. Herd the smokers into a handful of crappy bars in unhip neighborhoods, raise the tax on a pack again, tell the cops to ding us with littering tickets if we flick butts into the street, whatever — we won’t complain, we never do. But don’t tell us how to live, Mayor Mike.

OR I WILL LIGHT THAT STUPID BIKE OF YOURS ON FIRE AND SMOKE IT. IN A BAR.

January 13, 2003

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