By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Sure, we'll all live longer, but how will this affect the future of flirting?
No smoking in bars, if the city pushes such legislation through, means no excuse to approach a stranger, unless you count You look familiar , which doesn't count.
Why, just earlier on this night, at Rumors restaurant and bar south of Dupont Circle . . .
"Girl comes up and she says, 'Can I bum a smoke?' and it was obviously a pretext," says a guy named Jason Ewart, 29. The girl talked to Ewart awhile after that, one of those classic Washington dialogues about law school.
"Dude!" says Ewart's friend across the table. "She had to justify getting a cigarette!"
"She did stay longer than necessary," says a third guy.
Ewart tells the story of a woman he met some while back, when he was single. She came over to bum a smoke, and only later, when they were exchanging cards, did he catch sight of the pack of cigarettes in her bag.
Cigarette etiquette is ancient stuff, stowed in the cultural marrow back when men wore real hats and glam movie stars with impossible cheekbones gave come-hither looks through unfiltered haze. What relics of chivalry still surround this tiny lethal object, the cigarette! What other than a cigarette could a person request of a total stranger? What but splendid pretense prompts a fellow to flick a lighter for a girl who already has a match?
Speaking of which, Ewart has a rule.
"Why can't you light another guy's cigarette?" asks his friend Nate Tamarin.
"You just don't do it," Ewart says.
Pinup Betty Grable in a turban, circa 1935, her eyebrows thin as starving commas: She rests a cigarette on her lips, cradled between two dark fingernails. The man beside her stares at the lit match he's holding out, while she looks intently into his eyes. That look was part of the ritual, you figure; even if she didn't mean it, that was the polite thing to do. He made her feel like a lady and she made him feel like a man. It seems a whole lot of silliness now, but everyone knew their parts.
These days, Americans flirt feebly, liquor-soaked and anxious. But for lo, these many years we at least have had cigarettes, instruments of seduction. How many love affairs have been started by a man offering a match? Scratch that. How many illicit couplings? How many first names saved in cell phones, responsible for sowing mistrust months later when discovered by significant others? ( But I wasn't gonna call her !)
Two blondes at a bar: They don't even consider the nonsmoking guys, who -- they have determined from years of study -- are no fun at all. The obscene adjective they use to describe these men can be forgiven, as the blondes have been tossing back rum runners. This is their third bar of the night. They're headed to two more. Smoking, smoking, all the way.
"That's how I met my boyfriend," one of the blondes says. "He bummed a cigarette from me."
At any bar, there are both the committed smokers and the furtive ones, whose co-workers or wives don't know. Sometimes they call themselves social smokers.
"That's the worst thing in the world," says Ewart, who impersonates a social smoker, saying: " 'I'm a poser.' "
They smoke when they're nervous or bored -- something to do with my hands -- and because it's more graceful than shredding a napkin. They smoke because beer and cigarettes are as perfect as coffee and doughnuts, or, for that matter, coffee and cigarettes. They smoke because it's powerful, like wearing sunglasses, because it's tough, like showing off bruises. They smoke because each new cigarette is a reinvention.
Some have long ago ceased to be social smokers, but they still call themselves that because it sounds temporary and like a choice, not like addiction, where smoking stops being sexy.
Not sexy: those people outside office buildings. One hand clutches an unbuttoned coat collar. The other holds a cigarette. There's no draped wrist on a bar, no whiskey and low lighting. Delivery trucks rumble past and there's gray gum by the ash-and-trash and it's cooold , and you wonder what kind of demon could drag them out here. When they return to their cubicles, they drag a stale, grubby smell behind them.
Not sexy: smokers at a party, relegated to the back yard, where the backdrop to their conversation is a girl vomiting by the garage.
The smokers in Rumors know about the non-sexy ones, but they don't see themselves that way. A clean-cut manager remarks that he doesn't look like a smoker just before lighting up. A patron speaks dismissively (between puffs) of the sort of people who hang out in airport smoking lounges. Rednecks, he calls them. Whatever that means.
What, then, if smoking disappears from the District's bars next January? Already the D.C. Council has approved a ban and appears to have enough votes to override a mayoral veto, should there be one. Will the mating rituals be disrupted? Will people be reduced to approaching one another under the guise of borrowing something as dreary as a pen?
Or will those impromptu sidewalk smoking clubs become social events in themselves, as Ewart and his friends say has happened in New York? Outside a bar it's quieter and, frankly, it smells better, and a person is guaranteed to be among those of like mind: fellow smokers.
"New York people don't talk to you when you're in a bar," says Ewart, "but when you're outside . . ."
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