Clear the Air

Let's talk, for a moment, about the smoky bar.

The haze and the mystery. The aura of excess and abandon. The toxins. The defiant indulgence in toxins.

Let's talk about how for so long the bar just was a smoky bar.

It was fat men and fat cigars and wood-trimmed backrooms with $12 glasses of merlot-cab blends where Chris Buckley and his lobbyists sat and thanked us for smoking.

It was passing an ashtray and huddling into high-backed booths, or low-slung lounge chairs, watching the 23-year-old across the room tilt her head back with a long exhale, aiming for some shade of Jessica Rabbit sophistication.

It was the "Excuse me, but do you have an extra cigarette?" way of saying, "Oooh, you're kind of cute, and this is the most low-risk way I can think of to start a conversation without mortifying myself."

It was the old lady bartender who probably wasn't all that old but had a voice like a garbage disposal and would leave the cig in her mouth while mixing three drinks, popping four bottle caps and lecturing you on how "you gotta toss that sorry cheater before he ups and ruins your whole damn life."

It was the smell, which ceased to smell until you left the bar, at which point it became a stench. And stayed a stench until the wash, except for those times when -- for one reason or another -- you failed to end up in your own bed at the end of the night. Then it became a putrid scarlet letter you wore all the way home, convinced the whole while that it was being used by everyone who crossed your path as the sole basis on which to judge your essential human worth.

Here, let's listen to Oscar Wilde on the subject:

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?"

And now the surgeon general:

"Seriously? Do we have to go over this again? What don't you understand about the word 'deathtrap'?"