Clear the Air

Right. Point taken. Especially by the governing bodies in Maryland and the District. (It's still "smoke 'em if you got 'em" in the commonwealth, of course.)

It has been more than three months since a bar stopped being a smoky bar in the District (well, for the most part anyway -- see Page 29). So we dropped by what used to be some of the smokiest addresses in the city to find out what has been lost and gained and maybe indelibly altered. To see what remains in the absence of haze.

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"A bar is a temple of oral fixation, and they have taken the cardboard nipple away," Phil Duarte proclaims. He is a painter and a musician and a three-decade on-again, off-again smoker who is off again at the moment but is livid nonetheless.

"If I thought the state was really trying to protect my health, I might feel differently," he adds from his regular spot in the front booth at the Raven Grill, where the neon "Cocktails" sign glows just above his head.

Duarte is a pontificator with an 11 o'clock shadow, whose big hands remain folded across his belly as he expounds on the power of market forces, the underrated Marion Barry era and a Dead Kennedys song that has the Suede Denim Secret Police coming "for your uncool niece."

"I prefer the old, grungy D.C. to the new, whitewashed D.C., and the smoking ban goes along with that," Duarte says.

"But the point is, if you're not a smoker, you're smoking every time you come in here," Ron Morreale butts in from the other side of the booth. Morreale -- who likes to think of the Mount Pleasant dive as a "book with all characters and no plot" -- is the type to talk with his hands, one of which is holding an unlit cigarette at the moment. "Smoking is the only vice I know of where you share your disease with someone who isn't partaking. I like the ban. I really do.

"This makes me want to go smoke," Morreale says, pulling up his pants and ducking out of the place that's not his favorite bar, but his "only bar."

But wait, there's more. "I like bar people in my bar. I don't like yuppies," Duarte says. It seems the recession of the nicotine cloud that used to be a fixture at the Raven has brought some newcomers in to partake of the jukebox and $2.50 Miller Lites. "I think," he adds, "I am becoming a curmudgeon."

"I've lost 20 pounds," Keith Semmes says on a Friday afternoon from the patio of JR's Bar & Grill on 17th Street near Dupont Circle. The real estate professional used to go to bars -- this one in particular -- five nights a week. He would drink, eat a burger, talk. Now he goes out once a week, choosing instead to go home, microwave something and smoke in his own apartment.

"The bartenders even call me and ask where I am," he says. "But I've saved a fortune not coming out there and spending all this money."