Fear, loathing as bars go quietly up in smoke (New York City)

The Age ^ | November 14, 2004 | Roger Franklin

[Eurotwit]

Like a lot of New York's straight-off-the-boat Irish barmen, Brian ("no surname, thanks") has a problem with authority, one that means keeping a weather eye on the door of the unfashionable watering hole where he slings suds from 6pm until closing time. As an undocumented alien with a tourist visa that expired more than three years ago, Brian's chief concern has always been the immigration authorities. These days, though, there is another threat to his livelihood: the Big Apple's smoking police. "It's a fookin' crime," he said, "the way those bastards behave."

The regulars at Brian's bar agreed. The talk that night last week had been of the front-page picture on the New York Post. It was a close-cropped head-shot of a young GI in Fallujah, face smeared with fatigue and camouflage paint, and a daub of what on closer examination was revealed to be a splatter of dried blood down the bridge of his nose.

The face of battle - yes, but it wasn't the 10,000-yard stare of eyes fresh from combat that had the regulars' attention. It was the just-lit cigarette dangling from the soldier's lips.

"So that's how it works," quipped Brian. "Shoot a fookin' sand goblin, win a fookin' fag."

The regulars chuckled, as Americans always do at that imported word, which means gay, and only gay, on this side of the Atlantic. But they got his drift, and one of the patrons wondered if the soldier and his M-16 might not find fruitful employment on New York's home front.

"Mr Mayor, you son of a bitch," he began, making a gun with index finger and upraised thumb, "you're dead." Then, in defiance of the Big Apple's draconian smoking laws, he exhaled a plume of ostentatious rebellion towards the yellowed ceiling. "Fook you, Mr Michael Bloomberg," added Brian.

That's the way it works these days in allegedly smoke-free New York, where the city's two-year-old smoking ban has ushered in an entirely new social ecology. At the chic bars and eateries, the ones that depend on high-volume turnover, even an unlit cigarette raised to the lips will bring an immediate warning to get the hell outside and light up on the sidewalk. With fines running as high as $2000 per violation, no eatery will risk the penalties.

But in the little neighbourhood joints, the ones that depend on regulars and locals, well, that's a different matter altogether. At first, when the ban was fresh, the hole-in-the-wall joints tried to uphold it. Trouble was, it proved financially ruinous.

One bar, Fiddler's Green on West 48th Street, had survived for decades through blackouts, crime waves and even an armed hold-up. But the smoking ban did it in. "Drinkers smoke, and the people who complain about smoking don't drink - not a lot anyway," said Brian.

So, after weighing the risks, he followed the example of barmen in scores of other low-rent joints and began distributing saucers to his late-night regulars. They have to be saucers because the mere presence of an ashtray - even a clean one - is taken as proof positive that illegal activities have been going on. Then the fines are issued.

No one is safe these days. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, a diehard smoker and one of New York's premier arbiters of the chic and the cool, was bailed up in his office and fined by two little men from the health department, not once but three times. In office buildings, the presence of a single squashed butt in a stairwell is taken as proof that law-breaking goes on, and the landlord is slapped with fines.

Now that muggings, rapes and murders are down by as much as three-quarters on the runaway figures of a dozen years ago, Bloomberg has adapted the zero-tolerance approach to "crimes" that never previously raised an eyebrow.

When Bloomberg, with a convert's loathing for his former vice, increased sin taxes in the five boroughs, tobacco sales soared in Long Island and New Jersey, and truckloads of cigarettes were shipped into town from Indian reservations.

Barman Brian doesn't give a fook, as he might put it, about politics. But he fully comprehends the way the world works. "I want to pay my rent, same as everyone," he said. "Here, let me give you a light."

[t_skoz]

In defense of all my fellow Micks, let me say that of course we have a rather large cursing vocabulary, far beyond the "fooks" that this bloke spits out.

However, I have never been to a place that curses in a more hatefull manner, and with such poetic eloquence, as Sweden. The Swedes have mastered the curse!

No, I can't repeat them here...

[risk]

Heh!

[t_skoz]

Move to Rochester :-)

best regards from Upstate

[paleocon patriarch]

He should be deported to the Irish Republic where they have banned smoking all over the country.

Don't worry, the Irish immigrants are returning to the old sod in droves. Seems that the roaring economy of the Celtic tiger has erased their "Far and Away" dreams. And yes, smoking is banned throughout Ireland in pubs.