A Requiem For Smokers

This afternoon my friend and I dropped into a friendly neighborhood tavern to grab some lunch and to watch the Detroit Red Wings CRUSH the Colorado Avalanche in the second round of the NHL playoffs. Now, if you happen to be a Colorado Avalanche fan, you should know that I deeply respect the Colorado team, and that I also respect you as a fellow sport fan. Cheer up - I'm sure your guys will do better next time out.

Just kidding. The Avs suck.

Anyway, I didn't really want to talk about the hockey game. I want to talk about something else in that tavern, something you can count on finding in lots of bars, along with oceans of alcohol-fueled despair and happy hour hot wing specials. I want to talk about people who smoke cigarettes.

Many years ago, this would not be something that was even worth mentioning. When I was a kid, my parents (and the parents of all my friends) ate their meals with a fork in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Back then, it seemed like everybody smoked.

And people could smoke just about anywhere they wanted to. Ok, they did discourage smoking in some nursery schools and most operating rooms, and it was considered impolite to actually light up in an elevator, but other than that it was pretty much "smoke 'em if you got 'em."

Old movies probably had a fair amount to do with this attitude. Many love scenes kicked off with William Powell firing up a Pall Mall and blowing smoke in the face of a (breathless) Myrna Loy. In the sports movies, the home team would get its pep talk from a head coach with a clipboard in one hand and a Camel in the other. Being serious athletes, one or two of the players refrained from smoking, at least until after the game.

I once saw a 1950s Sci-Fi movie in which a rocket crew in silver space suits and oak swivel chairs landed on Mars, turned off their rocket, then sat back and lit up. I can't think of anything quite as refreshing as a nice haze of cigarette smoke when you're living in a pressurized tin can.

Back then cigarettes were even considered vaguely medicinal. The first thing a corpsman would do after tending to a wounded John Wayne on a stretcher in Iwo Jima would be to shove a lit cigarette in his mouth. Apparently, in combat medicine, a pretty good substitute for antibiotics is emphysema.

These days smokers occupy a rung on the social ladder somewhere between lepers and skunk wranglers. You see them in the designated smoking areas outside office buildings huddled in hazy little clusters, with their shoulders hunched against the weather and the disapproval of society.

About the only other indoor places you still see people smoking are bars. In fact, in cities like New York and the entire country of Ireland, smoking is prohibited in any public building, bars included. Among other things, this means that in these places all the bars smell a whole lot better - unless, of course, Stinky McPhee happens to be hanging out there.

So what has happened?

I think the main thing is that a lot of those really cool people who were almost never seen without a cigarette, people like John Wayne, the Marlboro Man, and my parents, are - astonishingly - no longer with us. And a lot of us who smoked because we grew up that way have decided to get rid of cigarettes and put off joining them, at least for long enough to get well acquainted with our grandchildren.

Besides, it's just plain expensive to smoke. Not only do cigarettes cost a small fortune (more than $8.50 a pack in New York!), a smoker can't sell a house or furniture without special cleaning and fumigating. In fact, just having smoked in a car can knock more than $1,000 off the resale value.

So now when I sit in a bar and watch someone sitting in a cloud of smoke and putting a cigarette to their lips, it seems kind of strange.

Anybody care for a mint?