The Week of Smoking Dangerously
Queenan, Joe
......................................... Joe Queenan The Week of Smoking Dangerously Buddy, can you spare a match? 0 ne recent afternoon, I lit a Marlboro and slipped into a Times Square strip...
...When the stench had dissipated, she leaned down and said gruffly, "We work on tips: three dollars to strip, five dollars to touch...
...But the most impressive reaction of all comes from the three people who physically leave the track to run on the dirt off to the side...
...By the time the millennium rolls around, schoolchildren will be taught that even though cigar aficionado Winston Churchill was the Lion of England, we might all have been better off submitting to the Nazi boot...
...I start to get a clear idea of how insurmountable the anti-smoking opposition is when I stride into an Eighth Avenue pawn shop with a cigarette in my mouth and am told to get the hell out...
...All of the individuals I approached were fantastically dressed women of leisure who looked like they had husbands with good jobs-perhaps running tobacco companies...
...Mrs...
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...But most people, including most smokers, don't want to think of themselves as people whose personal idiosyncrasies will be tolerated only in a grubby, dangerous neighborhood...
...Bums...
...Yuppies either are lawyers or are married to lawyers, and have persuaded themselves that it is possible to establish hermetically sealed universes in which all human activity can be classified as licit or illicit...
...Are these like Toscanis...
...One of them tells me that I hold the cigarette the wrong way...
...Burdened by my sense of being a social menace, I spend the entire week deliberately eluding my normal, noncarcinogenic friends and spending all my free time with people who are going to die of cancer...
...Let me give you an example...
...In a French bistro called Le Ferrier, several people at the next table make faces about my smoking, even though we are seated outdoors and there are ashtrays on the table...
...A boutique presents them with a perfect social setting in which, in an atmosphere relatively devoid of personal danger, they can make another human being feel totally worthless...
...When I approached them with a cigarette between my fingers and asked for a light, they looked insulted...
...There are 79 women and 21 men, of, whom roughly 80 percent are under 30...
...suggests that the cigars are profoundly offensive...
...Regularly 524...
...The five most devastating words in the anti-smok er's vast lexicon of derision are these: "I didn't know you smoked...
...Each time I was greeted with the same look: You are scum...
...Yuppies are all like Molly Ivins: they like to sermonize, but they only want to do it on the Mount...
...But even in cabs where the driver lets me smoke, I can't enjoy it because the ashtrays have all been removed...
...There is no smoking in this eatery...
...But that was okay because one of the other machines was now vacant...
...The phrase isn't a euphemism for "I feel sorry for anyone foolish enough to endanger his health by putting a cancer stick in his mouth...
...But I cannot resist a final parry...
...Whew...
...Go over and smoke in some whorehouse on Eighth Avenue-don't smoke here in this upscale boutique we named after a French cat...
...Teenagers...
...Wheezing carcinogens all over the Vine Ripe Belgium Tomatoes ($1.79 a pound), I was immediately singled out as persona npn grata...
...Why spend seven dollars when you can get the same effect for a dollar-ninety...
...Even when I am not smoking, I feel like a pariah...
...You are allowed to smoke in the bar...
...As the week drags on, my sense of being a social leper increases...
...There was certainly no twinkle in the eye of the tennis ladies at Canard & Company at 92nd and Madison when I strolled in with a Winston protruding from my lips...
...Not until I hit a food emporium called the Madison Marches at 75th & Madison did I find a place I could light up without being told off...
...What fascinated me was not whether I would be asked to leave, but how I would be asked to leave...
...First I get the cold (tattooed) shoulder from the stripper...
...But it doesn't matter...
...The machine said it could not read my card...
...Then, along came the Native American movement of the 1960s and we all realized that these guys were a bunch of racist infanticides and fakes...
...wo patterns emerged...
...At Godiva Chocolatier, Dean & De Luca, and several upscale gourmet shops, the employees could have cared less if I smoked...
...We are seated in a pasta joint on Eighth Avenue, she having meatless lasagna, me the manicotti...
...Although a "No Smoking" sign was clearly posted right next to one of the four ATMs, I lit up a Marlboro and took my place in line...
...My gargantuan Dominican cigar must have beguiled them into thinking that I am a friend of Dave's...
...I smoke a Gitane...
...And two, women were far more likely to upbraid me than men...
...He had every right to be ticked off because I'd jumped ahead of him, but he wasn't mad at all...
...I got a vivid sense of how loathsome the vice of smoking is now con sidered when I walked up to a few women on upper Madison Avenue, in the mu seum district...
...Boutiques thus become mini-cosmoses that yuppies can control through a Hammurabi's Code of acceptable behavior...
...Scary...
...I inquired...
...That's what's really discouraging...
...They did not...
...0 Two patterns emerged...
...He apologizes and starts to put the cigarette out...
...There were three women using the machines, though the fourth was vacant...
...My week as a smoker got off to an odd start when I popped inside a Citibank at the corner of 64th and Madison to get some cash...
...Do I look like a hooker...
...They look like Mesozoic tootsie rolls...
...Kids who grew up in the 1950s were taught that Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill were genuine American heroes: brave, courageous, and free...
...When I go to have a cocktail with a British friend in the private lounge of the RitzCarlton, everybody else clears out...
...It depends on what you're trying to accomplish," he says...
...Do what you want," she sneered...
...I can sense that the waiters want me out of there...
...Now, years later, I decided to revisit the old habit as a way of gauging how much the mores of smoking had changed...
...it's a cultural thing...
...29 The American Spectator March 1995 es, and I call after her, "Give me a break...
...One, patrons of these shops are almost exclusively yuppies who believe that all human activity can be codified according to a rigid moral template...
...As the anti-smoking movement gains momentum, those scenes where Bogart smokes cigarettes in Casablanca will be colorized out and the smokes will be replaced by mints...
...These will get the job done...
...What I did know was that the machine didn't work...
...Mail book orders to: The Hillsdale College Press Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Ml 49242 This may be the scariest book you read this year...
...I discovered this as I made my way up Madison Avenue, ambling into various fashionable boutiques with a cigarette dangling from my lips, knowing that I was going to be asked to put it out or leave...
...One woman, a true reservoir dog, actually says, "Can't you find any better place to smoke that thing...
...How could I possibly think that they smoked...
...Twice I said that I was a French citizen hav ing a nicotine fit...
...One, it was the patrons in upscale establishments, not the personnel, who were most likely to tell me off...
...A waiter comes up and yanks away a chair from the table...
...Do I look like white trash...
...But the tobacconist waves him off...
...Once I descend indignantly after two blocks and the driver becomes incensed when I demand a $1.75 receipt...
...I'll tell you another thing we can look forward to...
...No, it was the customers, mostly females, who wafted their hands about and pointed to the No Smoking signs...
...TThis encounter set the tone for the rest of the week...
...Several times I said I had believed that people could still smoke in places that sold coffee...
...During a phone interview with Don Imus, I light up a cigar and then sneeringly apologize to his millions of listeners for subjecting them to trans-telephonic secondary smoke...
...I load up my arsenal and walk up to the Central Park Reservoir, which is used almost exclusively as a jogging track...
...When I'd finished, I made eye contact with the Hispanic man as he took my place...
...I smoke a second...
...This is what I smoke when I'm out fishing...
...Even the low-rent packaging ("Made in Scranton, Pa...
...It's a boy...
...Four people cough to express displeasure...
...You revolt me...
...He doesn't ask if I want another drink...
...Incidentally, how do the anti-smoking forces know that these acts are deliberate...
...It's a euphemism for "I didn't know you dismembered tiny dogs...
...Four of the twenty cigarettes from my first pack of Marlboros went to beggars: a bag person and three kids who surrounded me on 94th Street demanding smokes...
...When' I visit my local YMCA and climb on an exercise bike, the man sitting on the bike to my left promptly snorts and leaves...
...I inquire, recalling the diminutive tree stumps a French friend of mine uses to clear a large area of the Riviera for himself every July...
...For once, it's not coming from me...
...If they did it on the street, they'd get a punch in the nose...
...The entire week that I masquerade as a smoker, only a handful of strangers are nice to me: two foreigners asking for directions and a quartet of tourists who crowd around me in the lobby of the David Letterman show, asking how to get standby tickets...
...At Pierre Deux, a fabric store, the cashier studied the unlit French coffin-nail dangling from my lips with a look that said, "Just try it, mon vieux...
...At Godiva Chocolatier, a patron pointed to the No Smoking sign with a gesture that signified in any language that I was a hopeless jerk...
...He doesn't ask if everything was to my satisfaction...
...I realized this when I spotted a frowzy, fiftyish woman chain-smoking Winstons at a corner of 65th and Madison, and sidled up to her with a Marlboro dangling from my lips, muttering, "There aren't many of us left, are there...
...As the anti-smoking juggernaut gains momentum, I am certain that No Smoking signs will be replaced...
...By the fourth day of my experiment, I am starting to get a bit combative...
...A conspiratorial glance passed between us...
...I study the box...
...Of the 100 only five, three men and two women, look threatening...
...Do you mind if I smoke...
...There are several explanations for this behavior...
...Or would I be treated like a subhuman and told to get out and stay out...
...A third...
...You light up one of these and it's just you and the fish...
...Did the machine know I was a smoker...
...Here was a woman with more tattoos than the 7th Fleet working as a stripper in the sleaziest dive in Manhattan, yet even she looked down on me as a smoker...
...And you should know it...
...I smoke in the backs of taxi cabs, which is illegal, and am twice told to put it out or get out...
...The last day of my experiment, I have double epiphanies...
...There are also the Amaretto-soaked ones," a colleague volunteers...
...One whispers "A--hole" as she pass THE FALL _. OF THE IVORY TOWERS Government Funding, Corruption, j and the Bankrupting of American Higher Education GEORGE ROCHE Fore word bF Malaolne S. Forbcs, Jr...
...He said this with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye, not wanting to scare off a reasonably well-dressed man who, however vile his personal habits, looked like he might be willing to overpay for a huge stack of CDs...
...by No Having Smoked signs...
...At that moment, I realized that the anti-smoking movement was a thundering juggernaut that had penetrated even the lowest substratum of Joe Queenan is the author of If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble (Hyperion...
...I stubbed out my smoke on the floor, lit another...
...Nor did the smile leave his face when I remarked, "Mario Lanza smoked!," an assertion that may or may not have been true...
...They did not...
...I should have known it, I should...
...Never did...
...Theatrical coughing will become a leitmotif in my stroll around the reservoir...
...30 The American Spectator March 1995...
...I had not devised a homemade sub-nuclear device, or put an entire African nation to the sword...
...and you should know that...
...Then, later that day I meet a friend for lunch...
...Another asks why I am smoking Russian Sobranies (because bag people are puz 28 The American Spectator March 1995 zled by black cigarettes with gold foil, and usually won't accept them...
...One friend tells me about a music lover who was smoking at an open-air Pavarotti concert in Central Park when a woman flew into a fit and demanded that a cop arrest him...
...Did anybody care if I smoked at the Palace peep show...
...A couple of times I said that I'd simply forgotten the cig arette was in my mouth...
...Yves St...
...Couldn't it be an accident...
...No sooner do I get that sucker lit than a short man in an Italian T-shirt sporting a stopwatch the size of Naples jogs past me, coughing theatrically...
...Then I make an odd request...
...The homeless...
...A few seconds later, a second chair is removed...
...0 ne recent afternoon, I lit a Marlboro and slipped into a Times Square strip joint...
...He had taken my cue...
...Intriguing: Amaretto-soaked logs...
...No such luck...
...One, it was the patrons in upscale establishments, not the personnel, who were most likely to tell me off...
...I just nosh...
...We need this," he says, not terribly politely...
...A second says, "People are jogging here," and I mutter, "I'm sorry, I'm French...
...to the monthly speech digest, Imprimis...
...Finally, the maitre d' comes over and says, "We're setting up for dinner now...
...He doesn't ask me if I want to stay for dinner...
...The waiter is perhaps terrified that I am planning to network with a vast constellation of Gitane enthusiasts...
...It's coming from a young man who's sitting a few feet away, eating a tuna sandwich while puffing on a cigarette...
...Would I politely be asked to get rid of my cigarette...
...Of course, the Madison Marche is run by Koreans...
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...The cop told her to get lost...
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...He just tells me in a polite, courteous way to take a hike...
...Nipping past him, I inserted my cash card, while puffing away furiously, flicking the ashes directly at the "No Smoking" sign...
...One day I started walking north on Madison Avenue, stopping into every business establishment that had a French name...
...Did they care if I smoked at the 8th Avenue Grocery...
...A stubby, Hispanic blue-collar type, who looked a lot like a smoker, was standing in line ahead of me, but he ignored the 26 The American Spectator March 1995 empty ATM...
...Laurent didn't want cigarette smoke up the cravats...
...Drunks...
...And iYs not about crime, drugs, or AIDS...
...27 The American Spectator March 1995 would cut me some slack if I pretended to be French, because French people smoke like chimneys: Hey, give me a break...
...Miss ALE CitylStatel2ip [ Home [ phice OLLEG E _" --- - Address The Fall of the ivory Tower is featured as 'Book of the Year" in an Insight magazine special report...
...Then I highly recommend De Nobilis," he responds, passing me a tiny box containing five dwarflike, dangerous-looking cigars...
...0 ne extremely interesting development in the world of nicotinophobia is the burgeoning antismoking bias one detects in places where you are actually allowed to smoke...
...Same principle, less money," he replies...
...I catch a lot of fish...
...I fired back, "Yes, but I missed the last plane to L.A...
...I want to really offend a bunch of people who've been getting on my nerves lately...
...I had a revolting Gauloises Caporal hanging from my lips, Jean Gabin-style, but I figured people Here was a woman• with more tattoos than the 7th Fleet working as a stripper in the sleaziest dive in Manhattan, yet even she looked down on me as a smoker...
...I keeping a running tab of reactions to my offensive behavior...
...I sidled into a peep-show booth, inserted a dollar bill, and, when the glass partition had risen to, reveal the exotic dancer inside, exhaled...
...Had Citibank, caving in to pressure from its anti-smoking clientele, equipped its ATMs with anti-carcinogenic sensors that would prevent smokers from getting more cash to feed their habit...
...As my sense of cultural ostracism grows, I am driven to increasingly idiotic gestures of rebellion...
...Never will...
...It's your show...
...they're all actors anyway, so they probably smoke themselves, and at five bucks an hour who's going to tangle with the weirdo with the cigarette...
...I visit a tobacco shop in midtown Manhattan and load up on some elegant Sobranies, another pack of Gauloises, a tin of Schimmelpenninck slim cigars, and a couple of Monte Cruzes...
...No sooner had I opened the door with the sign reading Our Pledge to Our Customers To Our Cows We do not use BST, BGH, or any bovine growth hormone of any kind...
...Inevitably, we spend all our time talking about how awful anti-smokers are...
...One area that has not been sufficiently examined is the right to exude a smoky odor in a non-smoking environment, even though you are not actually smoking at the time...
...Consider how different things were over at 46th and 8th, where I spent fifteen minutes one day smoking my way through all the businesses on the west side of the Street...
...Smokers may engage in rehearsed solidarityat bars, at tailgate parties, in men's rooms-but deep down inside they do not feel instinctive solidarity with one another...
...It is the fear that a single renegade puffer may inspire others to ape him that makes anti-smokers so aggressive in their attitudes towards illicit smoking...
...Within seconds, a fiftyish, welldressed man came over and whispered, "I'm sorry, you can't smoke here...
...I didn't know...
...My epiphany in the strip joint was the culmination of a long, psychologically draining week spent smoking in various public and private places throughout the Greater New York area...
...One night I arrange to have drinks with a friend at Harry Cipriani, the cigar-box lounge in the Sherry Netherlander Hotel...
...Ronnybrook Farm Dairies than a harridan with a politically correct tote bag hissed: "You can't smoke in here...
...Yet she treated me like the scum of the earth...
...She simply walked away...
...Now he was smoking...
...And two, women were far, more likely to upbraid me than men...
...It's about higher education...
...The sad fact is that, while anti-smokers almost all think of themselves as allies in a moral and ecological crusade, smokers do not feel a similar rapport with other smokers...
...Lighting up one of my De Nobilis, I begin strolling around the track in a generally counterclockwise direction, blowing smoke directly in the faces of the mostly twenty-something and thirty-something joggers who pass me...
...American society, and that smokers, as a class, were doomed...
...Name , Mr...
...My first encounter was surprisingly congenial...
...Are you trying to draw attention, or are you trying to clear the area...
...A cloud of Gallic smoke is starting to waft across the room to the cheesecake...
...On the other hand, I had not behaved like John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, Charles Manson, or Pol Pot...
...I had given up smoking cigarettes ages ago, and in recent times my only nicotine-related activity was the occasional cigar puffed in the presence of people who had annoyed me...
...You'll notice that yuppies do not, as a rule, go out into the streets to tell grown men to stop using walls as urinals, to tell black teenagers to turn down their radios, or to tell thieves to stop pulling radios out of cars...
...I had been tactless, insensitive, uncouth, uncaring...
...But as my companion leaves, I double back (first having sized him up as a bit of a wimp), and say, "Excuse me, but there's no smoking in here...
...I don't say anything for the longest time...
...Do you catch a lot of fish...
...At the Metropolitan Opera Gift Shop on Madison Avenue, I strolled in, smoking a Marlboro, and began spewing poison all over the Ravel CDs...
...hissed the girl inside the booth, disdainfully, waving the smoke away with her hands...
...They most certainly did not...
...Ms...
...I was immensely discomfited...
...Something like that is surely going to happen with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis and all the great chain-smoking movie stars of the past...
...At Au Chat Botte, they didn't want me hissing fumes all over the forty-dollar baby bonnets...
...We are chatting amiably when I detect a familiar, fetid smell wafting up through my nostrils...
...You deserve to die...
...Whether the speaker is a waitress in my favorite diner, a friend at my outdoor swim/tennis club, or a colleague who knows that I am working on a story about smoking, the contempt inherent in those five words is almost nuclear...
...Did they care if I chain-smoked at Nilupul Video, the Full Moon Saloon, the Big Apple Gift Shop, Le Rendez-Vous Cafe, the Caravan Restaurant, Scruffy Duffy's, the Adult Video Store, the Friendship Hotel, the Subway, or the Acropolis Restaurant...
...I handed her a five, evaluated her "dancing" for 30 seconds, and left...
...Yuppies also arrange their daily lives so that they always occupy the moral high ground...
...Smoking forces you to bond involuntarily with your social inferiors...
...Could you please recommend the most repugnant cigar you carry...
...I zipped into it, aware that I had now committed two anti-social acts: smoking and line jumping...
...I furtively smoke a cigarette in the lobby of Avery Fisher Hall and the Metropolitan Opera...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
