Where There's Smoke
from Notes on New York
It was in the 80s and sunny yesterday, so Alex and I spent the afternoon lying in the middle of the Great Lawn in Central Park, sun-baked and half-conscious. The softball teams of the publishing league were practicing all around us, and after a few hours the thuds of home runs landing near our heads persuaded us to move along to another phase of spring-afternoon indulgence. In vain, we looked up and down Amsterdam Avenue for a bar with outdoor seating that wouldn't require us to order $12 plates of soggy calimari to justify our sitting there.
We settled on a place that had full-length doors that opened to the street, $2.50 pints of Magic Hat and Yuengling, and an empty two-person table just off the street. Alex took a seat, and I headed up to the bar to order. And then I was struck with a wonderful sensation: there, in the depths of the bar, the air felt--if not spring-like--almost fresh. I could actually see the back wall of the bar clearly. And then I remembered: smoking ban. This was my first visit to a bar since the ban had gone into effect.
In the months leading up to it, I was ambivalent about the prospect of the smoking ban, leaning slightly toward opposing it. We knew what we were doing when we moved to New York: didn't we all agree to subordinate our desire for health to our desire to resemble some Jazz-era swell, some pseudo-Parisian scribbler, some post-punk bohemian with her face drifting in and out of focus in the wraiths of her Winston? But there, in the actual smoke-free bar, where the scent of sunshine and new grass from the park lingered in my hair, where--even under the cyclopean gaze of the pocked and tar-glazed dartboard--I felt light and springlike, for once, I felt a rush of gratitude toward our hapless mayor for pushing this ban through.
Full of vernal well-being, I over-tipped for our beers and turned back toward our table. It was engulfed in thick gray smoke. I could barely see Alex, who was sitting with his shirt pulled up over his face. Some patrons groaned and coughed. I squinted and hurried to sit down, to put the beers down and hold my nose. Just outside the door, a city bus had pulled up to the stop, engine ablaze, disgorging a tire fire's worth of fumes before unloading and shutting down.
We drank fast, and plenty, just like the old days.
April 16, 2003
noteworthy:
- Jane
- Paintings from the last 7 or 8 years are archived on Jane's portfolio site.
- Ftrain re-vamp
- Paul Ford's already inimitable site, Ftrain.com, is now even less imitable, sitekit notwithstanding. Graph Narratives? Web Pidgin? A site designed to work better in Mozilla and Safari than in IE? Dreamy and strange.
- Walker Percy on Bourbon
- “Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he's already an alcoholic.”