Smokers Cope With Loss of Their Last Public Haven

When they took away elevators, movie theaters and airlines, smokers grumbled.

When restaurants and workplaces were deemed off-limits, they moved outside.

So on New Year’s Day, when the state banned smoking in their most hallowed refuge--the bar--California’s smokers did what they have learned to do best: They coped.

From Pasadena to Santa Monica to San Francisco, smokers leaned out of barroom doors, headed for parking lots, retreated to patios or quietly defied the latest attack on the habit that has made them social lepers.

They bemoaned the loss of their last sanctuary; they carped about government intervention; they said the bar business would go bust. But, mostly, they found a way to smoke.

For Farrell Fullerton the new no-smoking order meant a simple balancing act. Planted in the doorway of Domenico’s sports bar in Pasadena, the 56-year-old held his draft beer in one hand, inside the doorway, and his cigarette in the other, over the sidewalk.

“This is how it has to be, one hand in and one hand out. You can’t have beer outside and you can’t smoke inside,” Fullerton said.

At Ireland’s 32 in Van Nuys on Thursday, regular patron Tommy Shanahan sat sipping a noontime tea and rolling an unlit Pall Mall on the bar before heading to the parking lot to light up.

“You’ll notice,” said Shanahan, 59, an Irish-born construction worker, “that I’m not in there drinking. People’ll come out to smoke and chitchat for two hours, and it’s bound to hurt the bar’s revenues.

“I, for one, haven’t gone to a movie since they cut out smoking at the movies, and that was long ago. So I don’t know what I’m going to do with this issue.”

At Yankee Doodles sports bar in Woodland Hills and at Schatzi’s on Main, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s restaurant-bar in Santa Monica, nicotine users found refuge on the patio.

But even outdoors, they were not necessarily safe from newly empowered nonsmokers. George Goshe told how another patron outside Schatzi’s complained about fumes from his Salem Light. But he wasn’t about to give up the seamless sense of balance acquired from his smoke and his drink of choice, Johnnie Walker Black Label and soda.

“We have been banished as far as we can go,” Goshe said.

Goshe and his drinking pal, Dan Fitzpatrick, both retired, said they had taken to the road Thursday in search of an establishment that would still accommodate their essential elixir, alcohol and nicotine.

Mostly they had been disappointed. So they suggested a possible loophole in the law to the bartender at Schatzi’s: Couldn’t that wall of French doors qualify the establishment as outdoors?

Bartender Zac Chowdhury suggested it might be simpler to just move the whole bar outside. He wondered if the city would permit such a thing.

Patrons and operators of a bar in the San Fernando Valley community of North Hills thought they had already found their way around the new law.

A small sign had been posted above the bar of the Norwood Inn reading, “Thank You for Not Smoking.” But the bartender, who asked to remain anonymous, said she had subsequently read that the law does not apply to establishments with fewer than five employees, if all of them agree to allow smoking.

Early Thursday afternoon, nine people sat at the bar of the Norwood. Seven of them were smoking. So was the bartender. “We only have three employees,” she explained.

County health officials said there is no exemption for small establishments, but owners might be confused because an earlier tobacco ban included such a proviso.

Most bar owners see no out. They talked only of the substantial fines that accompany the law. They could have to pay up to $100 for a first offense and up to $7,000 per violation for a series of offenses. Customers who insist on smoking can also be fined, with the amount determined by local authorities.

The law is aimed at protecting bartenders and other employees from secondhand smoke, which has been linked to lung cancer, respiratory problems and other illnesses.

Many bartenders said--at least out of the earshot of newly fidgety nonsmokers--that they were relieved to be free of smoke, dirty ashtrays and smelly patrons.

Tad Nessina, a bartender at Domenico’s, said the ban will make things easier in the long run. “I don’t have to worry about selling cigarettes, collecting ashtrays and giving out matches,” he said. “And it probably adds another 10 years to my life.”

Many bartenders said that initial cooperation has been high, but that a real test will come this weekend, with the return of regulars and something close to the post-holiday routine.

“On Fridays, people come after work. They are tired. They want to relax, have a beer and a smoke,” said Merc Coimba of Yankee Doodles on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. “That’s when we will find out.”

For many nonsmokers, the clearing of the barroom air was viewed as yet another victory for health and good values.

“I’m very happy. The simple fact is smokers are killing people who don’t smoke and that should be against the law,” said Gary Powell, 33, of Santa Monica.

Powell offered a counterpoint to smokers’ theory that bar business will take a nose dive. Facing the prospect of clear skies around the bar stools, Powell said: “I will definitely go to more bars now.”

Even for smokers who acquiesced, there was a certain sense that society’s rule-makers had gone overboard. The lawyers and public health nurses seem to be taking over, and the Marlboro man has ridden off into the sunset.

In Pasadena, Craig Borchert, 24, called the law “stupid” and said his native South Carolina would never be so foolish. Tony, a nonsmoking pharmacist from Arizona, drinking in Santa Monica, called the smoking ban “a California thing.”

But what is to be expected from a state that put helmets on bikers, even the Hells Angels?

When he strode into Hollywood Billiards on Thursday afternoon, Josh Shilling, 24, pulled out his Marlboro Lights. Then he noticed the mysterious absence of ashtrays.

“I don’t like this proposition at all,” Shilling said. “You just have to be able to smoke in bars. It just goes along, a smoky bar, a smoky pool hall. Where’s the ambience?”

At 1 a.m. at San Francisco’s Cafe DuNord, one hour into California’s smoking ban, the feeling ran high that the barroom must remain safe for vice.

Granger Davis, Peter Rossi and Frank Barnhardt kept right on toking. Asked why, they answered like smokers.

“Because I’m drunk,” Davis said.

“Because addiction doesn’t stop at midnight,” put in Rossi.

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein, Amy Oakes, Valerie Burgher and Eric Rimbert and Associated Press contributed to this story.