Carefully Smoking Out the Truth

As soon as I sat down and ordered a ginger ale, I knew this was a friendly place.

For one thing, the bartender, a woman in her 30s, introduced herself and shook my hand.

I’ve been in a lot of bars and ordered a lot of drinks, but I’ve never had a bartender shake my hand.

“We don’t have ginger ale,” she said, “but maybe I can make you one out of Sprite and Coke . . . .”

“That’s OK. Just a Sprite.”

Everyone around was drinking beer, but I didn’t feel like one. Simi Valley was doing its customary summer-afternoon broil and I was thirsty. Besides, I was working. Ducking into bars in Simi Valley isn’t in the job description, but it’s not prohibited either; columns are where you find them.

The bartender and I engaged in some pleasant small talk.

Friendly place, I ventured.

You bet, she agreed. Like family.

Suddenly she made an announcement into a hand-held mike: “Remember folks--no smoking in the bar! Our smoking area is OUTSIDE the bar! If you’re caught smoking inside, you could be cited and fined $135. So, please--no smoking!”

There were a few rough-looking, generously tattooed characters at the bar but nobody challenged her. These were regulars and they knew she wasn’t kidding around. Police in Simi Valley, who are serious about enforcing the state’s Smoke Free Workplace Act, have been known to descend on defiant bar owners and barroom smokers.

The bartender drifted away to help other customers, but a few minutes later drifted back to me.

We talked about this and that. She told me about her family. I told her about mine. I guessed she was from New York. She wasn’t. She guessed I was from New York. I am.

She was super-friendly to me, I thought, just as she was to everyone else.

But then I remembered the news stories of the last few weeks. In Chicago, a visiting British doctor gave a cocktail waitress a $10,000 tip on a $9 order. The smiling waitress made the front pages before his credit card company told her it couldn’t pay; the doctor--who, in fact, was a software engineer--had exceeded his limit.

In Boston, a Swiss financier told a bartender at a swank restaurant that she should be running her own place. Sure, she said, if only I had a few million to open it. In the last three months, he has invested more than $2 million in her new venture.

Could the extraordinarily companionable Simi Valley bartender possibly have viewed a stranger in Sears pants and perceived deep pockets? The thought crossed my mind but I dismissed it immediately.

“So--what brought you here?” she asked.

“I was just passing by,” I said.

Eventually she asked me what I did for a living, and I told her.

How interesting, she said, drifting off to other thirsty customers as I fell into conversation with the guy on the next stool.

A few minutes later, she drifted back.

“So you’re really a journalist?” she asked.

“You bet. Really.”

“You’re not kidding me? You really work for a newspaper?”

This was getting better and better. Flattered, I was getting ready to tell her, “Well, it’s not really as exciting as you might think but it does have its moments. Now there was this sewage story back in ‘81, when--”

But I didn’t get around to it, because she had another question.

“So you’re not a cop, right?”

“Nope. I’m not a cop.”

That’s when she made another announcement.

“It’s OK! Light ‘em up!”

And half a dozen customers at a genuinely friendly bar in Simi Valley lit ‘em up, confident that the Sprite-sipping stranger wouldn’t snuff ‘em out.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.