This hookup was brought to you by smoking. Young would've had no other reason to talk to the young woman, save for being drunk and thinking she was attractive. (Which, admittedly, is reason enough for most guys, but a nonsmoker would've found himself scrambling for an opening line.) The lighter gave Young his intro, and the woman gave him her number.
Young started smoking when he was 17, a few years after the tobacco settlements and the advent of all the Truth commercials on TV. He's what you would call a respectful smoker: He doesn't exhale in people's faces; he rarely lights up in confined spaces. But he does think antismokers can be a little demanding, if not self-righteous, at times.
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"If people complain because I'm walking in front of them smoking a cigarette and I'm doing my best to get out of their way, I'm just like, 'Get out of my way if it's bothering you,' " he says, pausing to take a drag outside the UH architecture building. He gazes at the blue smoke leaving his mouth, floating past his nose, his green eyes, his eyebrow ring -- up, up, up.
He lives in Moody Towers, where there was an uproar last semester when antismokers lobbied to outlaw smoking near the main entrance. "I can respect the fact that they don't want to stink like it and they don't want to inhale it," says Young, "but I think they go too far a lot of the time."
The university administration didn't agree and prohibited smoking near the dorm entrance, although the ashtrays have mysteriously reappeared and the smokers are back. Enforcement is a problem with any ban, as many members of City Council acknowledged when debating the issue for the city.
None of these limitations means anything to Young, who will keep on smoking half a pack a day (more when studying) no matter how much antismokers try to stop him. "I could quit," he says, "but why?" Smoking-cessation products can cost up to $40 a pop, while a pack of cigarettes is only $4, which even a poor college student can scrounge up. And for every person who accosts Young with 'tude, there's another who shares his habit and could become a new friend.
Smokers clump together. It's just what they do. They bum cigs; they borrow lighters; they feel a sense of camaraderie, of common vice, of shared pleasure. And they were doing so long before antismokers started corralling them and kicking them outside (although ostracism does breed solidarity).
Todd and Lisa Line never would've met if they hadn't both been into butts. "You tend to get on the same smoking schedule as someone you think is hot," he says, referring to when they used to work in the same building.
"I really didn't realize at first that he was checking me out," she says. He sneaked right up on her, and now they've been married for six years.
If antismokers had had their way, Todd never would've met the love of his life. How's that for family values? Oh, and he's also helping her take care of her kid. That's right: one less single-parent family, thanks to smoking.
"We're such a large-scale society, so whenever you can actually click with someone who's another smoker, I don't see what the problem is," says Colleen Smith, 23, a smoker for seven years who often puffs away her lunch breaks downtown. "We need to interact. We're so impersonal. We're so egocentric. And smoking is a form of community…Nonsmokers can have their community; just let us have our community on the other side of the restaurant."
Rights On
"Now wait a minute," some of you antismokers might be saying. "I have the right to go out in public and not have to breathe smoke."
Well, sorry, but bars and restaurants aren't public places. "These are privately owned establishments," says Dennis Keim, 52, a local rabble-rouser and occasional smoker. "If people don't want to be in that environment, there's nothing that forces them to be there. They have a choice of, in this town, something like 12,000 other eating establishments," he says, exaggerating the numbers a bit. (There are actually about 10,000 restaurants in the greater Houston area.)
Keim was okay with the ban, enacted in '92, that prohibited smoking on city property. "It's one thing to set policy in a facility that's owned by the government, where people have no alternative. You can't go to an alternative courthouse. You can't go to an alternative city hall."
But you can go to whatever restaurant you want. This is America, baby. And Houston, in case you haven't noticed from the utter lack of zoning, is supposed to be all about property rights. You can open up a tire shop right in the middle of a neighborhood. Ergo, you can do just about anything you want on your own property.
When City Councilman Michael Berry voted against the recent smoking ban, he said, "If you don't like smoking restaurants, don't go to them. What we heard over and over again, and it disturbs me, is this notion that 'I want to go to [someone's restaurant], and I want to tell him how to serve me on my terms,' which is 'I want you to serve me with no smoke,' even though he wants to serve those people who smoke."
