Up In Smoke

Some 150 years before the state of North Carolina banned smoking in all its bars and restaurants, Washington Duke completed his incarceration at Libby Prison in Richmond, Va.—an air-tight, inhumane hellhole, or as a 1864 article in the Richmond Enquirer called it, “a huge, improbable box of nocturnal sardines”—and was sent to New Bern, N.C. Finally free, he traded his Confederate currency for American dollars, walked 137 miles to his farm in Durham and founded the sprawling, University-endowing, industry-leading American Tobacco Company.

The erstwhile factory that once pumped out the world’s most popular cigarettes has lived on, in a way, as the American Tobacco Complex. But as you pass by the innocuous shops, upscale dining spots, music venues and fountains—a swath of gentrification that would have seemed unthinkable to Duke at the time—you get the feeling that the developers were out to bury the past, not celebrate it. The most obvious of Durham’s tobacco-stained artifacts—the iconic Lucky Strike smokestack, a reminder of the “toasted” brand of cigarettes that ingratiated a place in pop culture that persists even today—haunts the City of Medicine’s modest skyline more than it embodies it. It acts like an emblem of ancient times, not a fixture of a modern-day metropolis. And now, as the bars that lie within the tower’s shadow force smokers to light up outside, the painted-on Lucky Strike logo seems just that much more faded.

The smoking ban— “An Act To Prohibit Smoking In Certain Public Places And Certain Places Of Employment,” which is why it’s known only as the smoking ban—was narrowly passed by the North Carolina General Assembly last May and made effective at the start of this year. It is notable not for its foresight. Twenty-eight states had introduced similar laws before North Carolina, but this one, in particular, stands against the state’s rich history of tobacco production. No one can deny the proven health hazards associated with cigarettes, but when smokers can’t light up at bars just steps away from W.T. Blackwell’s famed Bull Durham Tobacco Factory, the irony of the ban is impossible to ignore. James B. Duke—who will be forever immortalized in stone on the quad, smoking a cigar filled with Duke’s mixture for eternity—must be rolling in his grave, which is located, appropriately enough, right behind him, in the Duke Chapel.

It’s the opening days of 2010. It’s chilly, and the air in James Joyce Irish Pub Restaurant—a Main Street haunt that attracts both serious hunkered-down drinkers, and grad students who can pick out the references in Ulysses, a copy of which is set behind the bar—is unnaturally clear. The transformation is immediately noticeable. The staff has provided its loyal smokers with an aesthetically pleasing fire pit outside, and those who can’t kick the habit stand and warm their hands by the flame as they finish their cigarettes. Inside, where sport-coat-clad twenty-somethings network over Miller Lites, the emanating musk that just a month ago defined the Irish Pub’s cigarette-friendly vibe—the palm-cupped flicks of lighters, the crackle of a burning cherry, the overflowing ashtrays near closing time—has departed, giving way to a clear-eyed but disconcertingly sterile ambiance. To a smoker, something feels wrong.

The hardest-working bartender in Durham, Eoin Bradley, is manning the pub tonight, fishing out bottlenecks and sliding them to the left and to the right. He’s a stocky guy with a rugby player’s build, and he’s going on a few day’s worth of stubble. I nurse a PBR until he has a free moment; there’s a White Stripes song blasting from the speakers. During a lull in drink orders, Eoin leans over to me. “I am a smoker,” he says in an awesome Irish brogue, “but the week before New Year’s I didn’t smoke. I haven’t even smoked 10 cigarettes since the start of the new year.”

The Joyce has made amends to accommodate smokers in this chilly weather, he says, but the new law has brought mostly positive results. “We got a fire pit goin’ out front and heaters out back, and they’ve been using that,” he says. “But there’s definitely more families. There’s babies—babies!—comin’ in. That’s never happened before.” And even as a smoker, Eoin is a fan of the state’s new policy. “For the staff, it’s way better,” Bradley told me. “I don’t reek of cigarettes when I go home at night.”

He leaves to take a few more drink orders and snaps open his cell phone. He’s ordering a taxi to take home a particularly sloppy customer. It’s not yet midnight. The White Stripes segue into a song by The Strokes. My PBR down to its dregs, I finish it off and thank Eoin.

“Just one beer? I shoulda kept talkin’!” he calls to me.

The process spread through North Carolina and Virginia. To meet the growing demand for that distinctive flavor, other farmers quickly flash-cured the tobacco with hot coal. The allure of Brightleaf tobacco was enough for it to spread to a small railroad depot on Hillsborough Road—which, I found out, has been an active passageway since the Regulator Movement. The railroad station and its budding community were named for Bartlett S. Durham, a local physician who donated the land upon which the station was built. The place was of little consequence until April 26, 1865, when Union Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman met up with Confederate General Joseph Johnston to enact the largest Confederate surrender of the Civil War. As the two men discussed the terms of the treaty at Bennett Place—a farm located just off of Hillsborough—the soldiers, who were tired, bored and restless from battle, had little to do in the agricultural land near Durham Station. So they spent their time smoking the Brightleaf tobacco that grew so freely near the area. The taste was milder than they expected, and they smoked a lot of it. When the generals decided upon an agreement, the soldiers left with them, and no matter where their homes were, they lacked that Durham tobacco. So they wrote letters—scores of letters—to the lone manufacturer in the town, John Ruffin Green. The demand was so high that Green changed the name of his company to the Bull Durham Tobacco Factory. With the influx of industry, a town charter was formed in 1869. In short, the city of Durham was established for the sole purpose of meeting the demand for cigarettes.

History has been replaced by foresight; the tobacco industry has been replaced by the rise of the Research Triangle; and when smoking finally met its match in the guise of the state government, barely an eyebrow was raised. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Most of the states in the Union have adopted similar policies, many of them more stringent than North Carolina’s. The law, it was generally presupposed, was inevitable.

The Green Room saw this coming. The legendary Durham pool hall where Nuke LaLoosh encountered a whiskey-drunk Crash Davis in “Bull Durham”—“I’m going to the show!” Nuke tells Crash in the iconic scene; Crash, boozy and ambivalent, responds by silently aiming his cue—preempted the ban by going smoke-free June 1, when its nicotine-addled denizens could enjoy the mild summer nights during their smoke breaks.

“First of all, I mean, this place has been associated with heavy smoking for some time,” Brad Petrusa, a Green Room employee, tells me over the phone. “We wanted people to go out in the summertime instead of 20-degree weather.” The Green Room has its loyal pool players, many of whom have been coming for years, Petrusa says, and doing away with the smoky ambience wasn’t something on their minds. “A lot of people didn’t even know about it—they’re not up on laws being passed and all that stuff,” he says. “People are pretty OK with it, but it’s the people who didn’t know it was passed who got upset.”

But like other local bars and restaurant, The Green Room is generally supportive of the rule—and it hopes its pool-hall junkies are, too. “It might actually increase business,” Petrusa says. “We have a lot of people who’ve been comin’ here for a long time, and they’re pretty much down with this place. People come here to play pool and hang out with people, hopefully not to smoke.”

It’s a Tuesday night, and Devine’s is filled with tone-deaf karaoke. The guys take liberal chugs from Bud Light tallboys while the girls clutch mixed drinks and stand in groups of threes and fours, looking around. It is exactly the same as every night at Devine’s, except for the one glaring difference.

Walking outside, I see three men in tie-dye shirts and puffy parkas huddled by the electric heater, a tall metal contraption with multiple ashtrays on its sill. Their cigarettes are mid-burn. “Step under the heater,” the graying man in the middle offers. I would have done so anyway—I was visibly shivering. The new law creates new necessities: if bars cannot permit their customers to smoke in the warmth of their establishment, they must provide that warmth outside.

“We’re older,” says David Long, a telecommunications specialist pulling on a smoke. He’s the man who first offered me a spot by the heater. “We play darts on Tuesday nights. It just makes our matches longer—we have to smoke between games. But it’s a law, so we have to follow it.”

Andy Reinhardt, a chemist and one of Long’s darts buddies, mashes his cigarette butt in the ashtray. “I smoke less and I drink less,” he tells me. “And I guess that’s a good thing.”

Walking to the front of Devine’s, I catch Mike Tuttle, the manager of Devine’s, taking a smoke break, leaving a few of the other employees to man the bar, where girls in black dresses wait—there’s a girl oscillating to and fro on one foot, with the proper amount of drunken imbalance—with one hand aloft, holding credit cards in the air. The bar is pretty packed, and Tuttle paces with an anxious gait.

“It’s overall better for the business,” he says, taking another drag and looking at the cash in the register, examining the night’s pull. “It’s obviously annoying to smoke outside, but it’s better for the majority of our clientele.”

Tuttle takes the cigarette to the face—he smokes the thing in, like, three drags—and laughs. “I’ve actually walked inside to put a cigarette out and I’m like ‘Oh, wait.’ But overall,” he says, “every business is better off with the smoking ban.”

Though it appears that the transition is going extra smoothly—there is little sign of complaints from either bar owners or bar customers—when 2 a.m. on a Saturday night rolls around, however, and social smokers lose enough inhibition to light up, will they remember to take it outside? And if they don’t, will anyone actually care?

The official wording of the bill that Gov. Bev Perdue passed into law May 20, 2009 instructs bar owners to “Direct a person who is smoking to extinguish the lighted tobacco product.” If the person continues to smoke after he or she has been asked not to, “the person committing the infraction may be punished by a fine of not more than fifty dollars ($50.00),” the bill reads. If a bar decides to maintain a more Aughts vibe and keep the air smoky, the consequences are equally vague: with the first violation a “local health director” will write them a letter; the second violation earns another letter; and when the third violation finally comes around, they get fined $200. Clearly, this is not the most iron-fisted wording. It is just begging to be broken.

So, it being a Saturday night, I make my way to Shooters II, the infamous cowboy-themed bar with a mechanical bull and elevated cages, the club that has made its way into the writings of both Rolling Stone and Tucker Max—by far the most appropriate place to break a law. The line of boozed-up undergrads spills onto West Morgan Street, and a few stray smokers pepper the scene: some in line, others by the parking lot, even more on the cramped patio on the side. After edging my way inside, offering up my ID and slipping the man behind the counter a five, I walk up the stairs to the row of stools that line the balcony.

Here, above the bull and above the cages, you get the full panorama of excess on display at Shooters—the cries for “Shots!”, the d-floor make outs, the embarrassing cage-dancing. Here, the isolated place where the boys rejected by girls can go and sulk. Here, where I would often sit, smoke cigarettes and avoid the madness below.

But now the ashtrays are all gone. The products of an education provided by Washington Duke’s fortune—partaking in a bacchanalia directly under the gaze of the spectral and elegant Lucky Strike smoke stack—can no longer enjoy the commodity that made the Dukes fabulously wealthy.

But I do it anyway—I light up a cigarette inside. And it feels pretty damn good.