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So how come I can’t fucking smoke? Somewhere north of San Francisco, I was sitting at the bar of a ramshackle roadhouse that, from all appearances, was exactly the sort of place I like. The bartender, ‘Lucky,’ or something like that, is in her fifties. She has a hoarse, rasping voice, two missing teeth, and a tattoo of a winged phallus above her wrinkled left breast. Charlie Daniels plays on the jukebox for a small group of regulars drinking bourbon and rye with beer chasers at ten o’clock in the morning. A chopped Harley sits out front and probably belongs to the guy in the cut-down denim jacket to my left, who offered to sell me crack a few moments ago when we passed each other in the septic bathroom – and I get the general impression that if I were to slide over to the left or the right, buy a few rounds for my fellow citizens, I could probably acquire an illegal handgun or two. This was the sort of place where I could walk over to the jukebox and play a couple of Johnny Cash tunes and nobody would say boo. Hell, they might even like it. This was the sort of place that when Johnny, singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ comes to the line, ‘I shot a man in Reno . . . just to watch him die,’ people will sing along, getting wistful over similar golden moments in their own pasts.

On my second pint, I was getting into the ambience: the familiar smell of decades of spilled beer, a hint of Lysol, chicken wings in the deep fryer. Somebody down at the other end was drunkenly insisting, ‘I barely touched the bitch! It was a fuckin’ accident! Why she’s gotta go and get a goddamn restraining order!’ – before bursting into tears. I took another sip of beer, reached automatically into my shirt pocket, and fired up a cigarette. Lucky the bartender looked at me as if I’d just taken my pants off and begun soaking myself down with gasoline.

‘Dude!’ she wheezed, nervous, her eyes darting in all directions at once. ‘You can’t do that here! You gotta take that outside!’

You can’t smoke anywhere in California. Rob Reiner says so. Celebrity fuckheads who live in walled compounds and use words like working class – never having sat down at a bar for an early-afternoon shot and a beer with any such animal in their lives – say so. For them, the bar is a place where we stupid, lumpen, and oppressed blue-collar proles are victimized by evil tobacco companies that have tricked us with their clever advertising into killing ourselves and our neighbors. For me, the bar is the last line of defense. ‘It’s an employee safety and health issue,’ explained Lucky. The state is protecting her fry cook (I could see him in the kitchen, picking at an abscessed track mark) from the pernicious effects of secondhand smoke. Now, I can understand why they don’t want me smoking in restaurant dining rooms. If I’m enjoying a delicate pairing of seared foie gras and pear chutney, I probably don’t want somebody puffing away on a jasmine cigarette at the next table. I’m considerate. I can find a way not to smoke in the dining rooms of decent restaurants. Though bitterly resentful that I can no longer enjoy a cigarette with my fucking coffee in most places, I’ve learned to live with it. But the bar? The bar! What these miserable screwheads are saying is that it’s OK to kill yourself with bourbon or tequila at nine o’clock in the morning – just don’t enjoy yourself when doing it. It’s only a matter of time before some well-intentioned health Nazi busts into your bedroom and yanks that postintercourse cigarette right outta your hand.

San Francisco is said to be one of the most ‘liberal’ and ‘tolerant’ places to live in America. That’s a good thing, right? I’m avidly supportive of ‘alternative lifestyles.’ I’m ‘tolerant’. But something’s gone wrong here. It’s a wildly expensive city to live in – even where I’m staying in the Tenderloin – too expensive for most people to afford. Yet San Francisco’s acceptance of hopelessness, prostitution, and drug addiction as ‘alternative lifestyles’ seems to have ensured that many of its neighborhoods are choked