The car was a drop head Pontiac, chosen especially for the name and the sense of retro adventure that it conjured. The itinerary was up Route 101, the coast road – the famous Pacific Highway. The first stop was a town called San Luis Obispo, some 190 miles north of LA. We had been recommended to stay here after a week staying with relatives. Non-smoking relatives. Non-drinking relatives. We were desperate for a smoke and a bottle of wine.
Before we even checked into the motel we had booked, we pulled up outside a bar in the centre of town. That’s how desperate we were. In our minds’ eyes, we would be lighting up and sucking in the blue plume of cooling smoke as our chilled Californian wine lay before us, an arm’s reach from desire.
Drinks in hand, we looked around for a table and an ash tray.
“It must be one of those places where you have to smoke outside”, I volunteered, sagaciously. We headed out onto the roped off area in the back. We made a beeline for a table and sat down. I glanced around. No tell-tale signs of smoking, no silver clouds playing in the dying light of the evening sunshine, no ash trays. Anywhere.
“Excuse me,” I asked a passing waiter, “but can we have an ash tray please?”
The waiter didn’t miss a beat. He stopped, tray balanced on his right hand, and affected a sympathetic look.
“You can’t smoke here”, he said.
“Where can we smoke?”, I asked, looking around. “Is this a non-smoking bar?”
“San Luis Obispo is a non-smoking city. The first in all of California. There’s no place to smoke anywhere within the city limits.”
This seemed to give him great satisfaction. I pushed my Marlboro back into the soft pack. Our dream dashed, we sipped our glasses and quietly fumed – metaphorically if not actually. The famous line from that Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca came out of my mouth.
“Of all the bars in all the towns in all the world, we had to walk into this one.”
We discussed whether or not our teetotal, vice-free relatives had sent us here deliberately, knowing we would be safe from ourselves for another twenty four hours. Away from their censorious gaze, maybe the virtuous citizens of San Luis Obispo has been entrusted with our safekeeping. Like a town full of Holier-than-thou probation officers determined to stop us straying back into sinful habits. We had been sent to the smoking equivalent of Stepford, where the citizens were modified for the coming vice-free C21st.
So, San Luis Obispo was California’s first entirely non-smoking town. This was back in 1991. And, as we know, where California leads, the world follows. We were glimpsing the future. Now, other than in a handful of countries, smoking is a leprous pursuit. Cigarettes are from a bygone era. They are relics from the silver screen, from films when, it seemed, every character smoked and Hollywood cool required the addition of a pure white roll of tobacco clamped between the lips. In this Logan’s Run future-scape, we were at the pioneering edge of a legislated world where an individual’s right to free choice had been taken away. And all in the Land Of the Free.
Our trip continued on up to San Francisco and we smoked in the car, the wind in our hair and rebellion in our souls. We sought out the byroads and little out-of-the-way towns such as Cayucos, which had a billboard welcoming you to “the town that time forgot”. This sounded promising. A town lost in time wouldn’t have draconian laws about smoking – it would probably welcome smokers like long lost friends. Cayucos proved to be exactly what it promised, but not in the way we had hoped.
We walked into the only bar, complete with a pair of swinging old saloon doors. When we walked in, everything stopped. All eyes focused on us. The one eyed woman at the bar turned her eye patch our way and then, seeing we were nothing special, turned again and resumed her conversation with the barman. On the television they were playing live testimony from the Judge Clarence Thomas hearing. Thomas was being grilled for a place on the bench of the Supreme Court and there was a lot of furore about his alleged harassment of his colleague, Anita Hill. As the cross examination of Hill played out in the bar, the scary one eyed woman exclaimed:
“Hell, I di’n’t wan’ no neegra judge, anyhaa”, and laughed as she spat on the floor. The bar laughed with her.
Redneck woman in bar
She drank what looked like a red eye. Beer, tomato juice, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce, ice. And with a fresh raw egg broken and dropped on the top. It looked like a glass of horror and it went perfectly with its owner. We sat tight lipped in the corner of the saloon, drank quickly and left. We were between a rock and a hard place. No smoking or smoking with racism and threat on the side. It was a toss up.
We headed for the hills and San Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst built his fantasy estate. They filmed the Roman villa scenes around the swimming pool here and the place was open house for many a freeloader. One pair of twins stayed a decade before finally being turfed out. You can see why it’s tempting to stay. The decor was shipped in from all over the world – the dining room is an Italian monastery sawn in pieces, crated up, despatched to California and re-assembled on this hill in the middle of nowhere.
We finished our ogling at what wealth can create and headed back down the route to Santa Barbara. A stroll along the beach and for dinner at the Harbor Restaurant on Stearns Wharf. Maybe life without cigarettes wasn’t so tough. The shank of the day and a stomach full of seafood made us content. Does that mean we’re Californians now?
