So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.:
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Now, though, tobacco is en route to extinction, the economy of this country at one time afloat on its trade, courtesy of the invisible hand of the market, the very same that has created the opportunity for made-wealth like that of Mike Bloomberg, the mayor with the Napoleon complex, never forget how he abandoned New York City taxpayers on the Boxing Day snowstorm (See Running for Your Life: The Blizzard and the Buddha, Jan. 4), and now he’s telling us that the smoking of lit rolled tobacco sticks is forbidden in parks, like Prospect Park in Brooklyn, whether on a bench within the park or on a stroll with a friend, or in the many gazebos, by the Boathouse, by The Lake or atop the hill overlooking the Long Meadow.
Smoke and face the consequences. The health effects of secondhand smoke aren’t to be scoffed at. And, yeah, it makes sense that I shouldn’t have to breath in someone else’s smoke when I’m out to dinner or at a concert. But the open air?
Sure, some open air laws make sense. At 10 p.m. on July 4, while walking up to meet me at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, M very nearly had to hit the deck when a middle-of-the-road fireworks show was ignited by someone in a crowd before an apartment building. There’s a reason that in-street rockets are against the law. And sidewalks. They are for people, not SUVs. And the idea of not putting on a seatbelt before turning the key in the ignition doesn’t occur to me. But legislation so that people cannot smoke a cigarette in a place the size of Prospect Park (585 acres). That’s unimaginable.
I get it that the first taste that Baby Leon (See R4YrLife: Holidays and Hamstrings) should not have – legislate that Bloomberg and imitators – is a fleck of gold leaf tobacco, (but then what of the duplicity of the Anheuser-Busch family which introduces their newborn scions to droplets of beer? Certainly open containers of booze are as flagrant an offense as public smoking, but that’s another matter) or that deli managers are subject to fine and face license removal for repeatedly selling cigarettes to minors (see my friend Ben Howe’s wonderful memoir, “My Korean Deli,” http://nyti.ms/eNrUq3). Or the argument behind SIN taxes, as regressive as they may be because the bite gouges poor folks, far and away the biggest consumers of cigarettes. (I also get the idea of fair-taxing the rich, but, alas, that too is another matter.) But no smoking in Prospect Park? Lucky that architects Olmsted & Vaux are long dead. Think Michelangelo, if, say, the Italian government decreed that because of human-borne agents to the Sistine Chapel, heretofore visitors will be required to don surgical masks, plastic gloves and Sistine disposable gowns.
“No Smoking Within the Park,” the signs says on the grounds of the park’s Litchfield Villa. Very interesting. As if a guy like Bloomberg, the consummate businessman, more private master than public servant, the very idea of the other beyond a citizen-subject, a target to be lectured to and commanded, unthinkable (the tao of useless stereotypes http://nyti.ms/ovwQnY, simply brilliant, if you haven’t seen it!) wouldn’t choose his language very carefully, everyone in his inner circle graduates of law school, at least, and no, the sign doesn’t say “No Smoking on the Grounds of the Park,” which make dubious at best the legality of puffing on a Marlboro or a Camel or a Parliament on one of the park benches that line the wide pathway exterior of the park, because as designed, the park, like Central Park in Manhattan, has very distinct entrances, the space itself as walled off as the ancient medina in Fez, Morocco, or the Gates of Jerusalem.
To smoke cigarettes just beyond the main entrance at Grand Army Plaza is surely a provocation worthy of being cuffed and perp-walked (“If you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime,” Bloomberg on the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn), but what of a stogie lit up while you’re sitting on a park bench beyond those walls? Hardly clear cut. I can envision a Park Slope standoff in the future, placard-carrying anti-smokers converging on a smoke-in of stogie puffers not “within the park” but outside it. What to do then, who wins?
This is hardly the New York of Frank Serpico. Imagine Paco in plainclothes, perhaps the great Hasid getup, remember, on cigarette-lighting detail for the 7-8. Paco’s partner pocketing, say, $100 per smoker. Paco refuses. Rather he collars the stooge and brings him in. Or more likely walks away from police work. New York in the late 1960s, yeah, that made sense, then there was real work to be done. Now in the 7-8, it’s bike-lane vandals and cigarette puffers. Fuhgeddaboudit.
Next: Running for Your Life: My People
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