Until a few years ago, if you were drinking at the Tiki-Ti bar on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and you wanted to have a smoke, you could just light one up there and then. Due to a quirk in California’s no-smoking laws, the Tiki-Ti bar was about the only place around where you really could smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
Nonsmoking regulations were designed to protect employees from the effects of secondhand smoke, and if a bar had no employees — if, in other words, all of the people who worked at the bar were owners of the establishment — then the law had no power. If you want to be pompous, you’d say, “The law did not obtain.” If you wanted to be cool, you’d say, “The law did not obtain,” and then you’d toss your cigarette to the wet pavement and grind it out with the toe of your shoe because, let’s face it, smoking makes everything cooler.
The Tiki-Ti bar is exactly what it sounds like: a classic Tiki-style bar serving drinks that make you feel like you’re on vacation. And because the people serving those drinks are all in the same family (the Buhen clan), as long as they didn’t mind the smoke, the California Department of Health Busybodies and General Bossiness (or whatever it’s called) couldn’t say a thing about it.
But then, a few years ago, one member of the family changed his mind, and that was that. Tiki-Ti became a nonsmoking establishment, like every other bar in California.
That was probably a wise decision. Smoking, according to its own packaging, causes lung cancer and strokes. If you’re at the Tiki-Ti bar impairing your judgment and killing off brain cells with mai tais and zombies, there’s no reason to add pulmonary and cardiovascular disease into the mix. Pick your poison, as they say.
One of the reasons I like to work at home, as opposed to an office, is that, at home, after lunch, I get to fire up a cigar if I want to. When I lived in Venice Beach, I could sit on my back deck, and now that I’m a New Yorker, I can sit on my roof and puff away the afternoon.
If I did that at an office, I’d be arrested. I almost was.
A few years ago, when I had a production company at Paramount Studios, we were located on the bottom floor of the Bob Hope building, a two-story stucco box built in the early 1920s when that part of the studio was owned by RKO.
After lunch, my producing partners and I would sit in my office and enjoy a cigar and gentlemanly conversation. It was then we discovered there are management benefits to an afternoon Churchill.
As anyone who has ever run a business will tell you, the more accessible you are, the more you’re called on to make a lot of silly decisions and to solve a lot of problems that should be solved by people a few clicks below you on the org chart. The easier it is to talk to you, the more everybody in the enterprise wants to do it. And, if you’re not careful, the afternoon hours that should be spent thinking and strategizing are spent, instead, having endless ad hoc meetings about nonurgent issues that will go away on their own if you ignore them.
Filling my office every afternoon with thick, blue smoke created a kind of toxic atmosphere. Our post-lunch cigar formed an eye-stinging, lung-choking, deathly-but-protective sheath. A lot of people who worked for us, we discovered, especially the asthmatics, would do anything to avoid knocking on our door. Anything including solving their own problems.
It’s understandable that a member of the Tiki-Ti family would want to work in a smoke-free atmosphere, but, in a normal office where every knock on the door is someone with a problem for you to solve or an emergency that isn’t, sometimes a healthier atmosphere isn’t healthy for business.
Rob Long is a television writer, producer, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
