by RAF KATIGBAK

It’s Tuesday, May 30, the eve of Montreal’s smoking ban, and I’m exhibiting all the symptoms: nervousness, nausea and dizziness. I’m sweaty and agitated and I’ve got that feeling of entrapment that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever had a nic fit. Except I’ve never had a nic fit. In fact, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.

Still, I’m stressed out because at midnight tonight, all 8,000 of Quebec’s bars and taverns are supposed to hang up no-smoking signs. And as you read this, a troop of undercover cops will be enforcing that law, infiltrating over 6,000 of those bars and issuing tickets with fines from $500 to $1,000 to owners that wilfully ignore the province-wide ban.

Am I some kind of backwoods libertarian that thinks that the rights of the seven per cent of Quebecers not in favour of joining the rest of the civilized world are being egregiously violated? Hardly. Am I worried about living in a police state where the increasing power of authority can spin dangerously out of hand? Not really.

In fact, I like the smoking ban. I’m looking forward to going home from a show not smelling like the armpit of a bowling alley and not waking up coughing second-hand lung butter onto my electric toothbrush. Like many of you, I’m looking forward to going to a show at a small club and actually seeing the show.

But I’m nervous because I’m empathetic. Not towards the 25 per cent of Quebec smokers who’ve already had the run of things (including my health) for far too long, but for the true minority: the few, the proud, the smoking fetishists.

Montreal is no stranger to perversion. In a city where sex shops—as ubiquitous as depanneurs—provide patrons with shopping carts and a 12-items-or-less aisle, Montrealers are so over the whole sex thing that you could conceivably catch some random guy in an alley sporting a baby bonnet with a lit candle up his ass spanking himself with a wooden spoon, and he’ll just look at you and go, “What?” and make you feel like the guilty one.

This openly sexual society combined with our once proud identity as a freely smoking, horking, spitting society made Montreal a virtual smorgasbord for those who engaged in capnolagnia (the scientific term for the fetishization of the smoking of tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, pipes or even ashtrays—basically people getting off on watching other people smoke). But now what? Where will all these sexy smokers go to indulge their fantasies?

The same place almost every other fetishist goes: the Internet. The place where, if you have a fetish so specific (say you’re a young Filipino male who enjoys rolling around in a turtle pool full of Mazola corn oil as you ask your girlfriend to throw baby dill pickles at you), chances are you’ll find a friend.

The source of smoking fetishes is assumed to originate from an oral fixation, but there’s also an argument that the increasing intensity of anti-smoking campaigns turns smoking into a transgressive and taboo act—eroticized images of women smoking may take some of their power from depicting a taboo being broken.

Sites like www.cigarettesluts.com, which advertise “French inhales! Deep drags! Smoke rings! Open mouths! Nose exhales! Multiple drags! Dangles! Snaps! Corks! Cigars! Holders!” may be the last refuge for Montreal’s smoking community to see some “girl on girl smoke fun!” Sites like these have received over five million hits since 1998.

Now Montreal stands poised as New York and Chicago did during prohibition. Instead of speakeasies serving booze and playing jazz, we’ll have smokeasies where you can buy cigarettes by the carton as you watch old Lucky Strike commercials on an endless loop. Strip clubs will turn into smoke clubs; Super Sexe will become Super Smoke, where women with fake breasts will smoke fake cigarettes, and inflatable dolls that will not burst into flames when you put a cigar in their mouths will become all the rage. Dealers in clubs will drop the tabs of MDMA and instead hustle sticks of du Mauriers, driving smokers further into the dark recesses of society.

Meanwhile the rest of us normal people will get to live our lives naturally and without impediment, free to fill up our turtle pool with as much Mazola and mini-gherkins as we want.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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