9:47 PM: I park my clunky old Volvo off Denton Dr. and walk around to the front of the Windmill Lounge. It’s an odd dive that advertises its reputation with a big banner on its front: “Dallas Observer says ‘Best Dive in Dallas.’” Inside, the room is dark, and it feels like a railroad dining car: a long line of booths along the front windows run parallel to the bar across the room. This bar is surrounded by vacant lots, shut down auto shops, and the eerie concrete skeleton of the future Dart extension; it almost feels like this little room is a train car, clip-clapping along through the black night.
I make my way to the bar and claim a stool. I’ve never been to the Windmill Lounge before. I’m here tonight because it is the last night you can smoke in Dallas bars. At midnight, the new smoking ordinance goes into effect, and places like this, where the stale smell of cigarette smoke is as much a part of place as the wood-paneled walls and the sticky beer on the floor, will be instantly changed. Or at least that’s my suspicion. A dive without cigarettes sounds like a hooker without cheap perfume. The fragrance is not necessarily pleasant, but that’s not why you’re there.

10:03 PM: I’m a quarter of the way through a Brooklyn Lager, pretending to watch a meaningless, late-season Stars game on the flat screen behind the bartender. My original idea was to take photos of this night, to try to capture images of these places during their last moments of smoke-filled glory. Now I’m just sucking on a Camel by myself, looking around for someone else who is smoking. Most of the booths and tables are full, and there are only a couple of free stools at the bar, but no one in here is smoking. It is karaoke night, and on the other side of the room a dark-haired guy in his early-thirties wearing a tee-shirt and a gut is howling the chorus of an Alice in Chains song. A quick flash out of the corner of my eye: a cute twenty-something with long black hair raises a little flame to her lips. Should I take a photo? Of what? I take a drag on my own cigarette, wash it down with a gulp of beer and turn back to the hockey game.

10:11 PM: “Hey guy, you have a light?” A man with pockmarks on his cheeks and a sharp nose is leaning into my bar space looking at me. I nod and raise my lighter. He pops a cigarette in his mouth and smacks at it, but it doesn’t light. He takes the lighter away, tries again with cupped hand, and blows out a big grey-green cloud through his fingers. The sudden interruption startled me. In those minutes I sat there smoking and drinking, I had drifted off, creating a little lonely space for myself in that crowded bar with smoke for walls.

10:13 PM: I’m staring down at my beer when a hand with a business card slides into view. I look up, and the sharp-nosed man is grinning at me. He nods, raises his eyebrows, and then turns back to his cigarette, a sly grin still on his face. I look down at the card. “So-and-so Travel Agency. So-and-so Travel Agent.” Why is this guy pretending this is some shady exchange? I look at him and he is lipping his cigarette, looking straight ahead and smiling, his eyes peaking over to see how I react.

10:37 PM: Back in the car – four smokes lighter, one beer heavier, and a camera without any photos on it. I’m excited about the next stop: Time Out Tavern. I grew up in New York where Mickey Mantle was a god. When I was a kid, my dad would take me across the street from Yankee Stadium to the bars where, in some glorious bygone days, I was told boozing ballplayers were as common as the autographed headshots that are now on the walls. At some point, call it a little brother thing, I became a Mets fan. Then I defected from New York for Dallas – an almost equal affront. So when I discovered that the Mick drank away his last years at a run-down little sports bar on Lovers Lane in the Park Cities, I saw it as poetic justice – Dallas stealing something from New York, though I don’t quite know what.

10:42: PM: This place is crowded, and much brighter then the Windmill Lounge. When you walk in you almost run into a pool table, and all the players turn to look you up and down. I still have my camera slung over my back, which draws a few extra glances as I make my way to a stool at the corner of the bar closest to the door. I’m staring at a little fish tank and above it, a picture of Mickey Mantle. I order a Coors Original.

10:57 PM: A clean-faced, blond-haired guy in his mid-thirties who sounds like Mathew McConaughey is leaning over my shoulders talking to the bartender about some crawfish boil she missed that raised money “for cancer.” I almost say something, but decide not to be a wise-ass.

11:05 PM: I’m working on my beer watching the fish, cigarette in hand. Next to me at the bar there’s a black guy wearing a smooth white cap and a pressed striped shirt. On the bar in front of him, his keys, a lighter, a pack of Carlton 100s, and an ashtray are neatly arranged. As he smokes, he moves the items around like little markers on a board game. Like me, he’s here alone. A girl in a short white mini-skirt who looks like a young Devonshire newlywed leans over him and asks the bartender for a light. The man is quick to offer his own, mumbles a few words, and within seconds he is surrounded by a gaggle of giggling women. Now he’s waving his cigarette in the air telling some story, and the women are sucking it down along with drags of their bummed Carltons. Would this game of props work tomorrow night?

11:17 PM: I haven’t taken any photos. For one, I feel my camera would disrupt scenes like the one I just witnessed. But I am now creating my own sort of scene – alone at this bar with the beer and cigarettes. My solitary smoking has become a conversation. Open box. Slide out smoke. Softly lay the box down. Pinch the lighter and raise it. Wait. Let the unlit cigarette dangle as I watch a fish slowly make its way across the tank. Glance up to the Mick. Slide my thumb on the lighter’s wheel. Flame kisses tip. A glow. A tingle in my lungs. A billow of smoke rising from within me, drifting away across the bar like incense. This cigarette is my date. The camera would interrupt it. This is the last night to smoke in Dallas bars, and I’m going to be faithful.

11:35 PM: Lover’s Lane. Make full stop. Do not slide into intersection. Stop sign. Make full stop. Beware red-light cameras. Beware University Park Police.

11:47 PM: It’s a long drive to the far side of Lakewood, where Gaston glides down a hill towards White Rock Lake. The Goat sits in one of the run-down, forgotten strip malls on the side of the hill. There are no windows, just a stone façade and a heavy wooden door. I open the door and step inside, and it feels like walking into the aftermath of a tobacco car-bomb. The air is thick and hazy, and the lights above the bar cut lines through it.

11:50 PM: For some reason I thought the smoking ban would come into effect when the bars closed at 2 a.m. I lean against the bar waiting for my Ziegenbock, and a guy with sandy skin, sunken cheeks and a Crocodile Dundee hat announces that the ban is minutes away. A man on the other corner of the long, undulating bar yells something back. There’s a loud cackle and a chubby faced woman down the line bobs her head forward, her messy mop of hair almost dipping into the ashtray in front of her. The bartender hands me my pint with a cigarette in the same hand, the filter rubbing against the glass.

11:52 PM: “Lumix – I have a Lumix.” I didn’t notice a young-guy next to me – the only one here remotely close to me in age – who was looking at the camera strung around my back. I forgot I was wearing the camera.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I have one of those – I picked it up in Kuwait,” he goes on, and we chat for a few moments about cameras. This place is much rowdier than the Windmill and Time Out, and everyone is shouting at each other around the bar: tired old guys, foul-mouthed cowboy types, plain-looking women with cheeks and bleached blond hair. There is a woman at the end of the bar with pruning lips and stringy brown hair who is sucking her cigarette through a space in her teeth. What a wonderful collection of faces. The room feels like a cross between a VFW hall and a meeting of the Local 745. There are some vinyl-covered tables with half-empty glasses of beer and a pool table in the corner surrounded by pot-bellied men.

11:57 PM: The band is gathering on the little raised platform at the other end of the room. The lead singer is tall and so lanky his jeans seem hooked to his hip bones.
“Alright y’all, you got two minutes until you can’t smoke here no more,” the singer says into the mic.
“That’s right – last smoke,” yells out the gravel-voiced bartendress.
Every hand in the place has a cigarette clipped between the forefingers, thin lines of smoke snaking out from the tips. In the thick air, I understand how this could all seem rather disgusting and unhealthy. Yet standing here with all these strangers, many of whom came here like me with only a pack of cigarettes as a companion, it is like we are participating in some ugly, cancerous communion of loneliness, consuming the smog that we circulated though our lungs and spit out into the room for everyone else to breathe.

12:00 PM: The band launches into “Evil Ways” by Santana with smirking irony. As they play, one-by-one, the cigarettes around me go out. I watch mine get smaller, and when the red glow is near the filter, I stuff it down in the ashtray. Looking around, there is no one smoking now, but the cloud of smoke still hangs around us. We are bobbing in it now, like sailors of the sunken Pequod, cut adrift.