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Smoking in an East Village bar during the pre-April 30 grace period.

As a bartender, D.H. is a natural. Tall, handsome and well groomed, he displays a genuine self-confidence, an openness that puts people at ease. He can crack open a Budweiser or mix a seabreeze with the best of them, but more importantly, he has an ineffable quality that most men only dream of: D.H. has real charisma, and among his friends, his success with women is the stuff of legend. He has dated everyone from strippers to bartenders, stockbrokers and even a model or two. It is said of D.H. that once, when he was involved in a monogamous relationship with a steady girlfriend, a woman draped her arms over his shoulders and whispered, “No one will ever know.”

Yes, that much charisma.

D.H. has been a great asset for any bar where he has worked due to the strange and simple arrangement that his good fortune allows him: women come to bars for a look at him, and men come for a look at them.

Business had been down where D.H. works even before the smoking ban — he’d given up a particularly bad Sunday shift a couple of months ago — but now, after the ban, a sea change has happened. When I asked him how much he had made that night he told me, and when I heard it, I had to ask him again. He had said, “Twenty-two dollars.”

One of the best bartenders I have ever met had just worked an eight-hour shift and come away with less than the flat-rate cab fare to an airport.

Sitting in bars and talking to bartenders after hours, when the doors are locked and the bartenders unwind — usually with the drink and cigarette that the customers can no longer have — yields a mixed bag of feedback on the smoking ban, running the gamut from the unexpected and unusual: “It’s actually better,” that I heard from exactly one bartender at a bar not far from Stuyvesant Town; to “no change;” to the weekday bartenders’ increasingly common complaint that in order to survive they had to rely on the grace period to let them lock the door and allow patrons to smoke in the hope that their subsequent tipping will reflect their being granted a special privilege.

The drop in business is certainly partly attributable to the general falling off of the economy after 9/11, but it is equally certain that in many cases, the smoking ban has made a bad situation worse. The grace period that expired at the end of last month was a time of mixed signals; but talking with bartenders in all but the largest and trendiest or best-situated bars provides a chorus of voices that tells you there are good reasons to believe that things are rougher than people are saying.

P.G., the bar-back at one bar where I work, has reported that the city’s health inspectors arrived for the first time last week. They came during a lull in business, on a weekday night, in the interval between a busy happy hour and the night’s deep doldrums. There were three of them sitting in the nearly empty bar for an hour brandishing clipboards and waiting for someone to light up. Their appearance left questions about their effectiveness.

According to Elliot Marcus, a city health official, quoted in an April 26 article in the Daily News: “No one is requiring bartenders to become cigarette cops,” and “All the law requires of operators is to remove ashtrays, post ‘no smoking’ signs and to make a good-faith effort to tell people not to smoke.”

If this scenario is the case, if the real responsibility of the bar ends with some employees telling a patron not to smoke in the bar once he or she lights up, then the only mechanisms for enforcement of the law involve “concerned” (or possibly vengeful) customers informing on bars, or in spot inspections by health department officials who will issue summonses; if, and only if, they can make a bar patron, a 6' 5" Hell’s Angel, for example, show them his driver’s license instead of walking away from them laughing.

Considering the ongoing cost of the smoking ban to the city — in the case of Dana Blake, the awful cost — to bars and to the people who work in them; considering the means the city is going to resort to in order to enforce the ban, you wonder what it’s all for. You might almost think that the mayor and the health commissioner were joking; you can almost imagine them sitting at a table together in a bar somewhere, giggling like girls, as they hammered out a law in New York that would do warm and fuzzy things for NAFTA advocates — a law that tried to balance the pay for tending bar in New York with the pay for doing the same thing in Mexico.

In a statement demonstrating world-class optimism in the absence of facts, Mayor Bloomberg justified the smoking ban to the City Council on the basis of beer and wine sales figures in California for the years 1998-2001 (the last years, for which figures are available, the mayor assures us). The use of these figures to economically justify the smoking ban in New York is one of the greatest insults to intelligence in the recent rhetoric of city politics: the figures, handpicked from the time of California’s Internet boom — when 20-somethings from all over the country were flocking to the state to take jobs with huge starting salaries — displays wildfire cynicism with regard to his audience. The mayor or his listener, one of the two has to be ignorant for this statement to work.

The parties that California Internet companies threw are the stuff of legend and only a massive fall in alcohol sales could have come as a surprise given the circumstances. Despite the undeniable upswing in sales of beer and wine, some bar owners in California reported a significant falling off in business after the 1998 implementation of California’s statewide smoking ban as well as bar closures. The fact that there are no figures available on those same sales after the crash of Internet stocks in 2000 and California’s current high unemployment rate is a tribute not to the mayor’s wisdom. Rather, it is a tribute to that of P.T. Barnum who said, “No one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

M.K. is a longtime doorman at several bars in the East Village.