BONFIRE OF THE VIRTUES

New Yorkers mourn the passing of the three-

martini lunch. But Charles Laurence finds that

self-indulgence still thrives — discreetly

New York MY hostess is apologising for being smashed so early in the evening, explaining that the cab bringing her to the Madison Avenue bar where she is holding her party had been stuck in traffic, allowing her time to smoke more than planned of her joint. She offers the rather damp remnant, pinched between forefinger and thumb, and reaches for a martini, straight-up with an olive, from a passing waitress. I take a whisky sour.

There is a persistent rumour abroad that the fun has gone out of life in New York, that the new puritanism has snuffed the candles that were once gloriously burned at both ends, that the hell-raising Manhat- tanite of old has become anhedonic.

By the time I am sipping my third whisky sour and sensing the anxieties of the day drifting away like cigar smoke to the extractor fan, my hostess, a nice woman really, is promoting romantic devilry by telling my girlfriend that she would like to sleep with me. This is flattering, of course, but certain to make the path of love extremely rough tonight. The girlfriend, a belle from the Deep South who believes firmly that passion is the essence of wom- anhood and that jealousy is to love as Tabasco is to a New Orleans bloody Mary, is predictably enraged. A long night is now a certainty, but it would be wise to post- pone going home for a while. The waitress brings more drinks.

There is truth in the rumour of a new puritanism, but I rather think it is not the whole truth. The puritans have, without doubt, breached the walls of a city which has never quite conformed to the strie- tures of American normalcy, and has long been despised and feared for it. The locals are reeling from the success of the tobacco police in banning all smoking from restau- rants and are now braced for a new 'zoning law' which will, almost incredibly, banish most of Manhattan's strip joints and Times Square sex parlours to a factory district in Queens.

Such measures are symptoms, rather than causes, of a dour and sober mood. The mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and his city council get away with them because they are presented as part and parcel of 'quality of life' issues, together with the dark- skinned bogeyman who, everybody knows but few will admit in these politically cor- rect times, is chiefly responsible for the murder rate. The new puritans have halved the number of murders; that venerable old bar Billy's Topless and a smoke with the after-dinner coffee seem fair exchange.

The mood itself stems from fear. The idea that life is a lot less fun than it used to be has found its best expression so far in a New Yorker article by James Atlas. He identifies himself with the 'tribe' of media folk, artists and 'literary' writers known to their tormentors on the puritan wing of the Republican Party as the cultural elite, and says that 'work dominates our existence'. The prevailing ethos is one of red circles, each with a line through it, proclaiming No Smoking, No Drinking, No Sex, No Fun.

Atlas has a point. He describes himself hurrying home to his wife and children, set- tling down at dawn to his computer to bang out more words for more money in the eternal struggle to maintain an Upper West Side lifestyle. He mourns the apparent passing of an old goat of 60 he once knew on a newspaper, who every Friday after- noon disappeared for an illicit tryst with a young fact-checker, and returned rosy- cheeked in post-coital jollity to address all his colleagues as 'captain'. Four hours of writing-time spent in bed!

'Where are the disastrous miscalcula- tions, the squandered opportunities, the wrong turns that made life so picaresque?' he asks. He complains that it was all right for the old goats because they could buy whole houses in Manhattan for less than the price of a studio today, and could thus afford misspent nights with Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern, a few divorces and other wrong turns.

If, indeed, he really wanted to put psy- chotropic experimentation and sexual adventure before the Upper West Side, weekends by the sea and a nanny, he might be advised to move to the latest beatnik dis- trict among the collapsing warehouses of the Williamsburg docks. Atlas finds much of the repressive, safety-first spirit rooted in the 'downsizing', profit-hungry demean-our of the modern corporation, and the media is no longer a refuge from the corporate world. These days, the cultural elite has to work to keep its jobs and absentee after- noon drunks would be the first to see their salaries sacrificed for corporate profit.

The fabled three-martini lunch is proba- bly a goner. The smart mid-town restau- rants — The Four Seasons, Bernadine, 21 Club, Gotham Bar and Grill, and so on — offer mean little repasts of low-cal bottled water and white wine, served mostly for the effect. These days, it is the size of the bill that makes an impression, not the meal, and the tables are empty by half past two. But not so long ago I was treated to lunch at Harry's Bar by a Wall Street lawyer. We began with, yes, a martini, and went on to a robust Medoc, and before we knew it it was teatime. This man, a tubby type full of cackling laughter who has never seen the inside of a gym, has his own firm housed at the top of a skyscraper, and no corporate boss.

But it is more than a case of the excep- tion proving the rule. Puritanism has long been misunderstood in America, partly because mythology has always been pre- ferred to history. There never was a per- fect Shining City on the Hill. The extreme social discipline of the New England colonies was based on an extreme and unsophisticated view of base human appe- tites. John and Mary could never be left in the same room together because it was assumed that skirts would immediately rise and trousers fall. The Puritans expected unbridled, unsanctioned coupling because Adam fell, and expectations tend to be ful- filled.

The urge to hedonism is still out there. For every baby-boomer scared into the 'recovery movement' — innocence lost to the relentless knowledge of the killer properties of forbidden fruit — there is a new recruit to the fast lane. The new crop of Wall Street traders crowds the real ale bars of the South Street Sea Port, and poses with Havanas in cigar bars while aspiring to the status of the analysts who watch for models at the Mere Bar and Spy in Soho, the Bat Bar, Pravda or the Bow- ery Bar. At the Merc, if you ask for a very dry martini, they serve vodka untouched by vermouth. It is the dreaded white wine that has gone out of fashion, and cocktails and 'boutique' beers that are 'in'. For star- gazing, you can't beat Hogs and Heifers, a grungy, pseudo-biker bar in the middle of the meat market where spirits come only in shot-glasses.

There is no evidence of a fall in sales of cocaine, even if those no longer having fun find restaurant bathrooms now used only for their intended purpose. The city's biggest chain of night-clubs has just been busted for allowing — and perhaps more, according to prosecuting attorneys — the distribution of Ecstasy. Younger bohemi- ans yet to be signed to corporate payrolls are making a familiar old wrong turn by reviving a fashion for heroin. Nobody is talking about the Union Square Café, a ghastly, bloodless, California cuisine joint which banned tobacco before City Hall thought of it, but everybody is queuing for tables and monster steaks at Old Home- stead, Smith and Wolensky, and Sparks.

I have a calling card tucked away in my desk, one that took me by surprise at another little do the other night. 'I know you're hooked up with that blonde,' said the young lady who proffered it, as bold as any adventuress from the good old days. 'But I don't mind, I'm not that sort of girl. Call me.' I have resisted. But like all the old sins and risks and fun, it is here if you want it.