So now they are coming for the cigar bars. Perhaps it is only right.

It is seemingly impossible to know - should the legislature have its way - what will become of them, particularly places like Churchill Bar, the stately, red-leather-clad enclave tucked in a corner of the Brown Palace Hotel.

It is well past noon, the lunch crowd having departed, and Michael Pacheco is considering the question as though I had just asked what his life would be like if he had no legs.

"Do you really think it will happen?" is the best the 45-year-old man, who for 18 years has tended bar at Churchill, can muster.

It is among the handful of cigar establishments in the state, which, along with casinos and the smoking lounges at Denver International, were granted exemptions from last year's statewide smoking ban.

On Monday, though, the state Senate gave final approval to House Bill 1269, which will outlaw smoking at casinos, and a companion measure will nix puffing everywhere in Colorado except at the airport.

The legislation, as it reads now, would give the casinos a year's grace to build smoking patios and adjust their business plans.

This is not a done deal, but the deadline for Churchill and other high-end cigar emporiums would seem to be July 2008.

The aroma of fine stogies hangs in the air as you walk through the doorway just off the deeply elegant lobby of the hotel.

The room at this hour is sparsely populated. In one corner, two men are sealing a big business deal. Or so it is said after one of the men approaches the bar, hands Mike Pacheco both his bill and a mahogany humidor with his name emblazoned on a gold plaque.

The bar man slides the box inside the bar's larger, glass-front humidor.

Everyone, it seems, knows Mike Pacheco. He blushes when you point this out.

"Yeah," he says, "I know their families, their spouses, watched their children grow up."

He has been at the hotel 22 years, nearly half his life, working in various restaurants and clubs there before requesting Churchill. He now knows everyone by name, what they drink and the time they have to leave.

He has served movie, rock and sports stars, yet when asked to name the most memorable one, he tells this story:

"There was this guy who would come in at least once a week. I think he lived on the streets. But he would scrape up the money and come in, and I would set him up with the silver and the napkins.

"He would come in mostly in the winter, I think to get out of the cold. You should have seen the looks management gave me. But he had the money, and I wanted to make him feel special.

"He stopped coming in about eight years ago. And he would always tell me before he left, 'God bless you. I'll keep you in my prayers.' I miss him. It's the people I love here."

The odd thing, he says, is maybe half who come in during his daytime shift do not smoke. Most are businessmen who come in, he says, just to get away for a few minutes from their busy workdays.

"The things I have heard across this bar - and you are a confidant to everyone - could bring down some pretty powerful people," Mike Pacheco says.

I wanted to know about the humidors, the devices that keep cigars from drying out, which were so much a part of last year's debate over the smoking ban.

Turns out, Churchill has 75 private humidors in its "club." A personal humidor and a nameplate costs $500 upon joining, plus another $150 per year.

"Most don't come in," he says. "Fifty percent, I'd say, I rarely see."

The traffic in cigar sales, he says, more often involves non-club members.

The most expensive he sells is what the industry calls a Pre-Castro Cuban, a Montecristo that goes for $300 a stick.

Mike Pacheco has sold six recently, he says, the most recent to a man who closed a multimillion-dollar deal at a table in the bar.

"He wanted to celebrate, to have the best I had. He got the Pre-Castro and ordered an awful drink he thought was the best. I told him I had better."

It is called Hardy Perfect Series - Air/Fire Water, an 1870s-vintage cognac, said to be the world's oldest known unblended cognac. It is on the menu at $575 an ounce. The man bought him and his partner each an ounce.

So what happens, I ask, if they outlaw smoking in Churchill? Mike Pacheco thinks for a long time.

"I'll tell you, I don't know. But I have to believe they will find a way to keep this place open. I'd hate to see it go.

"It shouldn't be a government decision. And where does it stop?

"The government says it wants to protect me, my health, but I have enough seniority to go anywhere in this hotel. I made the choice to be here."

There are hundreds of bartenders in Colorado who, for nearly a year now, have screamed the same thing, their livelihoods upended or severely limited as a result of the smoking ban.

I wish no harm to anyone working an honest day. Yet if the legislature does what it should have done last year, and that is to exempt no business from the smoking ban, it is only fair.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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