Smoke on the water: Austin hookah lounges

Ask Sami Romman the health question and you get cheeseburgers.

'If you eat cheeseburgers five times a week, that's not good for you,' said the co-owner of Austin's Kasbah hookah lounge. 'But you have a cheeseburger once a week, maybe that's not so bad.'

He's answering this question: Is smoking a hookah as bad for you as smoking cigarettes?

You don't have to watch Dr. Oz to know that lighting and then breathing anything isn't good for you. But the hookah smoke is so cool after it passes through the water, expansive and perfumed, sweet as a campfire marshmallow. And because it's not acrid and hot, you might be tempted to inhale, passing it back through your mouth and nose like the condensed breath of fall's first morning.

Back here in the less-prosaic world, I've cleaned enough hookahs to know this: The black, resinous particulate matter that builds up in those satin-girdled hookah hoses? Some of that's getting into your mouth and in your lungs. When you've tried, let's say, six places in six days for a story on hookah lounges, it makes for a fine flinty cough.

In those six days, I also learned that first, most people have no idea what a hookah is. That I can fix. (It's what the caterpillar is smoking in 'Alice in Wonderland,' the one who sounds like Professor Snape.)

And second, the hookah can bring together cultures that are half a world apart physically, a whole world apart philosophically. See there. Hookahs and cheeseburgers. With nothing more than tobacco and saturated fat, we've built a bridge between the Middle East and America.

Just set that coffee down next to my Nobel Prize.

The cloud (and how it got there)

Simply put, a hookah is a water pipe. A hollow metal stem fits into a thick glass vase filled halfway with water. Atop that stem sits a ceramic bowl with holes in the bottom. Into that bowl goes shisha , which is shredded tobacco mixed with molasses or honey and a corner-shop's inventory of fruits, spices and flavorings. Over the bowl goes a shroud of foil poked with an artful array of holes for ventilation. On top of that foil go a few pieces of checker-sized charcoal as hot as Elin Nordegren's vengeance.

A hose with a tapered mouthpiece fits into the shiny stem. As the smoker draws breath through the hose, air is pulled down over the coals, through the shisha, down the stem, through the water, into the vase and back through the hose as a pillowy cloud of smoke that's more like aspirated Fruity Pebbles. The rush, when there is one, is no more sinister than a second cup of coffee.

There will be bubbling. The same rapid-fire thurping your parents heard from your older brother's room before things at home got real different. Except this is about tobacco and not that other plant. It's a Middle Eastern cafe-society thing that predates Jeff Spicoli by a millennium.

But the stigma remains. At Yahala Hookah Lounge on Airport Boulevard, a rough-looking guy rattles in, looking to bum a cigarette. 'I don't smoke,' one of the hookah-smokers says in full exhale. The rough guy does a double-take. 'Yeah, just that marijuana (stuff),' he grumbles on the way out.

The hookah lounges in this story don't feel like stoner places. They're mostly like any other student-magnet, with coffee and free Wi-Fi. Except for the bubbling, and except for the place with the sea monster. Let me explain.

At Redline Hookah on South First Street, there are big saltwater aquariums, and in one of them swims a sea monster, a cheetah-spotted thing that stares at me with dead white eyes for 10 minutes while I smoke. Stick with your theory about it being a moray eel, but in Redline's dim, soporific light, it looks like a phantom, helped not at all by the DJ flashing topographic grids against a wall, pulsing them in time to music that sounds like a chorus of car horns.

The ceiling is hung with bedsheet tapestries that look like Persian rugs. Shiny black and red couches flank low, scuffed tables for the pipes. Some of the shisha flavors defy logic. What is 'Afro Pie'? 'Dead Nazi'? And there are beer bongs. But service is good, and the resident tech performs CPR on a flatlining pipe to stoke it. It's a jangly rotating model with a plain flexible hose, a step down from the hoses with grips as big and ornate as scimitar handles at some places.