That’s just sick
Friday 11/10/06.
The Beer Cure has totally failed, so I do the Sick Day Cure, spending the day
drinking tea, slurping soup, and watching all 26 episodes of Justice League
Unlimited Series 1.
And what do I miss at the Naughty Pine?
At 5 PM, when Dominic comes in for his upstairs bar shift,
he almost gets fired. The only reason he doesn’t is because the bar has only
sixteen days to live. At 7PM, five minutes after Tripod goes upstairs and he
and Dominic disappear into the men’s room, Dominic gets fired by Randi, because
“Fuck this shit.” Which becomes the motto for the evening. Appropriately
enough, Randi fires Dominic downstairs in Booth 113, which is usually referred
to as the Break-Up Booth. This is where Uma Thurman walked out on Ethan Hawke,
Martha Gellhorn threw a drink in Ernest Hemingway’s face, Julie Christie told
Warren Beatty to go fuck himself, Bob Dylan stood up Joan Baez, Stan Lee told
Jack Kirby to fuck off, Jane Jacobs slapped Robert Moses, Faye Dunaway told
Warren Beatty to go fuck himself, Dean Martin flicked a cigarette at Jerry
Lewis’ eyeball, Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits broke up four times in one
night, Madonna told Warren Beatty to go fuck himself, Lauren Bacall and Jason
Robards Jr. nearly killed each other (4 stitches for her, 25 for him), and
Diane Keaton told Warren Beatty to go fuck himself after making her do over 200
takes of a wordless ten-second scene in Reds where she starts
typing something and then pulls the paper out, balls it up, throws it away,
inserts another one, and starts typing again. Table 113 also has more comped
meals than any other booth or table in the Naughty Pine--in this booth, the
beer goes flat, the wine tastes sour, plates drop and shatter as food is
delivered, and perfectly-served appetizers suddenly have long strands of hair
in them. It’s the hair that make everyone think the booth is haunted-- the
strands are always at least nine inches long and blonde, and they’ve been
showing up since an unidentified woman was found dead of arsenic poisoning in
Booth 113 on October 31, 1935. The identity of the dead woman remains a
mystery, but Luc Sante, among others, believes that she was the mysterious
“other woman” who appeared in letters and pictures found after Dutch Schultz
was killed at the Palace Chophouse on October 23, 1935. Whether her death was
murder or suicide is still unknown; autopsy results confirmed that she had
enough arsenic in her to kill five people, as well as remarking on the natural
color of her slightly-curled nine-inch-long blonde hair.
As Randi is letting Dominic go, and Dominic is pleading for
another chance, which would put his “another chance” total into the low three
figures, Sarah calls Dave in and covers the upstairs bar until he gets there.
She’s behind the bar when Randi and Sunday go up to the roof to have a
cigarette, but Dave is behind the bar 30 minutes later when the two of them
come back down, hugging each other and laughing. Neither Dave nor Sarah get the
significance of this. I like to think I would have, had I been there. But I
also like to think that Sunday and Randi would have asked me to accompany them while they had
their little talk. Because how can you have that kind of talk without me there?
I mean, really?
A reporter from the Village Voice comes upstairs and talks
about the bar’s history with Dave, but rubs him the wrong way, so Dave starts
feeding him urban legends instead of real stories. He tells the reporter that
Big Joe Little was dining with Samantha Seaton when he was shot in the head in
1964 (it was Linda Darnell). He swears that Richard Burton came upstairs during
the run of Hamlet and recited excerpts from Richard Francis Burton’s version of
the Khasida (which happened at the White Horse, not here). He reveals that the
TV actress Cheri L’Estienne, who was an upstairs regular during the 70’s, is
really Cheryl Lee Stein of Staten Island, and blew a featured part in Pulp
Fiction because over dinner with Quentin Tarantino at Table 207, she called Uma
Thurman a “no-talent man-pleaser with pontoons for feet.” And then tops it off
by swearing the guy to secrecy and then telling him that Terence Stamp and Julie Christie had regular sex in the men's room, as if Christie would be caught dead doing anything that plebian, and besides it was Stamp and Jean Shrimpton, and it was in the downstairs men's room because everybody knows the stalls there are wider. The guy
from the Voice walks out deliriously happy; Dave buys shots for the bar because
the dumb son of a bitch bought everything Dave sold him.
Downstairs around 9, there’s an impromptu Dada Cabaret at
Table 118. This is the Mona Lisa Booth which got its name as a result of one
the great art thefts of modern times. After stealing the Mona Lisa from the
Louvre on August 21, 1911, Vincenzo Perugia painted several copies of da
Vinci’s masterpiece and sold them to help finance a round-the-world voyage. In
December of 1911, he arrived in New York, made the acquaintance of some
Italian-Americans who took him out to dinner at the Knotty Pine, and got so
drunk that he passed out. When he awoke, he found himself sitting at Table 118
with his money and watch stolen, and the bill due. Having nothing but the
clothes on his back and his painting portfolio to his name, Perugia gave the
bartender one of his Mona Lisas as payment. Unfortunately, he was still so inebriated
that he handed over the original instead of a copy. It is doubtful whether
Perugia ever realized this; certainly he never mentioned it when he was
arrested in 1913 for trying to sell what he thought was the original to the
Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, for $100,000. But even if he had mentioned
it, it is doubtful whether the Italian or even the French authorities would
have made the admission public. In any case, it is da Vinci’s original which
now sits in a battered frame on the wall in Table 118. It was only put under
glass in 1915, after Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on it.
As part of the Cabaret, the Professor dresses up as Tristan Tzara, stands in the doorway with a bucket of red paint and a cane, dips the cane into the paint, signs the floor, steps back, frames the view like a painter framing his subject, and declares: “I think I'll call it 'The Naughty Pine!'” Then five people costumed as The Avant
Guardians (Stark, Montagu, Pozzi, Jemima Franklin and The Lady Aoi—the
European vigilante group that supposedly saved the world a dozen times over
between the two wars) perform Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer—Hope Of Women, after which Ned Shay dresses up in black and ad-libs a song called “The Talking French
Blues” that has everybody in hysterics. Here are the only two stanzas that
Sarah remembers to write down because she’s laughing so hard:
My tabac is out of Gauloise,
And the sou chef burned the flan.
My tabac is out of Gauloise,
And the sou chef burned the flan.
My mistress she just left me,
For another married man.
I drink red wine for breakfast,
And my wardrobe’s, que’est-ce que
c’est, black.
I drink red wine for breakfast,
And my wardrobe’s, how you say,
black.
If I had a missile system,
I could sell it to Iraq.
After being shut off by Steve downstairs, the Professor
staggers upstairs with five women and sits at Table 202. The young’ns leave one
by one over the course of the next two hours as the Prof verbally cuts each one
of them down to the size of a shot glass. It’s like watching a horror movie as
all the happy campers get killed off by a very efficient monster who knows
exactly where to put the knife, leaving him alone with the Last Girl, who is by
definition the one woman at the table who is immune to his lack of charm. He
makes his play, she turns the tables on him and escapes, and the Prof passes
out in his chair for twenty minutes before Dave moves him to Table 212, and
lets him sprawl out on the seat.
My old friend El shows up, specifically to see me, and when
Dave says I haven’t come in, she says “Just tell him El was here,” and she
leaves. El and I were scheduled to move to Brooklyn with a third roommate on
September 15, 2001. We ended up not moving till the end of the month, for
obvious reasons, and I spent the intervening weeks on her couch on 9th Street.
When traffic was shut down below 14th Street on September 12th, the Naughty
Pine (like a lot of other establishments) stayed closed. Until either Friday
the 14th or Saturday the 15th, when it reopened. I can’t remember which night
it was, but what I do remember is walking upstairs with El and having my entire
body scaled by a noise level that went from 8 out of 10 at the bottom step to
20 out of 10 at the door. The place was packed tighter than Times Square on New
Year’s Eve and the energy level was off the charts. Everything had been closed
for so long, it was like the first warm day after a February cold wave, when
all the stir-crazy shut-ins go out and howl at the moon. People weren’t
talking, they were screaming so loud it’s a wonder the glassware didn’t
shatter. It’s embarrassing as hell to admit it, but all I could do was look
around with a stupid grin in my face and say “How cool is this?” El saud
“What?” I yelled: “HOW COOL IS THIS?” El yelled “WHAT?!?” I just shrugged.
Nobody but God heard me. But those are the things God needs to hear more often.
Nobody sees her come in, but at 10PM somebody notices that
Winona Ryder is in the corral with her drinking minder, a forlorn and annoyed
little guy with dark hair who complains all night about having to make sure his
charge hits him instead of the pavement when she falls over, and gets home in
one piece to her apartment on 14th Street. He’s even more annoyed that he has
to keep drinking seltzer all night, while Winona is throwing down enough vodka
tonics to put out a live volcano with no apparent effect at all. When Ketel
Mike starts making jokes about Winona shoplifting toilet paper from the Ladies
Room, Dave cuts him off and sends him downstairs. For the rest of the night,
various table patrons of all ages come up to Ms Ryder and tell her how much
they loved her in Beetlejuice, which is the equivalent of someone
walking up to you when you’re 35 and saying how much they loved the way you
spent your junior year in high school.
The Professor wakes up at midnight, asks for coffee, and
starts talking about fractals, in which the smallest piece always contains the
pattern of the larger design. When someone mentions that this is like “that
Chapel Perilous thing Guinness Matt keeps talking about,” the Professor starts
calling for me. But I’m not there. I’m dreaming about Wonder Woman.
Alcohol: none
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