Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 10

              

      It’ll be a boozy, woo-oo-oo-oo-oozy night tonight

Monday, 11/6/06. I get an email from The Girl We Don’t Mention; she’s in town visiting her kid and wants to know what I’m doing for dinner Wednesday night. Because I am an all-day sucker for women who done me wrong, I say nothing, and we make plans to run every red light on Memory Lane by meeting at the Galaxy Diner on 46th and 9th and then trolling what’s left of the Hell’s Kitchen we remember from there. I hit the Strand after work and buy three books (East of Laughter, by RA Lafferty; Slow Days, Fast Company, by Eve Babitz; Red Noses, by Peter Barnes), then come out debating whether or not I should go to the Pine tonight.

ME: Do I really want to go there tonight?

LOGICAL MATTHEW: There are only three Mondays left, dude.

ME: But why am I doing this? Is it because I want to be there, or because I feel like I should be there?

MATTHEW THE ALCOHOLIC: Why the fuck do you think, pal?

Why indeed? I get to the bar a little after 8, to find about 10 people hovering around the bar area, five guys at the other end of the bar wolfing down burgers, ten people in the lounge, no chairs in the corral, and ten tables filled. The people hanging out at the bar are all talking business. In about 20 minutes, they will be yelling business. And laughing very loudly at remarks that are not funny. Great, I think to myself—I come here to escape my fucking day job, and now my fucking day job has decided to infest my bar. Kenny is perched on the corner and is unusually quiet. “I just wanted a low-key relaxing Monday, you know?” he says. I make a buzzer sound. “Exactly,” he replies.

Notably missing tonight: Ketel Mike. Until I see him at the Ratatosk Table with his brother and his mother. (There are two Ratatosks—the anarchist from the Twenties, and the radical from the Sixties. The first took his name from the squirrel in Norse mythology who gnaws away at the roots of the World Tree; the second took his name from the first.) The fact that Ketel Mike is here with his mother is Not A Good Thing. The last time he was up here with her, they were sitting at the Big Joe Little table, and in their middle of their meal, Ketel Mike jumped to his feet and yelled “YOU ARE DRIVING ME FUCKING CRAZY SO WHY DON’T YOU JUST! GO! FUCK YOURSELF!” Then he marched to the bar and drank three Ketel rocks shots in the space of 90 seconds, during which time you could have heard a mouse running across the floor. Having poured enough vodka on his anger to calm himself down, Ketel Mike went back to the table, where his mother had been calmly eating her food, and finished his meal in silence. He was the soul of politeness as he bid her goodbye and watched her go downstairs; and once she was completely gone, in typical K Mike fashion, he went around the floor to every table that had a pretty girl on it and apologized profusely while trying to get their phone numbers.

But tonight there is no outburst. K Mike does come over to the bar for a quick shot of Ketel, and hovers over me like someone trying to steal my test answers as he drinks it. “You’ve started a new notebook,” he announces. “Yes I have,” I say, as I write down the words Yes I have. I still feel a little guilty about taking notes on what’s going on here. It’s something I have never done in the hundreds of drinking years that I’ve been coming here, and I know it’s something that everyone who has worked here is afraid I’ve been doing. I remember joking about it once to Maddie, when she still did upstairs shifts, and Dave took my head off about it. “Don’t even joke,” he said. “Everyone up here is worried that you’re taking down every word that comes out of their mouths.” I envision a moment two months down the road, when I bump into Maddie in Brooklyn somewhere:

MADDIE: (This is not a question) So tell me the truth—you were really taking down every word that came out of our mouths all those nights, weren’t you.

ME: Every. Syllable.

MADDIE: (pulling out an Uzi) Die, pendejo!

I scribble some notes on the moral implications of being in effect a tape recorder for this diary, but I can’t think straight. I can feel the beginnings of a phlegm ball in the back of my throat, which means I’m coming down with a cold. It figures. This place has three weeks left and I’ll probably end up spending two of them sneezing and wheezing. Unless I nip this in the bud as quickly as possible. With grog. Lots and lots of grog.

              Rock and Roll High School

At around 10 PM, I bump into Anita heading into the Ladies as I’m coming out of the Men’s Room. To any other woman, this would be embarrassing. To Anita, it’s a come-on. I give Kenny the raised eyebrow when I get back to the bar.

ME: Anita?

KENNY: I know, man; I didn’t think she’d be in this late.

ME: Where’s she sitting?

(Kenny points to the corner stool, which is two away from me.)

ME: Whew.

How does one describe Anita to a stranger? She’s my generation, she’s a flaming liberal; she’s a personal friend of John Kerry, an excellent photographer, and possibly the most sex-obsessed human being I have ever met in my life. She’s made a pass or two at me, which I contrived to either ignore or drop. And for a while there she was seeing Bill Kennedy, another regular, a relationship which ended like a high school passion, with accusations of immaturity and stalking, and protestations like “I am so over her!” followed by twenty minutes of “Can you believe what she did to me yesterday?” The two of them have so many issues it might as well be a subscription, but they are alike in one significant way: given half a chance, they’ll each bend your ear in five different places, and when your tympanic membrane bursts out of sheer boredom, they’ll switch seats and start working on the other one.

I’m not in the mood for that tonight, so when Anita comes out of the Ladies, I keep my head down and write furiously. She orders a Pinot. I continue to write. In the corner of my eye, I see her looking may way, and I know that if our eyes meet, she will take that as an opening for conversation. I don’t look up; I continue to write. And when it’s halftime on the Monday Night Football game, I swing around and study the highlights and replays as if my life depends on it.  Two minutes later she calls Kenny over.

ANITA: I’m sorry, I hate to do this to you, but can I have the check?

KENNY: No problem.

ANITA: It’s the wine. It’s really awful.

KENNY: I’m sorry.

ANITA: I feel really bad about this.

KENNY: That’s okay. And it could be worse—you could be drinking the Chardonnay. It’s like paint thinner.

ME: (Studying that TV set) Only thinner.

ANITA: How much?

KENNY: Nah, it’s on us.

ANITA: I’m sorry, Kenny.

When she leaves, Kenny raises his arms in a two-fisted “It’s good!” gesture, and pours us both a celebratory shot of whiskey.

KENNY: It wasn’t the wine. She left because nobody was talking to her. Cheers!

ME: Cheers!

It’s so high school, but I love it.

          In vino veritas

The game ends with Seattle beating Oakland 16 zip, and I head downstairs just as Manuel come up with two cuties, parks himself at Table 204, and orders his usual No-Foam Pitcher Of Stella, which means Kenny is going to spend the next five minutes gritting his teeth while he uses a knife to scrape every last molecule of Stella foam from that pitcher. I give him a look of sympathy as I head downstairs and out. If Sunday is here, I don’t want to see her. After what I said to her yesterday, I have no idea what she’s going to do. Will she throw a drink in my face? (The Edward Albee option.) Will she treat me like we had a huge argument offstage that nobody ever got to see? (The Coast Of Utopia option.) Will she leap into my arms and say she only screwed around with Dominic to make me jealous? (The Woody Allen option—except that she’s too old.) Or maybe it’ll just peter out into an anticlimax. (The Neil Gaiman option.) Either way, I do not want to deal with her tonight, so I arrow out of the bar like I’ve been shot from Robin Hood’s bow and aim for the train, but who do I see smoking his meerschaum outside? Ned Shay! “Matty!” he cries. (He’s one of the five people on Planet Earth whom I allow to call me that.) “What fucking hill did you come out of?” I say, giving him a huge hug. “Is Nancy here?” He shakes his head. “She’ll be here tomorrow or the day after,” he says. “You got a place to crash?” “We do,” he says. “Well if you need one,” I start to say, and Ned interrupts with “You’re not leaving, dude—not before I buy you a drink.” “No I am not,” I reply, because who am I to refuse (a) a freed drink and (b) a man who has lived more lives than any twenty people I know.

While Ned smokes, I bring him up to date on my life since the last time he ventured into the city, and then we head back in to where he’s sitting, Table 105, Tom Paine’s old table. Back when the Pine was on Pine Street, the wall over the table had a portrait of Paine, but it ended up being replaced by the famous Anheuser-Busch painting of Custer’s Last Stand, which is still there. In 1884, while visiting New York as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Sitting Bull ate a plate of clam chowder at this table, which he chose specifically because of the Little Big Horn painting. He is said to have pointed out that Long Hair Custer was actually short-haired during the battle, a fact which no one at the time believed. This is also the table where the original Ratatosk, the one from the 1920’s, held court while his anarchist newsletters and broadsheets were run off in the kitchen. Like the upstairs Ratatosk, everyone in the bar, staff and patrons alike, knew who he was, but never gave him up to the authorities, so that even today, the true identity of each of them remains a public mystery. Unless you get the Professor drunk enough to spill the beans.

Ned asks me about my writing, and because he is one of the few non-writers whose eyes do not glaze over whenever I talk about what I’m working on, I tell him about the evolution play, and the Huck Finn idea I’ve had since the 80’s, and the other two subatomic physics plays that will be part of the Schrödinger’s Girlfriend trilogy, and I tell him about the Bohr play (Bohr’s Model, which will go Buňuel’s That Obscure Object Of Desire six better by having half a dozen different  actresses play the same character). Then he asks me about movies, and I start pounding the table about this Japanese animè I saw at the New York Film Festival this past summer. “Ned, it is seriously an animè version of Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch mixed with At Swim Two Birds—it’s called Paprika, and it’s a total Philip K Dick mindfuck about people who can enter your dreams through this machine, only the machine gets co-opted by a nutcase—” (“As it does,” says Ned) “—and suddenly the dream world infects the real world so you don’t know what’s reality and what isn’t. Your past comes back to haunt you, your view of yourself gets ripped away, it’s like watching a meme infection, I mean it’s so Warren Ellis he’s probably slitting his wrists because he didn’t think of it.” Ned nods; he’s enough of a geek to know that I’m talking about Warren Ellis the comic book author and not Warren Ellis the musical partner of Nick Cave. Me, I always thought they were the same until about a year ago, when I got embarrassingly schooled about them both by the Professor over Glenfiddich.

So while I’m raving about this movie, who do I hear behind me but the Professor, talking about Philip K Dick, and death.

PROFESSOR: Philip K Dick is brilliant because he gets it, he gets that the world conforms to our individual perceptions, even though its existence, its bloodstream if you will, is split between the shared and the personal. Personal reality says that when I die, the universe dies with me. Shared reality says that when I die, the universe lives on. But it’s completely paradoxical, because the universe is made up of individuals who, in effect, kill a piece of that universe every time one of them dies. All these units which create and uphold a universe, which nevertheless outlives the loss of each and every one of them. How does that make any sense, unless the CONSENSUAL reality has a cumulative power that the individual reality does not? It’s like the universe is this cosmic parasite, feeding off the belief of each of its members, even as it sucks the life out of them. Which is more Lovecraft than Dick, but you get the idea. It’s like this bar. You could make a Lovecraft novel out of this bar, which feeds on the energies of its patrons to live. Or you could do a Philip K Dick version in reverse—because in this case, it’s the universe that’s going to die, and all the individual members who kept it alive by believing in it are going to have to go on living. If you want to call that life.

And there is such a tone in the Professor’s voice—something deep and not just resigned to failure but dead to even an attempt at success—that I can’t help myself, I turn around and say, “You okay, Professor?”

He smiles at me, but it’s not a smile of pleasure. There’s nothing pleasant about him at all; he looks like a cross between Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing at the end of a Hammer horror movie, where both the creation and the creator know that they are monsters to the bone and thus deserve whatever horrible fate Life has in store for them. “Matthew! Ned!” he cries, waving a half-full bell glass of scotch. “Come join us. We shall not pass this way again—so let us at least do it together while we can.” I look at Ned. He nods imperceptibly. We both slide out of our booth and swing around to the Professor’s, to discover that he’s sitting across from Sunday and a woman around my age with whitish blonde hair. Sunday and I have a moment. I say “Hey,” and try and fail to keep my face unreadable; she says “Hey,” and succeeds at keeping hers a mask. Then I sit next to the Professor, and Ned sits next to me, and Sunday says, “This is turning into the know-it-all table.” “Then you’ll finally get an education,” says the woman next to her. “Fuck you,” says Sunday in a careless tone of voice, and then introduces us. “Mum, this is Guinness Matt; he likes to think he’s a writer, but he’d rather sleep with rejection than marry success. Matty,” she says, knowing how much I hate being called that, “my mother Dolores.”

Sunday’s mother turns around and extends her hand. “Matthew,” she says. I take her hand. “Liora,” I say to The Girl We Don’t Mention.

Alcohol: Guinness (5) Jameson’s (3)

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Song for the beginning of the night

Song for the end of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells


Day 11

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 9

            “I am not a number; I am a free man.”

Sunday, 11/5/06. I dream that I am Patrick McGoohan, and Number 2 is The Girl We Don’t Mention. Every time I try to escape The Village, she smiles at me and I swoon. I come up with one Byzantine plot after another, and she foils them all with a kiss. “You think you’re so clever,” she says. “Cleverer than you,” I say in my best McGoohan growl, with my head at an angle to the rest of my body and the fingers of one hand twitching as if they miss the feel of a gun. Number 2 smiles and paraphrases AA Milne: “Oh yes, you’re 6, you’re clever as clever. But you will stay 6 forever and ever.” And my face rushes up to the camera and just as it’s about to hurl itself free, the bars of a cell clang together, trapping me inside your television set, and I wake up to the clanging sound of street construction on Union.  It’s eight o’clock. I drag myself out of bed, and head into Manhattan for coffee and cinnamon rolls at the Au Bon Pain near J&R, and then walk down to the corner of Wall and Broadway, where I take a Naughty Pine-related picture.

At noon on September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon containing 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of metal slugs exploded in front of 23 Wall Street, killing 38 people, injuring over 400, and causing over $2,000,000 (in 1920 dollars) worth of property damage. The scars from the explosion can still be seen in the stone of 23 Wall Street. Today we’d probably call it an act of domestic terrorism, except that there’s no such thing in this country, terrorism is always incited from abroad, so if it happened now we would probably label it as Italian terrorism, because it was an act of violent retaliation by supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti, who had just been indicted for murder in Massachusetts. The mastermind behind the bombing was an anarchist named Mario Buda, but the actual driver of the wagon is believed be Giuseppe Budino, who went by the name of Joe Boda when he was the Naughty Pine’s head chef from 1917 to 1929. Although he was never arrested—and in fact no arrests were ever made in the case—there is enough circumstantial evidence to make Budino the prime suspect in the bombing: he had been heard railing against the government after Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrest, he had taken the morning of the bombing off, and he had a cousin who worked at a scrap metal dump in Brooklyn. Budino died in a hit-and-run accident in 1940; coincidentally (heh), the FBI closed the Wall Street Bombing case two weeks later.

I walk down Wall Street to Pearl, walk north on Pearl until I get to Pine Street, and head west. 69 Pine is not even a separate address now; it’s the garage for the Deutsche Bank building on Wall Street. 

Gone are the three gas lamps that fronted the original building (dubbed Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos by Edgar Allan Poe); gone are the four marble steps leading up to the door; gone is the courtyard behind the bar except for this picture, circa 1888:

That courtyard was the site of many a shivaree, as well as two famous duellos. On May 9, 1849, two days after the infamous Astor Place riots, British actor William Charles Macready challenged American actor Edwin Forrest to a duel. As the challenged party, Forrest chose walking sticks as their weapons, and after a congenial dinner the two men and their seconds adjourned to the Pine Courtyard and proceeded to whale away at each other with their hickory sticks until each man was half-dead and covered with bruises. They then returned to the bar and drank till dawn. In 1873, after a performance of Scouts of the Plains at the Astor Theatre, Buffalo Bill Cody, Texas Jack Omohundro, and Wild Bill Hickock got “violently lickered up,” as Omohundro later wrote, and went out into the courtyard to see who was the best shot among the three of them. The challenge was to come as close as possible to hitting each other, a contest that each failed on the twelfth go-round when Cody nicked Hickock’s ear, Hickock winged Cody’s shoulder, and Omohundro shot off the little toe of his left foot.

                      Bar etiquette

I head up to Times Square to catch an 11AM show of Borat (which is very very funny). After Borat, I head down to the Pine for a late lunch. Randi is managing, Sunday is bartending, and F Murray Abraham is sitting at the bar watching the Giants playing Houston. So I sit next to him and we talk football. This is what I love most about New York—treating everybody like a neighbor, no matter how unknown or how famous they are. It's the first rule of New York City etiquette. The only time I've ever seen Sam Shepard in this city was in the Naughty Pine. It was also on a Sunday. I think Mike Wells was behind the bar; I can't remember. I do remember that golf was on the TV, and classical music was playing, so we're talking back in the Bernie Days. So I'm sitting there writing and sipping my Guinness and I happen to glance to my right, and who is sitting two stools down from me but Sam Shepard, writing in a notebook and sipping a beer that is not a Guinness, but I'm not going to hold that against him.  I just motioned (Mike? Bernie?) over and said "His next one's on me," and when it got delivered, the author of True West raised his pint and leaned in towards me and I raised mine and leaned towards him, and we both clinked glasses and said "Cheers" and went back to our writing. And if we hadn't both been writing, I don't think I would have done it; it was about the shared creativity, not the fact that we were sharing the same bar—not the recognition of a fan to a star, but one toiler to another, which was accepted on its own terms from one scribbler to the other.

Which is why I don't buy F Murray Abraham a drink. That would be the act of an admirer to someone above him, and we're just two guys watching the game here, I mean the moment I buy him a drink he becomes an Oscar-winning actor and I become a fan, and he gets that all the time. When does he get to just be a regular? Today, by God, because if somebody's going to ask this guy for an autograph, it ain't gonna be me. So I get steak and rice and drink a couple of stouts, and he drinks Stella, and not a word passes between us about movies, or plays, or the arts. We're just two guys at our local, watching a football game. The only time anything but football enters into the conversation is when I say "Gonna miss this place when it's gone," and Abraham says "It will leave a very large hole."

           Something going wrong around hee-yur

After the game is over and my bar companion exits, I have one for the road, because I do NOT need another late Sunday night. I’m only super-human, after all. But I have decided what I’m going to do about the whole Sunday-fooling-around-with-Dominic thing: I just didn’t expect Randi to be here while I was doing it. Which will make it tricky. But I am six; I’m clever as clever.

So I take my yellow legal pad out of my man bag, as opposed to my notebook, because permanent things go in the notebook and disposable things go on the legal pad; I tear out a sheet; I write Dominic’s name at the top of the page;and then I start to list the names of all the staff members who have worked at the Naughty Pine since I’ve been coming here. The first fifteen names come very quickly; and then I start to make a big deal about not being able to think of something, which is usually a red flag when it comes to Sunday asking me what the problem is. But she doesn’t take the bait, for whatever reason, so I finally say, “Randi? What was the name of that redheaded waitress upstairs, God, the singer, about three years ago, she had a band?”  “You mean the one Dominic slept with?” Randi says acidly and I go “Yup,” and Randi says “Maureen” like Dominic is still sleeping with her, and God knows he could be. “Thanks,” I say, and write Maureen’s name at the end of the list.

“What are you doing?” Sunday asks, and while I’m thinking “Finally!” I say, “I’m making a list of everyone I can remember who ever worked here.” Randi glances at the list as she heads out for a cigarette. “There are two Jennys,” she says. “Right, right,” I say, “I keep forgetting—little Jenny and curly-haired Jenny. And who was the bartender upstairs before Maddie? I can't for the life of me remember her name.” “Joey would know. Ask Joey.” She heads out, calling back, “And don’t forget Julia. And Kadie. And Fingers.” And then she’s gone, and I can get down to business.

I look at the list and start laughing. “What,” says Sunday, “what are you laughing at?” “Well,” I say, “if I take off all but a couple of the guys’ names? This could be a list of everyone that Dominic’s slept with since he started working here.” Sunday glances at the names. “Jynah? Really?” “Oh God yes,” I reply. “Hasn’t she ever talked about it? I mean it’s almost impossible to get her to STOP talking about it. Now who am I missing? Wait—I know.” And I write SUNDAY in capital letters at the end of the list. And Sunday looks at me for a second, and then she laughs and says, “I’m not part of that list,” and for a moment I actually believe her. But only for a moment. I figure I have two minutes to say my peace before Randi comes back in, but as it turns out, it only takes seven lines. 

ME: So what did you think of Matt Mays? Pretty great, huh?

SUNDAY: Pretty great. (So casual I could cry:) I didn't see you there.

ME: Well, you had your eyes on something else. And your hands. And your right knee, from where I was standing.

SUNDAY: I was a little drunk.

ME: Isn't that the excuse your mother uses all the time?

SUNDAY: (all huffy) So is this where you tell me I’m better than that?

ME: I never tell people what they already know.

Which is the biggest lie of the six-year-old century, but I can live with it, as I throw down three twenties and leave.

Alcohol: Guinness (3)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 10

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 8

Saturday, 11/4/06 – 12:05 AM. Randi and I part when we get back to the downstairs bar, her to do her alleged job and me to get waved over to the Tesla Table by the Professor.

                The Tesla Table

In 1937, Nikolai Tesla asked permission to light the Naughty Pine as part of his ongoing experimentation with charged particle beam weapons and what he called the “teleforce.” He was given six booths on the north side of the bar, and in each one he put a slightly different version of what he called an “aetheric aero-electric lighting system,” a bulb with an astrapium-based filament unconnected to any wiring or power source which nevertheless stayed lit 24 hours a day because it got all its power from the aether (which, according to modern physics, doesn’t exist). Of those six, two were stolen by employees of General Electric, which tried (and failed) to find out how they worked. One was broken by Normal Mailer in a bar fight. One simply stopped working (no one knows why) on January 7, 1943. And one was short-circuited when Billie Holiday licked her thumb with her tongue, touched the bulb, and made a hissing noise. The bulb winked out, never to shine again. The sole remaining bulb, which has been shining non-stop for almost 70 years, has become perceptibly brighter since the mid-90’s, which supports a theory that says the increase in ambient electrical energy since the 1980’s, due to computers and cellphones, has increased the capacity of the bulb, which is drawing its power from the available electrical energy in the aether. Which doesn’t exist. Or does it?

I get a Guinness from John B behind the bar, and sidle into the Tesla Table with Esma and Rob from the Strip House, and the Professor and a cute blonde with short hair. But not before I lick my thumb, press it up against the bulb, and make a hissing sound, which is a ritual among the staff and regulars. I’m sitting next to Esma; as usual, the scent of whatever shampoo she uses when she washes her hair permeates the air—it’s lush and flowery and makes me want to lean my head on her shoulder for the next two hours, if not ask her, “So do you really wash your hair right after your shift ends, or does it always smell like this?” The Professor points out that he hasn’t seen me in the upstairs bar for a while; I explain that I’ve been either writing or napping instead of coming in right after work, “So by the time I get in, I’ve missed your class,” which gets a nice round of laughter from everyone, including the blonde. Rob talks about the bands he’s performing with, and how juggling their schedule plus his work schedule is a complete and total bitch and a half. 

In the course of the next two hours, I have two more stouts. I have taken to throwing down twenties to everyone no matter what they charge me, and leaving them on the bar. Tonight is no different. I also buy a round for the table, because my corporate day job salary has to be good for something. Rob talks about the reaction to Dominic’s coke-fueled escapades last night.

ROB: Man, was Steve angry.  You should have seen him. Bitching Dom out to everyone. “If he can’t do his books, he doesn’t deserve to be here.”  It’s a wonder Dominic still has a job.

ME: They won’t fire him. They’ll keep him here until the place goes under. Because it’s the Titanic now.

I give them a brief synopsis of Randi’s Titanic Versus Poseidon theory. And then the Professor talks about how his grandmother was one of the survivors, which is just barely possible chronologically, and while the blonde looks over at him with adoring eyes, Rob and Esma and I try to figure out where we’re going to be drinking in a month. “Reservoir?” “Not unless the clientele changes. They’re all so young and stupid there.” “The whole city’s turning into young and stupid.” “Yeah, why is that?” “Because they’re the ones with the money.” “Fuck.” “You said it.” And that’s the note on which I leave. Where are we going to be drinking in 2007? And “Not here” isn’t an acceptable answer.

               Mene, Mene, Freddie Upharsin

I sleep in, as I usually do on a Saturday, getting up at 8 AM and heading over to Ozzie’s on 4^th Avenue for coffee, a blueberry muffin, and some writing. I deliberate seeing the Borat movie at 11, but I end up writing till 11:30, at which point I head into town and browse Tower Records at 66^th Street before my lunch date with Evolution Girl. The Music section is still pretty full, but the DVD’s have been totally denuded of everything except season sets of Golden Girls. I make a mental note to come in about once a week and check out the discounts on imports; Tower has the best import section in the city, and it is the latest in a long line of things I will be missing come New Year’s.

I walk up to Jackson Hole. Freddie is already there—dressed in expensive casual, as opposed to my cheap casual—and because of that, I can tell right off that this is not going to go anywhere. Randoms you meet at bars are almost never the same when you see them in the sunlight. They’re paler, quieter, and (yes) duller versions of the people who attracted you with a mixed drink in front of them. They’re hesitant; they’re not as fluid. They may have accepted you by bar light, but when they measure you by sunlight standards, you’re the one who looks smaller than the sum of your parts.

I can tell right from the moment we trade career information that Freddie has weighed me in the balance of her day-job life and found me wanting. She works for a law firm; the older guy she was with at the Pine the other night is her mentor. “There’s nothing transactional in it,” she says of their relationship. When I tell her I work at Morgan Stanley, her eyes gleam; when I say that it’s in the Multimedia department, and that I write plays, her eyes go dull like a pair of old blue marbles, and while she asks me a few polite questions about my writing, they are all politeness and no interest. It’s not a bad date—the burgers were great—but I know, when we part with a mutually-distant air kiss, that we will never see each other again, and neither one of us will regret it.

                    Putting the phony in euphony

After going back to Brooklyn, typing up the last couple of night’s Naughty Pine notes, and eating an early dinner, I head back into the city for an 8 PM CMJ show at Irving Plaza. Matt Mays and El Torpedo, a Canadian group on my friend Abe’s record label, are opening the evening. When I get there at 7:40, Abe is there with Nicole  and the lovely Lisa, who works at Sanctuary. Lisa is cute as hell, has a mane of curly brown hair, and a sharp sense of humor. We watch Matt Mays from the front of the stage, where one of the guards tells me I can’t take flash pictures (sheesh) so I take a bunch of low light 400 shots, some of which are pretty cool. But not as cool, if you know what I mean. Bruce the photographer is also there, roaming the aisle between the audience and the stage. After the show, Lisa mans the souvenir booth until the bass player can relieve her.

At 10:15 I’m saying goodbye to Lisa outside Irving Plaza. Do I ask her to come out with a drink with me? No, because I know there’s nothing there, not even a neurotic attraction that will go nowhere. At 10:30 I’m upstairs at the Pine. The bar is full, but the far corner is empty, so I stand there for a few minutes until I can steal a seat from the table full of Hoboken frat boys behind me. Almost the first words out of Kenny’s mouth when I get there are the words: “Why don’t you go back to JERSEY?” Kenny is not having a fun time. If they’re from Jersey, he’s probably been making lemon drop shots and Long Island iced teas all night.

Kenny tells me I just missed Marita. Evidently she came in without her bank card, and got incredibly apologetic the way only Maria can get incredibly apologetic.

MARITA: Oh Kenny I am so sorry. [Ten seconds later:] Kenny, I am SO sorry about the bank card. [Fifteen seconds later:] Please don’t hate me about the bank card.

KENNY: Marita: You live a block away. You’re engaged to one of our managers. You’re good for it, okay?

Kenny then fills me in on the latest news of the proposed closing party, which is going to be held on Sunday the 26^th. Richie is running it, and rumor has it that it’ll be from 3 to 10 PM, for regulars and staff. It’ll be a drink the kegs dry party, with food. God alone knows how many bottles will be left, especially if the place never re-orders anything.

I spend most of the night working on The Play, which attracts the attention of a young’n named Kacie, who asks to read what I’m working on so diligently. I show her a page of notes and she adds a comment and signs it. I tell her if I use her note, I’ll credit her when and if the play ever gets done. It’s a good note, too—the kind of “keep it honest by remembering to give the opposing point of view” note that I usually only give myself during a second or third draft.

I end up downstairs at 1 AM with Esma and Rob again. At the Tesla Table. It’s like we never really went home. Rob mentions how Saturday night’s vibe has totally changed now that Sarah is manager instead of Richie. And he’s right—the downstairs bar is a lot less tense. There’s a timeless quality to the fun—and not just because the massive clock on the east wall broke last week when somebody tried to change it to Standard Time, and they took it down. There is a big bare circular patch on the wall about the windows tonight, so now this decades-old reflex I have, of glancing over my shoulder to check the time, is totally frustrating. It’s an obvious metaphor for the whole closing thing: for the next three weeks, time has stopped in this bar; and after that, Time will have stopped the bar itself.

Alcohol: Guinness (3—11/3 after midnight), Sam Adams Octoberfest (1—Jackson Hole), Heineken (2—Irving Plaza), Guinness (5—11/4)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 9

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 7

             A chip the size of the Ritz

Friday, 11/3/06. I get to bed around 2:30 in the morning, and three hours later I’m up, showered, and waiting for the train into work. I’ve got that cactus-spine-in-my-head feeling I always get when I have too much whiskey, but otherwise (thanks to water and Advil) I’m fully day-job-functional, which today (Thank God) entails little more than concentration, basic motor skills, and endless patience with corporate a-holes. I get out of work at 4, I throw myself onto my bed when I get home at 4:30, and sleep for the next three hours. There are only four more Fridays left, counting this one; but I intend to spend this one eating take-out Chinese and watching Randolph Scott westerns. Because there’s nothing that says “Recovering from too much alcohol” more than watching middle-aged cowboys hook up with actresses with big hair and torpedo bras.

I’m in the middle of Ride Lonesome when I get two texts from Randi:

RANDI: Help!

RANDI: My bar is full of assholes!

Since Dominic is supposed to be working tonight, I can only conclude that all tequila hell has broken loose, so I text Randi back that I’m on my way, bid Ben Brigade goodbye, shrug off my sweats, put on some dark clothes that won’t show spill marks, grab a book for the train ride (The Face In The Frost by John Bellairs), and head for the train. Because I’m a regular, and this is what regulars do.

                Nice euphony, if we’re being polite

So who’s Randi, really? In the immortal words of Glynnis: “When you take Randi out on a date, you have to make a reservation for three-one for her, one for you, and one for the chip on her shoulder.” (Glynnis is never wrong about people.) But Randi didn’t always have that chip. Five years ago she came to New York for a week-long visit with her current boyfriend and three other couples. By the end of the week, she and the boyfriend were on the outs (because you never really know someone until you travel with them), and on their last night in the city, the eight of them wound up at the upstairs Naughty Pine, where Randi sat at the bar and the other seven (including her boyfriend) sat at Table 201. Who was behind the bar? Dominic. The first words they spoke to each other:

DOMINIC: So who are you, who were you, and who do you hope to be?

RANDI: (extending a hand) Miranda Beth Landis.

DOMINIC: Nice assonance.

At 1 AM, Randi and her friends left for their hotel, to pack up and take a dawn flight home. At 2 AM, while Dominic was closing up, Randi returned with her suitcase. Dominic didn’t bat an eye.

DOMINIC: What’ll it be?

RANDI: A change. I need a change.

DOMINIC: Coming right up.

They’ve been together ever since, bouncing off each other like a couple of charged particles in the Large Hadron Collider. And Randi went from waitress to bartender to manager, at which point that chip on her shoulder became so large you could see it from space, like the Great Wall of China.

When I walk into the Pine, it is indeed a shitshow downstairs, with Dominic nowhere to be seen and Steve and Jon facing off against a three-deep bar of drinkers like a couple of expendable extras guarding the gates of Rome against Hannibal’s inebriated elephants. I don’t see Randi, so I head upstairs to check in with Dave, who has his own packed bar to deal with and a freshly poured pint of Guinness waiting for me when I walk through the door. Evidently Randi told him she’d texted me, and when he asked her exactly what time she’d done it, he factored in the time it took me to get out of my apartment, and the time it took the R train to show up and get me to 14th Street, and started building the Guinness about three minutes before I walked in the door. Because he is a bartender, and this is what bartenders do. He tells me Randi is up on the roof, having a cigarette. So that’s where I head.

            That sinking feeling

If it’s an alcoholic shitshow downstairs, it’s an emotional shitshow on the roof. Randi and Dominic are Off Again thanks to last night, when the two of them had a fight after Dominic crawled into bed with Randi while he was coked to the eyeballs. Then he called out because Randi would have been managing him tonight. Can you say three-year-old?  “Why do I keep doing this to myself?” Randi says, and I attempt to give her some good advice. As always, the reason I know it’s good advice is because, if someone gave the same advice to me, I wouldn’t take it.

ME: Repeat after me.

RANDI: Repeat after me.

ME: Men who don't want you are a waste of time.

RANDI: Men who don't want me are a challenge.

ME: Chasing a loser makes you a loser.

RANDI: Chasing a loser is better than being alone.

ME: Beating your head against the wall gives you a concussion.

RANDI: Beating my head against the wall is foreplay.

ME: (throwing his hands in the air) I give up.

RANDI: Quitter.

She offers me a cigarette. I haven’t had one since April 9, 2002, and I’m not about to start now. “You’ve changed, then,” Randi says. “That’s unique, Wells. We never change. We never learn. None of us. We're all programming. We just repeat the old mistakes and achieve the same old victories and we think we're dumb or we think we're smart and it has nothing to do with intelligence. It's just the way our brains are wired. It's just what we can't stop doing.” “That's pretty depressing, Randi,” I say, and she shrugs. “Nah, it's just how I'm programmed to see the world.” “And how do you see it tonight?” “Tonight?” she says. “Well, tonight, I’m trying to figure out if I’m on the Titanic or the Poseidon.”

This leads to a very interesting analogy about the Naughty Pine. Is it the Poseidon, where the passengers (the staff and the regulars) are going to help each other survive once the disaster hits? Or is it the Titanic, where nobody thinks the ship will sink until it does, and everyone who’s not in a lifeboat freezes to death in the icy Arctic waters of a Naughty-Pine-less world? “But the good thing about it being the Titanic,” Randi says, “is that it’s the absolute end of something. It’s like the reverse of You Can’t Fire Me—I Quit—it’s I Don’t Have To Lift A Finger—This Disaster Will Do It For Me.” “Which means,” I point out, “that you don’t have to change.” “Of course I'll change,” Randi says, “the bar will be gone in a month.” “That’s not changing,” I say, “that’s dealing. If you’re waiting for your job to end before you actually break up with Dominic,” I begin, but that’s as far as I get, because on the word “Dominic,” Randi takes the chip off her shoulder and swats me in the jaw with it. “That is NOT what I said,” she declares in an Exorcist voice that’s all gruff and demonic. I give her a look and calmly repeat and continue my thought. “If you’re waiting for your job to end before you actually break up with Dominic, because you think that it will be easier for you to do it once you no longer work with each other, it’s like The Professor saying he’s going to go on the wagon once the Naughty Pine closes. When we all know,” I say, hand raised as she starts to interrupt, “when we all know that it’s not the place that sells the liquor that’s the problem, but the thirst. Which will find another bar where it can be quenched—just like you will find another Dominic. Unless you give it up like I gave up smoking,” I want to add, but once again, on the word “Dominic,” Randi gets all huffy. “So I’m an alcoholic now?” she asks, and I nod my head. “When it comes to Dominic? Yeah. He’s your scotch. You think the rest are poison, but he’ll kill you just as surely as they do. Only he’ll do it slowly, and he’ll make you think it’s your fault. And it will feel like a pleasure.”

She starts to say something, and I can tell it’s going to be some excuse that gets her off the hook, so I jump in before she can speak. “He’s the Titanic,” I say. “Not the Pine. Him. And he’ll take you down with him. Unless you jump overboard. Grab a lifeboat, and jump overboard. He’s the Poseidon. Everything is upside down. Nothing makes sense. But you have to get to the bottom of it, which is the only way out. Because if you stay, you die.”  I can tell I’m reaching her, and I almost—almost—say “And besides, the son of a bitch is fooling around with Sunday.” But I don’t. Instead I say something that sounds kind of brilliant, and immediately write it down afterwards.

ME: The only people who go down with the ship, are the ones who need the ship to live.

Alcohol: Guinness (1)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells



Day 8

Life In 14 Lines - 14

My scars have roots in other people’s gardens.

They wind like clinging vines through space and time,

Invuln’rable to weedings or to pardons—

Each one the record of a loss or crime.

This one is where my trusting heart was broken.

This one is where I lost my innocence.

This one from words I never should have spoken.

This is the one that still—still—makes no sense.

And though the skin is dead, it’s still connected

To something in me that pain understands—

I shy away from what got me rejected;

I never reach for what once cut my hands—

Yet still I search for love that, like a seed,

Can grow through all those scars and make me bleed.

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 6

                                “86 Dominic!”

Thursday, 11/2/06. After work I hit a showing of Infamous at the Village East. The main difference between the two In Cold Blood films is that Capote is the Masterpiece Theatre version, while Infamous is the Vanity Fair version. Capote: serious to the point of somber, a lot of muted colors, essentially straight. Infamous: light, bright, and essentially gay. It bounces back and forth between Kansas and Capote's female society circle, all of whom are wonderfully portrayed, and provides a view into a facet of Capote's character that the first movie didn't, or did only briefly: the shallowness of his passionate desire to be the court fool of High Society. How much of an actor he was. The opening scene is the entire film in miniature: Gwyneth Paltrow as Peggy Lee Kitty Dean in a Stork-like night club singing Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and literally breaking down in the middle of it. The music stops, she can barely get through the words, it's obvious she's reliving some traumatic break-up through the song, everyone watching her in the scene is riveted because she looks like she's going to break down in front of their eyes, everyone in the theatre is riveted for exactly the same reason—and then she snaps her fingers twice, the band comes in, and you realize that it was all part of the sell, all part of the way she was delivering the song. That's what this Capote film is about: performing, acting, selling a song (and dance), and the price you pay for doing it. Overall? I liked this version more than the first. The back and forth between New York and Kansas, the Oscar Wilde lightness of the comedy, make the serious moments stand out even more. Plus Daniel Craig makes such a great Perry Smith that you want someone to greenlight a movie about Neal Cassady with Craig in the title role. Plus plus, just as in Capote,the moral center of the film is Harper Lee, and Sandra Bullock is really really good in the part. Even though I couldn't help looking at her and thinking, "God, girl, when did you get all that work on your face?"

So I sit down at the upstairs bar, secure in the knowledge that the movie I’ve just seen is the entertainment of the evening. Silly me. Dominic is the entertainment of the evening. Thursday is his Friday, and this Thursday is his Friday the 13th.

The festivities start out innocently enough, but then they always do. Inga, one of Dominic’s bar girls, is with a group of corporate clubsterettes to my immediate right. Dominic is paying total attention to her at the expense of everyone else at the bar, especially the men. (In the immortal observation of Kate the waitress: “You always get perfect service from Dominic, unless there’s a vagina at the bar.”) In the space of fifteen minutes, he’s moved the corner people at the west end of the bar over to the east end, where I’m sitting, so that Inga and her shrieking flock of lovelies can spill over into the lounge. At which point, Dominic buys Inga and her girls a tequila shot, pours me one, and has one himself.

The time is 8:04. This is not a good sign. According to Matthew’s Eighth Law of the Naughty Pine, the earlier Dominic starts pouring shots for pretty girls, the uglier it gets. And tonight is no exception—tonight is uglier than the rosy butt of a chacma baboon.  Kate the waitress has already proclaimed the theme for the next three weeks: “No bottle left behind.” Dominic, being the public-spirited sort he is, is pitching in by personally taking care of all those pesky bottles of Patron. And the fact that he’s spreading it around is not making it any easier for me to (a) stop picturing him groping Sunday, a vision that I’m going to need as ton of mental floss to erase from my mind; and (b) hold myself back from calling him on it. Each additional drink is like somebody pushing me closer and closer to the edge of that cliff where my restraint will say “Fuck it!” and my tongue will say “You stupid fucking asshole!”  

Plus—as if careening towards disaster wasn’t enough of an incentive to throw moral caution to the wind—Tripod is suddenly standing at the service bar. I glance at Mauri as she shoulders past Tripod to give Dominic a table drink order, and the look on her face is pure “If there’s a God, will he just please strike this guy down with a lightning bolt already?” But there is no God; there is only Tripod, giving Mauri a leering hug that she only permits because she doesn’t want to get sued for clocking a customer.

Who is Tripod? He’s a guy named Arnold who went up to Maddie one night and said: “You want to come out to my Dad’s place in the Hamptons for the weekend? You’ll love it; my dick is as long as my leg.” And Maddie, who does a level of deadpan that stand-up comics envy, stood there with her one hand on her hip, looked the man full in the face, and said: “I don’t date tripods.” He has been Tripod ever since. And he is also Dominic’s cocaine connection.

When they go outside to “have a cigarette,” Sarah swings behind the bar, and suddenly there is good service again. “Want me to close you out before the fit hits the shan?” she asks, but I say no, I’ll stick around, and she sighs. “Can this night get any worse?” she asks, and the devil in me says: “It sure can—do you know that Dominic is fooling around with Sunday while he’s seeing Randi?” But what I say is, “Well, if you want something good to come out of the evening, call Randi in. Bet she takes one look at Dominic and breaks it off again.” “You don’t know the half of it,” Sarah says, and fills me in on the reason why the two of them got back together after the last time they broke up. It’s a doozy: Dominic started going to AA meetings. Swore he was cleaning up his act. Didn’t touch a drop, snort a flake, or inhale a leaf. Until Randi came back to him, after which every shift he worked became St. Patrick’s Day. “And the only reason he cleaned himself out like that was because Randi turned her back on him,” Sarah concludes, which makes perfect sense, because that kind of behavior is hard-wired into the Y chromosome. “It is a truth universally acknowledged by single females everywhere,” I begin—

ME:  It is a truth universally acknowledged by single females everywhere that, when a man is immediately and deeply interested in a woman, the moment she returns his advances in kind, he will run like hell in the opposite direction; and the moment she turns her back on him and walks away, he will wrap himself around her like a quilt of squids.

I immediately write it down while Sarah laughs and says “Where’s that from?” and I reply, “My new play that I just thought of,” I say, scribbling away. “Pride and Prejudice and Assholes.”

While Dominic is gone, Maddie comes up for a shift drink and talks about how traumatic it was to hit a deer while she was driving up to see her mom last weekend. She looks around.

MADDIE: No Ketel Mike?

ME: NOW you’ve done it!

Because she’s right—Ketel Mike has not been here at all tonight; but I’m just as right, because mentioning Ketel Mike’s name is usually his cue to appear at the door, like Lenny and Squiggy. I quickly throw salt over my shoulder, spit in the floor, stamp on it, and turn widdershins three times while humming Tchaikovsky’s Sabre Dance, which is also what you do so you won’t be cursed because you mentioned The Scottish Play, and Ketel Mike never appears.

Five minutes later, Dominic comes back upstairs (alone, thankfully) and disappears into the bathroom for (Sarah counts the seconds) two full minutes. He emerges with eyes like headlights and enough manic energy to fuel a Tokyo bullet train. But he’s not totally over the edge, at least not yet—he has the presence of mind to wait until Sarah goes downstairs before pouring another round of shots for everyone. But that’s the last sensible thing he does all night. He ignores table drink orders while he flirts with Inga. He calls out “Sorry—we have a no-suit dress code!” when a party of thirty-five suited men pour into the bar from downstairs. He disappears into the men’s room once every fifteen minutes, and comes out feeling like he’s God and looking as pale, translucent, and close to death as David Bowie did in his Thin White Duke days.

Meanwhile, my radar for pretty young women with father fixations is pinging like crazy when I notice  a really cute brunette with a considerably older man at the corner of the bar. They came upstairs with drinks already, which is usually the kiss of death as far as Dominic is concerned—I mean this is a man who has no compunction about yelling insults at the top of his lungs whenever investment banktards come up with their brimming pints and (ignoring the “Please Wait To Be Seated” sign) proceed to seat themselves wherever they please because they think they run the world. But as I said, the brunette is really cute, so Dominic cuts her a ton of slack because, like all men, he is subject to my friend Buddy’s First Law Of Male Behavior: “Penis trumps brain.”

And I’m right there with him, because she is actually talking about evolution at my bar. How cool is that? She’s aiming her comments at an Office Worker couple to my left, as well as a blonde in the far corner who talks about her students, so I’m assuming she’s a teacher. Evolution Girl is making the case that we’ve evolved past the point where Nature’s influence on our species is relevant. But she can’t complete a thought because Office Guy is interrupting her with snarky comments designed to prove that he’s smarter than she is. The older guy with her says nothing; he just sits there sipping his drink with a bored, entitled look that says: “Go ahead—fight over her—but she’s coming home with me.” The banter between Office Guy and Evolution Girl starts getting a little testy—I can see that she’s one more wiseass comment away from kicking him in the balls, if she can actually find them—so I pick a brief moment of silence and announce to the rest of the bar: “Human beings are, of course, the only species in history which can carry its own environment with it wherever it goes.” She points at me triumphantly. We make eye contact. (Hers are green.)

EVOLUTION GIRL: Yes! And because of that we’re a total menace –-

OFFICE GUY: A menace to each other mostly.

EVOLUTION GIRL: A total menace to the natural environment, because our artificial environment --

OFFICE GUY: And the natural environment is sure getting its revenge, right? How warm was it today?

OFFICE GIRL: In the high sixties.

OFFICE GUY: I remember the high sixties. Or was I just high in the Sixties?

ME: (to Evolution Girl) Go ahead -- I’m listening. Because our artificial environment?

EVOLUTION GIRL: Is lawless. We’re transcended the boundaries which constricted our ancestors. Thanks to our brains, we’ve short-circuited evolution.

ME: (God you’re cute) Uh-huh.

EVOLUTION GIRL: We’ve evolved into creatures who can’t survive in the wild, so when civilization falls apart? Because civilization always falls apart? We’re doomed.

ME: (Just tell me you think I’m cute, okay?) Exactly.

DOMINIC: My question is, have we evolved past tequila?

OFFICE GUY: Hell no.

DOMINIC: (arms wide) Shots for everyone!

Less than two minutes later Evolution Girl and her older guy friend are out the door. She swats me with a magazine as she passes my stool.

EVOLUTION GIRL: You understood what I was talking about, right?

ME: I totally understood it. And I’d like to hear more of it. Can we meet in an artificial environment sometime in the next week?

I hold out my notebook and pen; she writes her phone number and e-mail address, and then her name, Freddie Lang. “For Frédérique,” she says. And then she and the older guy—who has still not said a single word out loud—head for the stairs, her chattering away, him nodding and making sure that everyone sees him put his arm around her shoulder before they drop out of sight.

The rest of the evening is a whiskey and tequila blur. By 1 AM, I’m feeling like a whitewall that needs to be re-treaded. I’ve had at least five shots, we’ve been invaded by not only Bowl-Morlocks but a party of 25 snooty suits with their 25 stuck-up girlfriends, and Dominic is a sloshy, manic-depressive mess. He’s been chasing the dragon since midnight, and it shows. One minute he’s up, the next minute he’s down. He’s happy, he’s sad, and he’s talking faster than Glenn Close in The Big Chill. By the time Sarah comes up to help him do the books, he’s a frigging mess. “Sarah, I woke up crying, I’ll never get a job like this again, they’re closing my bar!” As he always does when he gets like this, Dominic veers between sentimentality and anger, and the anger is directed at me. “You think you’re so fucking smart.” “I swore I’d never let a regular into my life, and look at me. I used to be a great bartender and look at me.” The implication is, it’s all your fault, Hollow Leg Wells. About two months ago on a night only slightly less mortifying than this one, he lit into me for asking if he needed help doing the books—he tore me a new asshole in front of Bill Kennedy, and then twenty minutes later, he had me check the glu, because every time he added two and two together, he got blue.  Just imagine the five worst moments you’ve ever had of alcohol- or cocaine-fueled bitterness and sentimentality, and then imagine those moments happening over and over again one right after the other for two solid hours, raging and weeping, raging and weeping, raging and weeping like a skip in a record you can’t stop playing, and you’ll get an idea of what the last two hours of Dominic’s shift looked like. Just an idea, mind you.

“Get out. Get out now,” Sarah says, when Dominic dribbles off to the Men’s Room. I feel bad about it, but I bolt. And I barely remember getting into a cab. My only clear recollection is waking up with my head out the window like an Irish Setter as the cab turns sharply onto Union Street about twenty minutes later. 86 Matthew.

Alcohol: Guinness (5) Patron shots (4) Jameson shots (3)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 7

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 5

Brett and British Mike

                                             NBA

              (Neurotic Bar Attraction)

Wednesday, 11/1/06. Emma Lee is fending off the genteel but persistent advances of British Mike when I get to the upstairs bar around 7. When he heads to the men’s room, she turns to me and says “I just don’t like him that way,” which is pretty funny, considering what happens ninety minutes later. Brett is at the bar, along with Lara Jane, an actress who was in a revue at the 13^th Street Theatre last month; after every show, the cast and crew took over the lounge and corral, and they fell in love with the place, as almost everyone does. She’s pretty, so of course Dave flirted with her; and here she is flirting back, getting a sushi date for Saturday out of Dave before she leaves.

British Mike hangs around for one more drink, Emma Lee sandwiched between the two of us and chattering away like tongue between two old pieces of white bread. We talk about Margaret Sanger, with whom I am becoming obsessed. “She lived to see the birth control pill,” Emma Lee says. “She underwrote the research that created it,” British Mike points out, “by raising $150,000 for it in the Fifties.” “And it went public when again?” Emma Lee asks, and British Mike and I say in unison: “1960.” Gotta love a foreigner who knows US history. We start talking about all the advances Sanger lived to see. British Mike points out that she died three years before we landed on the moon, and I talk about my favorite example of someone’s lifetime embracing what feels like ancient history and modern times: Elizabeth Bacon Custer, who was born when John Tyler was President (1842), and died three months after Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany (1933). I don’t know about you, but my definition of “boggles the mind” is realizing that a woman who shook hands with Abraham Lincoln lived to hear Hitler rant on the radio. “To Libby Custer,” says Emma Lee, and we all clink glasses.

When British Mike leaves, Emma touches my shoulder and says: “I’m sorry you couldn’t make it to my party.” “Me too,” I reply, because the only other thing I can say is, “Well, I could have made it, but I decided to come here and drink instead.” She tells me that, after shooing the stragglers at her place out into a local bar around 2:30, she got a call from an alcoholic close friend who needed someone to talk him out of having a drink, so she jumped into a cab and ended up sponsoring him through the rest of the night, crashing on his couch at dawn and sleeping till like 2 PM. I tell her about Stacy’s wedding, giving her the abbreviated version of The Stacy Story, and Emma Lee cuts to the chase. “So was it unrequited love or failed love?” “I don’t know,” I reply, “I’m still trying to figure out which one is the better story.” “Failed love,” Emma Lee says without a moment’s hesitation. “Failed love is always a better story because it’s active. Unrequited love is static. It doesn’t go anywhere. You don’t risk anything. It’s passive. People who always feel unrequited love would rather say ‘Why me?’ instead of ‘Why not?’ Did you and Stacy ever date?” “Never.” “Not once?” “Not once.” “Then both stories suck,” she says, and we laugh; and Emma Lee heads for the finish line.

EMMA LEE: So who are you dating these days?

ME: (uh oh . . .) I haven’t dated anybody since 2002.

EMMA LEE: You’re lying.

ME: No I’m not. Diane. She had a nervous breakdown. (True story.)

EMMA LEE: And nobody since then? I find that hard to believe.

ME: Nobody. Outside of the odd NWA.

EMMA LEE: NWA?

ME: Neurotic Work Attachment. Other than that? Nobody. Wait—no—I’m forgetting Heather. She’s divorced, she has a pre-teen son, and because of our schedules we could never get together more than once every two weeks, so we never got past first base.

EMMA LEE: What is first base these days?

ME: First date; sorry.

EMMA LEE: Kissing? Tongue kissing?

ME: And it wasn’t our schedules. It was her schedule.

EMMA LEE: And what’s second base? (Getting shirty:) A hand up her shirt?

ME: All I know is, it was like constantly having to reboot a computer.

EMMA LEE: That’s too bad. (Beat.) You know, Matt, . . .

ME: (uh-oh . . .)

And this is where God starts chuckling. Barely 90 minutes after deflecting the double-barreled charm assault of British Mike, Emma Lee brings her own set of guns to bear on me. She talks about how we haven’t seen each other in a while, “and I don’t know whether it’s your schedule or my schedule or both,” but when she gets my Friday pictures she thinks to herself, “Oh yeah—Matt.” (And I’m thinking, oh dear, I wish there was some way of keeping this on a friendship footing because I just don’t feel that way about her.) She talks about how she doesn’t meet that many people, especially in bars, who qualify as people she likes, never mind friends, but that I am one of them. (Her use of the word “friends” makes me wonder if I’m over-reacting here, but I don’t think so.) And she talks about us keeping in touch once the Pine has closed, and getting together every now and then, and the part of me that’s expecting her to say “Because I really like you” is totally disappointed. She doesn’t say that; she doesn’t give a reason at all. She just throws it out on the bar, and I pick it up and reply “Of course we will.” Because what else can I say?

There’s a cowardly part of me which is totally overjoyed that I have somewhere to be at 10 PM, which means I have to leave around 9. I say my goodbyes to Dave and Dan the waiter and Melissa the waitress, and then wait for Emma Lee to come out of the Ladies, because she’ll be really upset if I leave without saying goodbye. It’s a good five-minute-long wait, with me just standing there and, ever the doubter, thinking to myself, “Am I reading her wrong? Is this not what I think it is on her part? And if it is what I think it is, what kind of signal am I sending by waiting to say goodnight to her like this?” Finally she comes out of the Women’s Room and smiles. “Waiting for me?” she says, as if she doesn’t deserve the attention, but I can tell she’s loving it. (So that answers one question, right?) Which leaves all the other questions to bounce around in my head as I head up to Broadway and then down to Great Jones, where Matt Mays and El Torpedo are playing a 10 PM show at Ace of Clubs.

By the time the show starts, my brain has absquatulated, so I don’t really think much about it when I glance around at the crowd and see somebody who looks like Dominic off to my right. Dominic’s got That Look which you see everywhere in this city—olive skin, dark wavy hair, two-day growth of beard, eyes like gray marbles, and a closet full of black clothes—so it’s probably my inner facial recognition software that matches up this guy, whoever he is, with someone I know. Happens all the time. Two songs later I glance back in his direction, and he’s necking with a young lovely in skimpy jean shorts and a striped man’s shirt that’s tied up above her waist, totally exposing the palomino tattoo racing across her midriff. My stomach does an Olympic-medal-winning backflip and I hear Sunday saying “He puts the ick in Dominic” as I watch him grope her ass and stick his tongue down her throat. Hi ho Trigger.

Alcohol: Guinness (2)

Ace of Clubs: Sam Adams Octoberfest (2)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 6