Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 15

             What’s truly important

Saturday 11/11/06. In my dream (as it often happens with me) Wonder Woman is two people at one and the same time, both of them Carters—Lynda and Christina. (This makes my version of Diana the perfect Amazon princess.) She’s holding a press conference about an affair she’s supposedly having with Superman, and as she’s fielding question after question, Steve Trevor (that’s me!) is standing at attention in full dress uniform behind her and to her left (audience right) in the universally recognized position of Supportive Mate. I keep my face an expressionless blank, and the more questions Diana gets asked, the more everyone looks my way to see how I feel about all this Superman stuff. And the questions start coming my way, which pisses Diana off. “Do you feel inadequate?” “Of course I do—he’s Superman,” I say, “but I think I still measure up.” And there’s just enough of a smirk on my face that a female reporter asks, “Is there anything you’d like to say to Superman about this?” And I look at Wonder Woman and I think, screw it, and I say, “Sure. I’d like to say this. I’d like to say, sorry, Supes—Diana likes to save her men, which is why she always comes home to me.” And I grin just as a newscaster interrupts the press conference to give the time and weather, which is my radio alarm going off, and I wake up and hit the snooze twice before I finally rise, feeling a little weary, but congestion free.

Work is mind-numbing but bearable. When I get to the Pine, I notice what looks like spilled red paint on the floor near the downstairs bar, but I think nothing of it. Two minutes after I settle onto an upstairs bar stool, Sarah comes up from downstairs to give Kenny a cigarette break. According to her, Richie is totally losing his shit about the closing. John B had put in to be out Thanksgiving weekend ages ago—he and Marita will be in Pennsylvania—so now there are day shifts that need to be picked up, because John won’t be back till Sunday. When Sarah reminds Richie of this, Richie’s response is: “But I have to plan the party on Sunday!” He then goes bazoo, and Sarah stands there visualizing her trip to Provincetown with her new boyfriend while Richie imitates Mount Saint Helens for the next 20 minutes. Until finally she says:

SARAH: You know what? This conversation is totally unimportant.

RICHIE: Excuse me?

SARAH: I’m sorry; I have work to do now.

As she tells me the story, Marita flits up, all energy, even though she was drinking last night till about 4 this morning.

SARAH: I don’t know how she does it.

ME: I don’t either

SARAH: And let us take a moment to ponder the miracle that is John and Marita.

ME: Let us  observe a moment of silence as we change the keg of worship.

(Five seconds later:)

SARAH: That’s long enough. Bottoms up!

Sarah then fills me in on everything I missed last night, with a special focus on the Dominic drayma. She says that the night she did the books for him, “he was such a mess. I should have left when you did. He kept TALKING to me while I was adding up his numbers. Do you know how hard it is to concentrate on addition when you’ve got as cokehead who can’t stop talking?” I tell her I think there’s a chapter in Euclid about that, and she squirts me with the Stella tap.

When Kenny comes back up, he’s obviously been checking the tires, and with good stuff too. Sarah tells him that Joey isn’t working the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Kenny’s mind, which is already blown, is now boggled. “That’s a $300 night!” Kenny cries. “Look—I’ll work it upstairs if Dave is working downstairs.” Sarah shakes her head. “Dave will want upstairs; work downstairs with me.” “Deal,” Kenny says. “Seal it with a scotch,” says Sarah, and Kenny pours us all a Talisker.

                Kenny on the virtues of Talisker

KENNY: Scotch tastes like peat moss.  I wonder why?  Oh yeah—because it’s made from PEAT MOSS.

                   It’s who I am, it’s what I do

It’s a night full of writing. I start plotting out Nobody Dies In Disneyland. I’m setting it in the 50’s, around the time of Khrushchev’s proposed visit. In this version, he really did visit there, and dead bodies start popping up. Or maybe just one. A woman. And they get her out of the Park and into the Hotel by doing one of their themed parades. Yes! They do a Snow White parade, where they dress up the dead body as Snow White, put her in a glass case, and walk her out of the park with seven guys dressed up as dwarves like it’s part of the daily entertainment. (What do they do if it’s a man? Hmm. Maybe dress him up as an Abraham Lincoln audio-animatronic robot, and carry him out for repairs?) Anyway—the parade gets hijacked along the way because once this women gets out, the story’s over, so maybe she’s not dead, maybe she’s paralyzed, or unconscious, or has an extreme medical condition. Which means she’s actually being kidnapped, because she knows something or has something. Evidence of the plot against Khrushchev? Evidence of a plot to kill Nixon? Evidence of one that turns into evidence of the other? (Yes, that.) So our hero rescues her, and they spend the rest of the novel fighting their way out of the park—specifically fighting people dressed up as Donald and Mickey and Goofy. Oh hell—let’s have a huge donnybrook where cartoon characters are kicking the shit out of each other, Disney princesses are carrying silenced revolvers, and all cartoon hell breaks loose. I’d read that. Especially if it was written in this hard-boiled Mickey Spillane style. Juxtaposing that with Mickey Mouse? “Hey, Pluto!” “Eat lead, rodent.” Oh God yes!

And I am merrily scribbling away like that for a good hour until my bar ears prick up and I become aware of an argument between two women to my left, about some guy that the blonde is seeing and the brunette next to her is calling the blonde every profane name in the book for not dumping him, and every time she does, the blonde wails even louder, and you can tell (if you apply Matthew’s First Law of Friendship) that the poor woman just wants sympathy, not emotional antibiotics. But the brunette is having none of it, so after calling her friend an idiot who thinks with her rhymes-with-punt, she stalks out the door and stomps really loudly down the 22 steps (and one landing) to the street, because she wants her friend to get the message that I AM LEAVING NOW AND I AM NOT COMING BACK SO HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT YOU STUPID LOSER?

The blonde is weeping like she’s at a funeral. I pull a wad of Kleenex out of my shoulderbag and hand it to her. She thanks me. I say “I’d ask you if you were okay, but that’s a really stupid question, so is it all right if I ask you a slightly less stupid question?” She gives me a resigned why-is-he-bothering-me look and nods, because she’s a woman and she knows that the quickest way to get rid of a guy is to let him say what he has to say and then bolt. I say, “Where did you get your heels? Costume Nationals, right?” “I got them at the Tootsi Plohound on Prince Street,” she says immediately, and then gives me a furrowed-brow look which says: “Wait a minute—I’m getting a straight guy vibe from you; how come you know women’s shoes?” But it’s broken the ice enough for me to have Kenny move our drinks to what I now think of as Ava’s Corner by the jukebox, and because the world reads SAFE no matter what I write about myself, I throw a five in the box, play The Best of Squeeze, and get her life story for the next thirty minutes. And yeah, about five minutes in, she comes up for air and says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; why am I telling you all this?” like they all do; and then she dives back down and continues unloading, and I do nothing except nod and make analogies, usually humorous ones so it lightens the mood, and provide the sympathy her friend couldn’t give her. It’s a familiar story. She’s stuck on a guy who treats her like shit when he has her, and promises to change when she leaves him. In other words, she’s Randi talking about Dominic. And I so want to give this woman the advice I would give Randi, but I don’t, because she doesn’t want advice—she wants an ear. So that’s what I give her. We do not trade names. We do not pretend that there is anything remotely potential about this. It’s all about the now, and the now for her is getting the release of telling this story tonight to anybody who will listen to her. And in situations like this, Anybody is my middle name.

By the time her friend comes stomping back, the blonde is feeling a little better about herself, and apologizing profusely for unloading on me. “No apology necessary,” I said, and her brunette friend goes, “Why are you apologizing to this old guy, and what are you talking to him for?” Sarah, God love her, says, “He’s not old.” (But I am; I’m more than twice this woman’s age.) “C’mon,” says the brunette, “let’s get out of here and go somewhere we can talk.” “I’m going home,” says the blonde. “Oh for Chrissakes,” says the brunette, “home to HIM?” The blonde looks at me, as if she’s afraid that I too will condemn her for going back to the guy she’s been complaining about for the last thirty minutes. “Just remember what I said,” I tell her, and she smiles, and kisses me on the cheek, and heads downstairs. The brunette flashes me a nasty look and follows her.

When they’re gone, Marita and Dan and Kenny and Sarah crowd around me the way Doc Boone’s fellow passengers crowd around him after he delivers Little Coyote in Stagecoach—patting my back, shaking my hand, offering me whiskey. “What did you tell her?” Marita asks. “What was it that you told her?”

ME: Something Barbara Stanwyck once said. She was listening to an actress bitch about her boyfriend at a Hollywood country club back in the Thirties, and after hearing her complain for a solid hour, Stanwyck finally said, “Look, honey. There’s only one question that matters in a situation like this. Is the fucking you’re getting worth the fucking you’re getting?”

               Turkey Day Blues

Maddie and Glynnis come up around 10:40. Glynnis is toasted. She points to a table in the lounge where a young bearded guy is sitting with an older couple.

GLYNNIS: Is that Sarah’s boyfriend?

ME: That’s him; his name’s Matt.

GLYNNIS: I like the name.

ME: So do I.

GLYNNIS: I want to go over and say hello but he’s with his parents. (A conspiratorial whisper:) I’ve been drinking, Matt. (Sadly:) I can’t do go over there. Not when he’s with his parents. Not like this. I just can’t. (She walks over there.) Hi, I’m Glynnis!

Maddie and I catch up.

MADDIE: I never get to see you any more; I just get to read your comments on my blog.

ME: I miss you too. (We hug.) You riding your bike home tonight?

MADDIE: God no.I’m taking the subway.

ME: Not a cab?

MADDIE: Not when the gravy train is pulling out of town.

ME: Maddie, that gravy train is crashing off a bridge.

We end up talking about Thanksgiving Dinner. Maddie is Very Passionate about Thanksgiving Dinner. Talking to her about Turkey Day is like talking to Germans about theology.

MADDIE: Every day it's a new crisis. I get like five calls a day from people. Can I bring my husband?  Look, I don’t know your husband, for the last three years you've barely mentioned your husband; but I do know you, so yes, you can bring him. Can I bring my boyfriend? Since when do you have a boyfriend? Okay, fine, bring him. And then Elijah told me his girlfriend has to work, so he has nowhere to go. So now my party of six is up to 13, maybe 16, depending. What are you doing?

MADDIE: I have an old girlfriend in town; we're going to be doing it with her kid.

ME: (shrewdly) And is her kid your kid?

MADDIE: God no. I'm just Uncle Matt.

MADDIE: You should come to my place for dessert. There'll be a ton of pies--apple, pecan, pumpkin. I'm going to glaze some nuts, and Glynnis is making cupcakes. Which means I have to run in the park.

ME: It's supposed to be raining.

MADDIE: Then I'll have to run in the rain. I have to do that every Sunday now. And if we're having cupcakes? Running. Running twice as far.

This year’s epic production is thematic: everyone has to come as a peasant.

MADDIE: And there’s no silverware. No utensils at all.

ME: So who’s going to cut the turkey or the pies?

MADDIE: That’s a good question.

ME: I think since you’re the cook, you get to be the Feudal Lord. Which means you’re the one with the knife and the fork.

MADDIE: I like that—Feudal Lord. I like that.

She tells me that one of the downstairs regulars brought in a box of chocolates, which Glynnis put at the staff table, and Maddie went to get a piece and the next thing she knew, it was twenty minutes later and a customer at one of the window tables is yelling “Where's our waitress? We’ve been waiting twenty minutes for our drinks!” And all eyes turn to Maddie, and there she is, with her chocolate-stained lips, giving them a “Whoops!” grin.

       Our own personal lost continent

When Sarah closes the upstairs at midnight, I head downstairs and see Esma at the bar. “It’s the hugger!” she cries, as I give her a big hug. Not for the first time, I wonder just what everyone who works here and comes here thinks of me. And what do they say about me when I’m not around? I’m tempted to leave my notebook open to an empty page and have people write in it, like some barfly version of a high school yearbook. (“Good luck finding another place that gives you so many buybacks! Keep in touch! Richie.”)

After a drink with Esma, I get another Guinness and do the rounds, clinking pints with the downstairs staff who have been cut, and sitting in all the empty booths I can find for a couple of sips at a time, soaking up the history as I get myself soaked. I finish my beer at Table 109, the Mohican Round Table, the only oval table in the bar. It used to sit in William “Bill the Butcher” Poole’s Christopher Street living room, but after his death in 1855 it was bequeathed to Isaiah Vanderlynn, who was, like Poole, one of the leaders of the Know Nothing party. The table sat in Vanderlynn’s study until the Draft Riots of 1863, during which the original table in Booth 109 was shattered in a fight between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, and Vanderlynn used the Poole Table to replace it. The legend that John Morrissey, Poole’s arch-enemy, broke into Poole’s house in 1854 and nearly killed Poole by beating his head forty times against the table has never been documented, but that doesn’t stop servers from telling customers that the large discoloration in the center of the table is the bloodstain from that attack. In fact, the bloodstain didn’t appear until 2001, when Daniel Day-Lewis, researching his role as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, paid 500 dollars to sit in Booth 109 and bang his own head 40 times against the table just to see what it felt like.

It’s about 2 when I leave, and who is sitting outside with her boyfriend but Sarah. “So,” she says. “So,” I say. And then it’s her turn to tell me a why-am-I-telling-you-this story.

SARAH: I lucked out. Two weeks after I moved here? I landed this job. And I don’t want to think about what I’d be doing in this city right now if I didn’t have this job. Because the friend I moved here with from Norfolk? She didn’t luck out. She left after six months. And I’m still here. All the friends I have, all the friends I’ve made, have been through this place. Through the people in this place. It’s fuckin’ weird, Matt. I’m going to really miss it. And I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like for people like you.

ME: It happens all the time in this city

SARAH: See, you get that.

ME: (A shrug) I’ve had so many places, and people, that I’ve said goodbye to since I moved here.

SARAH: Yeah, but this place.

ME: Yeah. This place. This place is special. It’s the atmosphere. A combination of the people who work here and the people who come here. There’s no other place like it. And once it’s gone, there’ll be nothing but the memory, and then the myth.

SARAH: Like Atlantis.

ME: Like our own personal Atlantis.

We share a charged little moment in which you can hear a coupe of souls chime like a single bell. Then Sarah says “G’night sweet pea,” and I say, “Night to you too. You guys have a great time in P-Town.” And home I go. I love Sarah to death and beyond. But I also know her, and if she's still in New York this time next year, I'll vote Republican for the rest of my life.

Alcohol: Guinness (7) Jameson (4)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 16

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 14

               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

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 15

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 13

Thursday 11/9/06. My sinuses have been throbbing like Kodo drums all day, so tonight I am going to take the Beer Cure for my burgeoning cold. The Beer Cure consists of me popping cold pills and drinking so much beer that my entire system gets dehydrated, which usually results in the complete death-by-starvation of whatever cold virus is parasitically giving me a runny nose, making my eyes water, and filling my lungs with greenish slimy crap.

When I walk in the first words I hear are Matt Lambert announcing “Just leave your stool in the middle of the floor!” to some guy who is walking out as I'm walking in. I think to myself, “God, straight lines already?” then take the stool and park it next to Marita, who wants to know whether I’m coming to the closing party and what time I’m going to show up. I tell her probably between 3 and 4, and she says that since she and John are going to be in PA for the holiday weekend, they won’t be back in the city until 5 PM at the earliest. While she talks, I take two Sudafed, have a pint of water, do a shot of Jameson, and drink half a Guinness pint. Beer Cure go! (Say THAT three times fast.)

         How Green Was My Valley Girl

The sound system is playing the score of Jonathan Miller’s Gangster Rigoletto, because tonight’s main event is Randi’s one year Verdi anniversary—Verdi being bar code for a green card wedding between a staff member and a citizen of another country who’s actually dumb enough to want to live here. (Why “Verdi anniversary?” Because one of the great jokes of opera is that, when you translate Giuseppe Verdi into English, you get Joe Green.) There have been at least five Verdi weddings at the Naughty Pine that I’ve been privy to since I started coming here, and all of them have been successful. Randi’s is with Nathan (not his real name), an actor from Toronto who’s been getting noticed in the downtown theatre scene. He never worked at the Pine, but he was (and is) a downstairs regular who became fast friends with Randi, and then became her roommate five months before their City Hall nuptials. He’s up in the lounge with some of his theatre friends and the incredibly pretty actress he’s seeing on the side. His present to Randi is the CD set of Sinatra’s V-Discs, the singles that were recorded in the 40’s and then sent to servicemen overseas; hers to him is an autographed copy of World War Z.

RANDI: I got Nate something he wanted, not something I wanted. Aren’t I the best wife?

DAVE: I have an autographed copy of World War Z.

GLYNNIS: Of course you do.

Glynnis and Mauri are up from downstairs because they were flower girls at Randi’s civil nuptials. We catch up for a few minutes; because I’m an upstairs regular and they are almost exclusively downstairs waitresses (has Glynnis EVER worked an upstairs shift, except maybe that one time at gunpoint?), and we rarely see each other to talk, except at the end of the night, when they’re just starting to drink and I’m just starting to pass out from drinking.

          Upstairs/Downstairs

The Naughty Pine is not really as single bar with two floors; it is two separate bars, the way Springfield and Shelbyville are two separate cities. The downstairs bar is all about the history—it has that mind-boggling 19th-century bar, it has relics from when only male property owners could vote in this country, it has bloodstains from arguments about the Civil War in 1868, and if you could suck the floor under Table 106 you’d get smashed from all the martinis Scott and Zelda spilled there. It is the scene bar and the Seen bar—when people walk in off the street, this is where they want to be. On a good night the tables are packed, the bar is three deep, and it’s white noise loud, with the kind of energy that could send NASA rockets to the Andromeda Galaxy by the time it takes you to down an Irish Car Bomb. (Which only the really special Irish patrons get to drink here; if you look closely, you’ll see a map of Ireland with certain county names in red behind the bar, next to the cash register—if you’re from one of those, you can be served an ICB; if you’re not, you get a shot of Powers in a Jersey Turnpike.) It’s all dark wood and feels timeless. When you want to hook up with a random, this is where you go to find her or him. When people talk about the Naughty Pine, this is the bar they mean.

If the downstairs bar is a pitcher of beer, the upstairs bar is a glass of scotch—the acquired taste of bars. It’s upper shelf all the way. (They say that Kerouac wanted to call it that, The Upper Shelf, and Ginsberg never let him live it down. “You’re such a snob at heart, Jack,” he’d say, and Kerouac would fume.)  Because of the skylight, Time passes up there, which adds a sense of transience to everything—the talk, the drinking, the intentions. Everything has a deadline. Everything has another level to it, as is true of anything that is done under the visible light of the moon and stars (because yes, on a clear night, you can actually see stars through the skylight). The people who drink at the upstairs bar are there because they want the camaraderie you don’t get from a room full of randoms—like movie-goers who see the first show of the day on Saturday, they’re there because they are passionate about what they’re going to see and do. They work the Skylight Shift. And as a writer? I’m up there because I can actually write at the bar without feeling like I'm interrupting somebody else’s bachelor party; because I can pull out my notebook and scribble for an hour or two and the people around me who have become my bar family will respect that.

There are very few celebrity sighting upstairs. Yes, there was the night Sandra Bullock had a dinner date at Table 208, and yes, there was the night Matt Damon sat by the jukebox, and within 45 minutes every woman on both floors of the bar was drinking in the lounge. But the only celebrity I’ve ever seen upstairs more than once is Paul Winfield, who (up until his death a couple of years ago) would show up once every month or so with his family for dinner, and who was one of the nicest guys you would ever want to meet. (It really burns me that people like him are gone while Kissinger still lives.)

As for staffing between the two bars, Glynnis is pretty much the Prime Minister of Downstairs, if only because Jynah thinks she’s the Queen and is too dumb to see that her power is only ceremonial. Randi is the Queen of Upstairs, and Dominic used to be her Prime Minister, but now he’s mostly the drunken albatross around her neck. Richie will occasionally manage upstairs, as will Sarah, but they’re mostly downstairs. Steve and Joey will never set foot behind the upstairs bar. Dave loves the upstairs bar; Kenny would love it more if he got better shifts. Doug used to do both (oh, I miss Doug), Elijah is pretty much a downstairs bartender now even though he was an upstairs regular, mostly because he prefers to be as far away from Dominic as possible, since nothing he does is ever right as far as Dominic is concerned. Sarah bartends downstairs (she and Sunday are the only female bartenders, though Randi has been known to get behind the stick in a crunch). For a while there, we all thought Little Jenny would become a bartender, but that never panned out, which is why she left. (And yet they gave Sunday a couple of bartending shifts less than two months after Jenny left, so go figure. As Dave is fond of saying, “There is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things; and then there is the Naughty Pine way.”)

A now-it-can-be-told secret about the downstairs bar? The guys have a red alert code for pretty women sitting at the bar. There are exactly 20 seats there, all of which have curved backs and swivel, so if you ever hear a bartender say “Water back on five!” you know there’s a stunner sitting at chair five.  In the upstairs bar, they don’t need a secret code—you always know where the pretty women are by wherever Dave and Dominic are spending the most time talking instead of pouring drinks.

And upstairs is also the shift drink bar for staff who get off early and aren’t closing. They’ll come up for a drink or two and chat before they head home, or stay until the upstairs closes and then join the downstairs crew from the floor and the kitchen at Table 111, which always has a RESERVED sign on it, and no one but staff, or the people they’re sleeping with, are ever seated there.

         That’s a joke, son—flew right by you

Dave is telling a blonde at the bar about Toad Hall. The blonde happens to be a Disneyland fanatic. “Do you know that it’s gone? Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride? Totally gone from Disneyland now. Everything is high tech now. Pirates of the Caribbean now. Everything.” And I remember an odd fact about Disneyland and Disney World. Nobody is allowed to die there. Death certificates for people who have dropped dead of a heart attack after riding Space Mountain always list the place of death as one of the hotels that’s just outside the park. It’ll never (officially) list the park as the place of death. Which makes me think of an idea for a farce, or a mystery, or a movie, or all three. It’s about somebody in a Goofy suit who gets murdered in the middle of the park, and a couple of his co-workers have to get him off the premises before (a) they get killed or (b) somebody realizes he’s dead. Working title: “Nobody Dies in Disneyland.” (Sounds like a Mike Hammer novel, doesn’t it?)

I start to jot down notes while three cute girls walk in, all of whom are young, pretty, and totally unfamiliar. “Three new girls!” Ketel Mike announces to the world at large. One of them leaves after a single drink, but the other two (Ann and Janie) stick around for another hour or so. Until Dave starts telling jokes:

DAVE: How does a woman hold her liquor?

ANN: I don’t know.

DAVE: By the ears.

(Beat.)

ANN: Huh?

JANIE: I don’t get it.

DAVE: Liquor. Y’know, like licker?

ANN: (Still not getting it) Yeah . . .

DAVE: Like lick-ing?

JANIE: (I’m not following you at all) Uh huh . . .

It literally takes them ten minutes to get this joke, which means that they are either the only actual virgins in the Village tonight or their boyfriends have a very limited repertoire of sexual techniques. Extremely limited. As in one.

Rachael from New School is in a booth with a couple of friends. She can’t believe that the place is closing. “I’ll be here some night next week for the long haul,” she promises, and it’s all Dave and I can do not to burst out laughing. Rachael is famous for sticking around until about two minutes before Dave finishes his books for the night, at which point she declares “I’m here till you leave” and then bolts downstairs and dives into a cab without even saying goodbye. I tell Dave that she’s a CWG, and explain the term: CWG stands for Chick With Glasses, and represents my observation that the biggest teases of my teenage years were always the girls with glasses. Rachael? Horn rims.

Around 11, as Dave is trying to close the place, Amanda from Knickerbocker comes in.  Amanda is tall, dark-haired, and built like Ann Miller, with legs that go down to the subway. Because she doesn’t wear glasses, she sticks around with me and Trish till the upstairs closes, and then the three of us join Dave at Reservoir down the street.  I stick around for a beer and a shot and then head home.  My sinuses are clear, my mouth is dry, and I’ve been at it so long that I’ve drunk myself sober. Success!!!

Alcohol: Guinness (6—Naughty Pine; 1—Reservoir)  Jameson (4—Naughty Pine; 1—Reservoir)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 14

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 12

Wednesday, 11/8/06. At work today, I print out the first four days of the closing diary, put them in a manila envelope, and then use my corporate mailroom access to have them sent first class to Allyson* in LA.

         Pop Quiz

When I get to the Pine, Randi points the Finger Of Doom at me when I walk in and say hi to the downstairs crew. Randi yanks me back outside and around the corner. “Dominic is getting evicted,” she says, and the tells me he hasn’t paid his rent in the last three months because he’s blown it all on blow, but he’s got it under control, he just needs to clean himself out and he’ll be fine, he just needs a place to crash until he gets on his feet again. “Your place?” I ask, and Randi shakes her head. “Sunday’s place,” she says, and I think to myself, oh crap. And Randi drops the hammer. “How long have you known about him and Sunday?”

What follows is five of the longest seconds of my life as my unstoppable friendship with Randi has a head-on collision with the immovable wall of my discretion. Saying things like “Guess who I saw necking with Dominic the other night” is not me—that’s Jynah. But not telling a close friend that I saw her boyfriend groping someone she works with, someone with whom I am also friends, is very much me, because it’s the kind of situation in which someone who hears secrets from two sides of a married couple or three sides of a romantic triangle constantly finds himself. I like to say that all my close friends will breathe a sigh of relief when they see me buried and in my grave, because I will take all their secrets with me. What I don’t say, which is just as true, is that the loudest sigh of relief you’ll ever hear on that day of days will be coming from me. 

Which doesn’t help me answer Randi’s question at all, so I resort to the only tactic that ever works in moments like this, and go full Bill Clinton. “I don’t ‘know’ anything,” I say, which is the literal if weaselly truth. Randi looks at me as if I have just said the words “I did not see Dominic having sex with that woman” in an Arkansas accent, and then she says, “And what if I told you that I know all about it?” and my immediate response is to reply “I would say, you know more than I do,” which is again the absolute disingenuous truth. There’s another five second pause, and then it’s like watching dawn break, because Randi is grinning at me. “I hope you keep my secrets this well,” she says, and kisses me on one cheek, slaps me lightly on the other, and shoos me back into the bar and into the upstairs stairwell.

         Cat on a stained glass skylight

“What the mysterious fuck was that?” I say to myself as I figuratively float up the twenty-two steps (and one landing) to the upstairs Pine.  And then I hear Dave yelling “NORM!” and I see Emily (as opposed to Emma Lee) and DJ and Trish and Kerry Anne and her boss Robert grinning at me. “CHEERS!” I yell back, because what else is there to say, and I sit next to DJ, who has saved me a stool. Kerry Anne and Robert are talking about KA’s upcoming trip to Niagara Falls. Robert is ticking off places in the area she should go. “Like The Anchor Pub in Buffalo.” “I’m not going to Buffalo!” Kerry Anne says. As I grab a stool, Richie appears and greets me with an official invitation to the closing party.

RICHIE: I’m planning a party on Sunday the 26^th and you are of course invited.

ME: Thank you. Can I bring anything?

RICHIE: (beat) Wear a thong.

ME: Great—I just happen to have one of those Borat puke-green bathing suit numbers!

This leads into a discussion of the Borat movie with Dan (the waiter who looks like Christian Bale). He saw it over the weekend with his father “whose jaw kept hitting the floor as I had a conniption trying not to laugh too hard. It’s not the best film to see with your uptight Dad.”

Meanwhile a party of six from Bowl-Mor has come up into the corral, pulled out their cellphones, and told their twenty closest friends where they are. Within fifteen minutes, the entire upstairs has become their living room—they’re spilling over the lounge and the corral and into the center tables, where one forlorn guy is sitting with his vodka tonic in a bell glass. A friend of his comes up to the bar to buy him a round, and leans in close to Dave, because what he’s about to say is very very personal.

GUY: Vodka tonic. And can I have it in a manly glass?

DAVE: “A manly glass?”

GUY: Y’know, something solid, something that’s not, uh, girly. (Pointing to the guy at the table.) It’s for him.

DAVE: (I don’t believe I’m hearing this.) A manly glass.

GUY: Dude, I gotta hang out with him.

(Dave holds up a pint glass.)

GUY: Perfect.

DAVE: (“Get out of my bar.”) On the house.

Dave then proceeds to tell everyone within earshot how he went into PetCo in Union Square to buy a cat, and got totally typed out, as it were.

DAVE: I walked in, I said I’m looking to buy a cat, and I swear to God, the woman takes one look at me and she says, You should try the animal shelter on 110^th Street. I said, Well what about that one over there? And she said, No, really, you should try the shelter. Finally I look at her and I say, Are you telling me you’re not going to sell me a cat? And she says, Look, pal, just go to the animal shelter, okay?

It’s only after he tells the story for the fifth time that he mentions the telling detail: he actually said “I have a mouse problem, so I’m looking to buy a cat.”

ME: You told them you only wanted to buy a cat to kill mice?

DAVE: Yeah . . .

THE ENTIRE BAR: Well no wonder!

Trish offers to give him her cat.  She works at Goldman Sachs (like DJ), and her backstory definitely needs a touch-up rewrite because what we’ve all heard is that she was leaving New York to move to Denver with her fiancé, but here she is, drinking Stella in Manhattan, with a diamond on the second finger of her left hand, not the third (so maybe she’s engaged in Europe?), and a smile that she is aiming at Dave like a klieg light, in-between giving him shit for forgetting her name after she gave it to him when she was in here two weeks ago.

I stay for one drink, leave Dave a 20, do an Irish goodbye, and hop into a cab to meet Dolores. As to what transpired then, permit me to quote Dorothy L Sayers in Chapter VII of Murder Must Advertise:

He grinned with a wry mouth, and went out to keep his date with the one young woman who showed no signs of yielding to him, and what he said or did on that occasion is in no way related to this story.

*And as for Allyson in LA, the woman to whom I mailed those diary copies?

Allyson is NOT the one on the left.

        Allyson Wonderland

Allyson is a talented actress who used to work at the Naughty Pine and then moved to Los Angeles. We bonded over theatre and Buffy The Vampire Slayer (mostly Buffy) when she was working the Thursday night shift upstairs and (coincidentally?) going out with whoever her shift partner was. (“If you want to date Ally, work a Thursday night shift with her,” as Jynah used to say.) Allyson is also responsible for the shortest and most brutal drinking game in New York bar history: “Do a shot of vodka whenever Ally fixes her hair.” Which averaged out to exactly four shots every two minutes, since Ally cannot let her hair go untouched for more than thirty seconds at a time. She’ll put it into a ponytail, then undo the ponytail and twirl it up into a bun, then undo the bun and let it hang down to her shoulders, and meanwhile Russian wrestlers with Olympic medals in drinking are dropping like fruit flies because they have just ingested a litre of Stolichnaya in the time it takes to recite the Gettysburg Address. The holder of the world record in the Ally drinking game? Dominic, with six minutes and forty-five seconds, but only because his last five shots were water.

Second-best Allyson story: the Chapel Perilous one. Remember Bill E from the Uno’s on 3rd Ave? He’s married to Noel, one of Ally’s distant cousins—their last name is one of those unique everyone-in-the-phone-book-with-this-is-related surnames—so one Thursday night, when Bill and Noel showed up at the Pine for DJ’s birthday party, I put the two of them together and then gave Ally my cell phone so she could call her mother on my dime and say “Hey—remember Cousin Whatsername? I’m talking to her daughter!”

But the all-time best Allyson story? Three years ago now (almost to the day), the Red Sox are playing the Yankees in the AL Championship Series. It’s a Thursday night. It’s the seventh game. It goes to 11 innings. By that time, Aaron and Ally have said fuck it to their tables and are crowding the bar along with everybody from downstairs who’s come up for a shift drink and almost all the table customers, who have been given free beers by Dave as long as they say they’re rooting for the Yankees. “Only Red Sox rooters pay!” he cries. It’s the closest the upstairs has ever come to being a sports bar, because everybody is rooting for the Yankees to win. Except me. I am the sole Red Sox fan at the bar. So you can imagine my feelings—actually? No you can’t—as Tim Wakefield serves up a fucking meatball to Aaron Fucking Boone and watches it sail into the stands. The cheering is deafening in the bar. “In your FACE!” yells someone to me who shall remain nameless, because I like to think we’re still friends. “Fuck the smoking ban!” Dave yells. “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” And everybody lights up, and the last thing I hear before I toss a couple of 20’s on the bar and head downstairs to throw up in the street is Dave yelling “Shots on the house!” Fast forward to the next day at 6PM, when I come into the bar after work and Glynnis and Maddie say hi to me, and Allyson (who’s working downstairs tonight) comes up to me with this incredible look of sympathy and commiseration on her face, and she reaches out to me with her right hand to touch me on the heart, and she looks at me the way forgiving angels look at lost and errant mortals as she says, with the compassion of a saint:

ALLYSON: What happened to you last night? We weren’t done making fun of you yet.

Alcohol: Guinness (1)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

Day 13

Wild Night This Morning: The Last Days of The Naughty Pine - 11

                        Chapel Perilous

Tuesday, 11/7/06, 2AM.  You do not find Chapel Perilous; it finds you. You do not leave Chapel Perilous; it abandons you. You do not enter Chapel Perilous; like Love, you only discover that you are there once you look behind you and realize that you have crossed the dividing line between where you were then and where you are now. How do you recognize that you have crossed the line? Simple. Things you look for come to you. Reference books fall from your hand and open to the page you have been seeking. A project you are working on, the details of which you have never shared with a living soul, is the topic of an overheard express train conversation. You think of someone you haven’t heard from in ages; five minutes later, you bump into her on the street, even though she lives three states away. You are in Chapel Perilous—the command post of reality, where the words “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction” are etched into the wall over the Control Panel, because that’s exactly what happens when you are in this place. The worst kind of improbable fiction. It’s like the Flitcraft story in Maltese Falcon, where a near-death experience makes Flitcraft feel “like somebody has taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.” And in those works, in Chapel Perilous, every chance occurrence is part of an implicate order in which everything fits together so well and completely that it either means that you’re losing your mind, or it means that the Universe is suddenly and totally interested in YOU, and has a vested interest in leading you by the hand to a revelation of something so unimaginable that it will undermine your faith in daily life. Chapel Perilous is a window into the world beyond the Matrix. It is like Fairyland—if you eat anything while you’re there, if you digest a single ounce of what it gives you, then you’re trapped inside forever. It is like luck—it comes and goes at a time of its own choosing, and the only thing you can rely on is that it will disappear the moment you count on it working in your favor. And it is like destiny, because luck and happenstance have nothing to do with it. Everything is meant. Everything has an echo. When you are in Chapel Perilous, the Abyss not only looks back at you, it cashes all your checks. When you are in Chapel Perilous, you are the main character in God’s novel. When you are in Chapel Perilous, everything happens for a reason.

Back when I was drinking Bass Ale, during the Punic Wars, I was sitting to the right of the taps one night at the upstairs Naughty Pine, writing in my notebook, vaguely aware of a silver-haired bearded guy counseling an attractive blonde woman in the northwest corner of the bar. They were sitting next to the jukebox. When it started playing “Tempted” by Squeeze, the woman laughed with such despair that it was like hearing a dream choke to death. She was not having an easy time of it. I couldn’t hear the details of their conversation, but I could get the feel of it, having been in hundreds of the same type: A is laying out the options, and B is saying “Yes, but,” which can be anything from “Yes, but I love him” to “Yes, but it’s not up to me” to “Yes, but what else can I do?” Which means she wants sympathy, and not advice.

MATTHEW’S FIRST RULE OF FRIENDSHIP: Always ask this question: “Do they want advice, or sympathy?” And remember that the ones who want advice will always accept your sympathy, but the ones who want your sympathy will never forgive you for giving them advice.

MATTHEW’S SECOND RULE OF FRIENDSHIP: Never break the First Rule.

I was in the Scribble Zone, so I don’t remember seeing the guy leave; the next thing I knew, Dave was tapping on my notebook. He had poured me a new pint and set it down next to the blonde. When I looked up at him, he said: “Her name is Ava. Go talk to her; she likes comic books.” And that is how I met one of my closest friends on the planet. I took my notebook over with me, introduced myself, and five minutes later, a voice inside me said “Ah—HERE you are; do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to show up in my life?” (Ava’s version: “Five minutes after we started talking, I said to myself, ‘I think I’ll keep him.’”) and six minutes after we started talking? We were talking about Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, Foucault’s Pendulum andThe Illuminati Trilogy, Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol (“Bona ta vada, Danny the Street!”) and Warren Ellis’ Planetary (“It’s a strange world.” “Let’s keep it that way.”). And Chapel Perilous. That night was not the first time that I had ever felt like a puzzle piece which Life had suddenly picked up and snapped down perfectly against a complete stranger, but it remains the only time in my life when so many of the odd curves and indentations in my weirdly-shaped piece have fit against the curves and indentations of someone else’s. Which is a Chapel Perilous thing, when two complete strangers can become the Power Twins. (“Form of a green card!”) (Heh—as if; right, Ava?) It has nothing to do with sex or romance; it has everything to do with two people meeting on Soulmate Street because they were already united in the Church Of Chance.

Now. I told you that story to tell you this one.

The title of this one is: How Matthew Met Dolores. This is back in the Good Old Days, when you took your life in your hands to walk east of Avenue A, when Pizzeria Uno’s on Third Avenue was my local, and when Bill E was my Dave. Picture it if you can. I am sitting at the bar next to my bar-friend Ben. I have a silver loop in my left ear. My hair is down to my shoulders. It is dyed blonde. (I know; I know.) I am wearing a necklace with a yin-yang medallion. I am watching the Knicks in the playoffs, which tells you how long ago this was, and behind me and to my left is this woman with short white-blonde hair, this woman in a suit, nursing a drink and lighting a cigarette. She looks like a cross between Annie Lennox and The Thin White Duke. She looks hot, and I like to think I do too, but I don’t, because no matter how many times I write the word DESIRABLE, everyone in the world reads it as SAFE. So when a seat at the bar opens up?

        [Dolores sidles up to the bar.]

DOLORES:  Mind if I smoke?

[Matthew pulls out a lighter and lights up her cigarette. She offers him one.]

MATTHEW:  I quit.

DOLORES:  But you still carry around a lighter.

MATTHEW:  Most of my friends smoke.

DOLORES:  How long have you quit?

MATTHEW:  This time? Two years. Since my mother died of lung cancer. I smoked up until the day of her funeral, and I haven’t touched one since.

DOLORES:  How old was she?

MATTHEW:  Fifty-seven.

DOLORES:  That’s young. 

MATTHEW:  I can’t even imagine forty, never mind fifty-seven. What do you want to be when you’re fifty-seven?

DOLORES:  I want to have at least one Tony Award and a small film career to support my theatre habit.

MATTHEW:  You’re an actress. What restaurant?

DOLORES:  Actually I do temp at a law firm.

MATTHEW:  I do nine to five at Smith Barney and write plays in my spare time.

DOLORES:  Shouldn’t that be the other way around?

MATTHEW:  I wish.

DOLORES:  No really –- if you say you work at Smith Barney, that’s how you think of yourself. You should always describe yourself by what you want to be, not what you have to be. So what do you want to be when you’re fifty-seven?

MATTHEW:  Alive.

DOLORES:  Here’s to your mother.

MATTHEW:  My mother.

DOLORES:  So are you working on anything?

MATTHEW:  Always. A play about Giordano Bruno, a play about Aaron Burr, a comedy about subatomic physics. You?

DOLORES:  Nothing right now. I just moved here—I’ve been acting in DC, I was at the Folger for two years. My big thing was I did Helen in Troilus and Cressida.

MATTHEW:  The one with Dan Southern as Hector? I saw that! I was down in DC for a work thing and caught the Sunday matinee.

DOLORES:  You know Southern?

MATTHEW:  He directed a farce I wrote. “Etched In Stone.”

DOLORES:  Wow. Small world.

MATTHEW:  [TOASTING]  Small world. So what’s an actress from DC doing in a Third Avenue bar?

DOLORES:  I live here now, and I’m meeting someone, we’re going dancing at Webster Hall. But it doesn’t look like he’s coming. You like to dance?

MATTHEW:  I love to dance.

DOLORES:  But you’re here to watch the game.

MATTHEW:  It’s just a game.

DOLORES:  That’s the way I feel. I mean don’t get me wrong, I like tall guys in shorts; but I like short guys in tight jeans a lot better.

MATTHEW:  [To Bill the Bartender] Check!

End of play, beginning of relationship: boy meets girl, boy goes nuts over girl, girl sings “Under My Thumb” until she gets tired of it all, and then sings “Start Me Up” to anything in pants. Or in other words: Shit—It’s Nothing But Another Disaster.

            The Siege Perilous

”Was it really that much of a disaster?” Dolores asks. We’ve just acted out our first meeting, to the delight of Ned and the Professor, and the increasingly mind-boggled astonishment of Sunday. “My end of it was,” I say, “but you got her out of it,” and I point to Sunday. ‘I thought you said her name was Laura.” Dolores explains that her daughter started going by her middle name when she turned 14 “because her name sounded too much like my name,” and Sunday mutters, “I’m right here at the table mother,” and then goes, “Wait—you guys are still in touch?” “Oh yes,” says Dolores. “This is my writer friend I’m always talking about.” “THIS IS YOUR WRITER FRIEND?!?” Sunday cries. “But you said he was famous!” The sting of that is salved and more when Dolores replies, “He is to me.” “I’m paying for dinner,” I say. “You better be,” Dolores replies, and Sunday cries “YOU’RE HAVING DINNER?!?” like she’s going to be the laughingstock of Bartender High School because her mom is suddenly dating one of her barflies. “Oh please,” Dolores says, “we’ve been fucking friends since Reagan was President.” “And vice versa,” I say. Only Ned laughs at it, but Sunday gets it. She stands up and says, with charming incoherence: “This is all. I just. Wow. Fuck me.” She points at me. “We,” she says, “need to talk.” She kisses the top of her mother’s head. “You,” she says, “I’ll call tomorrow. Ned. Professor.” And she’s gone. Dolores has the decency to wait until the door closes behind her to turn on me like a prosecuting attorney and demand: “Just tell me you haven’t tried to sleep with her.”  I look at her with all the condescension of a non-smoker to someone who has a two-pack-a-day habit. “I am a regular,” I declare. “I don’t do that shit.” I let that sink in, and then I add: “Of course, if I was WORKING with her?” And Dolores whacks me over the head with her purse while Ned and the Professor crack up.

She was Liora when I knew her in the 80’s—it was her acting name. “Dolores sounds like your maiden aunt,” she used to say, using two words that would never be in anyone’s dictionary when describing her. But I call her Dolores when, after the Professor has passed out and Ned has headed off to his crash pad, I walk her up to the Chelsea Hotel. She tells me she hasn’t had a drink since New Year’s Eve 2001. She tells me Sunday never misses a chance to bring up her drinking even though she’s still sober, “which is like somebody poking a stick in a wound so it won’t heal. But I don’t blame her.” She tells me she’s spent the last five years correcting the lies and stories she told her daughter, which has only made her daughter disbelieve everything she’s saying now, never mind everything she ever said in the past. I ask her about Max. She tells me he’s on his third wife. “And he’s on her all the time. I’ve  seen pictures of her. She’s gorgeous. But he’ll toss her away when she hits her sell-by-date. That’s what he does.” I ask about Mark. “He’s in Austin now; I see him all the time. He’ll play with this group and that group, and now and then he gets a job with someone and goes on tour.” And does Sunday know about all of us? Dolores shakes her head. I don’t blame her. It was me, Max and Mark back then. The joke was that Liora only dated guys whose names began with an M, because that way, no matter who she woke up next to, all she had to do was hum and make a vowel sound and she’d get the name right.

But it was no joke when Max asked her to marry him and she said yes. I know Mark asked her; and I asked her twice.  All three times she said no, very nicely, and then added something consoling and teasingly hopeful by saying “But if things were different,” which are the five cruelest words in the language, because if you want them to be different then you’ll make them different—and if you don’t want them to be different, then you shouldn’t fucking bring it up, because all it does is keep a door open when it should be nailed shut and boarded up. But that’s Liora. Always keeping the door open, no matter what.

I can feel my stomach wrenching into a knot with anger and hurt that still hasn’t died in twenty years—Jesus, I think, what’s been feeding it all this time? Besides, y’know, the fact that I still haven’t gotten over this woman—and I have the overpowering urge to ask her if she wants a nightcap, because that’s what we always did back when we were together, we’d have that one last drink that would tip us over the edge, or give us permission to say “Forget the consequences,” and down we’d go into the fuck-like-a-rabbit hole that was our war and peace, our joy and anger.

But that was Liora, not Dolores. So instead of asking her to blow her five years of sobriety on a Manhattan with me, I ask her the only thing I know which will get under her skin—I smile and I say, “So now that you’re not drinking, are you REALLY sure that Max is Laura’s father?” And she whacks me over the head with her purse. “Okay, okay—I’ll change the subject. Have you seen Mamma Mia yet? You’ll love the plot. It’s about this woman who was seeing three guys at the same time, and when she got pregnant—Ow!” I cry, because Dolores has whacked me with her purse again. “Okay okay okay,” I say, “I’m so sorry. Look—why don’t we see a movie after dinner tomorrow? Film Forum is playing Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell. You’ll love the plot—it’s about this woman who was seeing three guys at the same time and—Ow ow ow ow!” I yell because now she’s yanking my right earlobe like a grade-school teacher punishing the class wiseass. But she’s laughing when she does it, and that’s everything I wanted. Because I know that I will die—and I will be content to die—without ever hearing anything that makes me feel happier or more full of hope than this, Liora’s laughter.

Alcohol: Guinness (1)

Song of the night

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells


Day 12