The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  I had turned sixteen during the Summer of Love, and even in backwater Canada, eddies of social transformation were swirling around. Soldiers returned from Vietnam and brought back a lot of high-quality Asian hashish. Some of it wound up in Cornwall, along with a new drug, LSD. My older brothers were close in age, but we seemed to land on different sides of the generational divide. They were intent on developing their professional careers. I was too busy getting swept up in the sixties. Moe and Ray appeared oblivious to the Age of Aquarius, but I grew my hair out and embraced all that it had to offer.

  My friends and I took more than a few trips on hallucinogens. I’d already tried LSD a few times when a schoolmate of mine, a part-time drug dealer nicknamed “Screw,” secretly dosed a pitcher of orange juice with a dozen hits of high-quality LSD-25. Not realizing it was dosed, I drank the whole pitcher and spent the next two days sailing in a lysergic hurricane, messed up out of my mind.

  I walked the banks and canals of my hometown, walking and walking throughout the night. Connecting with what I was sure were cosmic but chaotic truths, I found myself unable to share them because I had somehow lost the power to speak. I recall feeling profound sadness that I’d never be able to talk with my parents or brothers again. I spent two days and nights wandering mute before I felt the drug slowly releasing its grip. After that experience, I swore off LSD forever.

  The Summer of Love came and went, but as far as I was concerned, the summer might have been great, but the love had been elusive. The sexual revolution was happening elsewhere, in New York and San Francisco—anywhere, it seemed, but wherever I was. Getting at all intimate with a girl was possible only after months of going out as a couple. A blow job was a totally unimaginable act, an emblem of perversion even amid the feverish back-seat fumblings of teenagers.

  I noticed a pretty girl one grade behind me at Saint Lawrence High. Sheila Abraham stood out in the tiny dating pool of Cornwall. She was smart and confident, if a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes. At least those shoes were expensive, I noticed, and I saw that Sheila seemed to have an endless supply of fashionable sixteen-dollar sweaters.

  I knew the Abrahams by reputation as one of the wealthiest families in town. Sheila’s Uncle Richard, known as “the Duke,” drove a conspicuous series of snappy cars: a fire-engine-red Buick Wildcat, a 1966 Riviera, and a 1963 Corvette (the model with pop-up headlights that I had lusted after when it first hit the streets). As a young kid on the loose in downtown Cornwall, I used to watch the Duke drive by in those cars with my tongue hanging out.

  The Abrahams lived in a large house in the second district, the nicest part of town. They owned a hotel, a bowling alley, and one of Cornwall’s tallest buildings, an eight-story office tower. They also owned their own boat and a vacation cottage, both out-of-reach luxuries to me.

  She might have caught my eye initially with the showy upper-class trappings of the Abraham family, but once I got to know her, Sheila’s intelligence and personality eclipsed her social standing. We fell in love and became a steady couple. In my last year of high school, we were both contemplating a life together. We found ourselves wondering what it would be like if we got married and settled down.

  When I looked into the future, all I knew was that I didn’t want a blue-collar job. I had seen the exhaustion on my father’s face, the toll it took on his body. I knew what had happened to my Uncle Ainèe Lebrun in that horrific mill accident. I was surrounded by hardworking men and women, and I admired them, but I knew I wanted to escape joining their ranks.

  I graduated from high school, moved out of Cornwall, and enrolled at Carleton University in Ottawa. I lived in a high-rise apartment building with a couple of my high-school classmates, excited finally to be away from Vimy Avenue. Once classes started, though, I almost instantly realized I’d enrolled in college only because I didn’t know what else to do. My heart wasn’t in it and, moreover, I found that my mill-town education had left me woefully unprepared for higher education. I remember scoping out a college course catalog and coming across a listing for “Anthropology.” What the fuck is that? I wondered.

  Instead of book learning, what I really studied was the counterculture. To anyone who didn’t personally experience the sixties, it’s difficult to convey the degree of upheaval going on in the world just then. The old order got demolished, uprooted, transformed. Everything seemed to be in flux all over the world: social conventions, politics, race relations, fashion, art, music—everything.

  Peace and love. Question authority. Tune in, turn on, drop out. The slogan from the student riots of May 1968 in Paris resonated with me: “Sous les pavés, la plage.” Beneath the paving stones, the beach. I believed that if I could just smash through the hard crust of overcivilized behavior, I would discover the freedom of going barefoot in the sand.

  Music became my true college major. The Stones, Uriah Heep, Santana, Bob Dylan. I inhaled rock ’n’ roll, the blues, B. B. King, Sly, Three Dog Night, CSNY, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix. Mick Jagger was my ultimate rock hero. I’d crank the amp up to eleven, smoke a little hash, relax, and float downstream. I followed Tim Leary’s advice faithfully, tuning in, turning on, and then, inevitably, dropping out. Carleton University seemed not to notice my absence. I stayed on in our hippie apartment and still pretended to attend class, but after a couple of months, I left college and returned to Cornwall.

  Right back to square one, and back to Sheila Abraham.

  When I hit my hometown on the rebound, most of my high-school friends were already working at the mills or stuck in other dead-end jobs like truck driving. Because I had lost my eye, the mills wouldn’t hire me, even if I’d applied. I looked around the mean streets of Cornwall, desperately wanting to make my mark doing something, anything—to use my accident settlement to try for a more prosperous life than my parents.

  During a quick stretch of time at the end of the sixties, being too ambitious was considered crass and bourgeois. But the antimaterialist concepts of the day never sank in with me. I always had an inner drive. Be first or be nothing. That attitude was both a curse and a blessing.

  Apart from high achievers like my brothers—whom I constantly sought to outdo—the only other successful people around seemed to be businesspeople. Sheila’s family had a lot of irons in the fire, and during this period I got to know them a lot better. The Abrahams became my anti–role models, with Sheila’s father and three uncles serving as examples of how not to succeed in business. I studied them accordingly.

  For a long time, I didn’t realize that the Abraham empire was built on sand. All their holdings were heavily leveraged; every property they had was mortgaged to the hilt. I’d come to discover that the family didn’t actually own anything—the banks did. I was too green to know what leverage even was. Over the course of a few years, as I continued to date Sheila, I witnessed the Abraham house of cards crash down, as one by one their holdings were ripped away from them.

  Even so, I never questioned their methods. I idolized them. Sheila’s father, Ted, and his brothers dashed frantically from enterprise to enterprise, always moving, never standing still. They were almost fiendish in their efforts to develop new schemes to prop up the old. The lesson I took was that the true essence of the capitalist was the hustle, not the score.

  I entered the Abraham kitchen one afternoon to find Ted, Uncle Ness, and Uncle Sammy present and plotting. The room was filled with steam, like a sauna. As soon as I walked in, Sam quickly tossed a towel over a huge pot bubbling on the stove. They were fiercely private about their latest idea, but they eventually revealed that they were boiling water to steam wood and shape lacrosse sticks, aiming to corner the market.

  I made what I considered to be an obvious observation. “Um, don’t the First Nation tribes pretty much have the lacrosse market all sewn up? They’ve been making the sticks on the rez for like a hundred years. It’s a Native game, after all.”

  The Abrahams didn’t listen. No amount of negativity was going to harsh their m
ellow.

  I blundered on. “I wonder how many lacrosse sticks are sold, anyway—say, in an average year? You know, what would be the total annual market in lacrosse sticks?”

  Again, it was as if I were a mosquito buzzing in their ears. They didn’t even bother to swat me away. The three of them focused on bending steamed wood. Lethal shards of birch began to fly across the kitchen. Having some history with wooden projectiles, I got the hell out of there.

  The lacrosse scheme burned hot and fast for a time, and I never saw an actual Abraham-made stick, but I had to appreciate the absurdist quality of it. They moved on to shaping wood for violins, with the announced intention of competing with Stradivarius. The family’s fortunes continued to diminish, though never for lack of trying. Push, push, push, never say die, pedal to the metal, balls-out effort always—such was the Abraham creed. And they communicated the capitalist virus to me.

  Ted Abraham also handed me another priceless gift: giving his daughter to me in marriage. Sheila and I got hitched in the church her family favored. A French-Canadian Catholic kid and a girl with a vaguely Middle Eastern background said their vows in a Protestant house of worship.

  Now the head of a household, I clutched the remainder of my settlement money a little tighter and looked around for opportunities. For a while I built houses with Ted, putting in full days on the construction site. But what I really wanted to do was open my own business. I liked the Abrahams’ wholehearted embrace of the capitalist dream, even if their specific practice left a little to be desired.

  I decided I would apply the Abraham style of fervor to my own ideas, just as soon as I could settle on one. So I started to search the town for opportunity. The year I graduated from high school, blue jeans were still forbidden in class. In the early fifties, blue jeans had the stigma of the working class, and anyone wearing them could be denied entry into a high-end restaurant or a supper club. In the sixties, though, that shit went out the window. The no-jeans rule was rescinded. Working class was cool, everything old was new again, and the fashion dictates of the period meant that every respectable teenager had to wear jeans, preferably Levi’s, and preferably vintage denim that was faded and soft.

  The two main clothing retailers in town were run by ancient shopkeepers who hadn’t kept up with the times. They sold “trousers,” and they always recommended proper cuffs, offering to calculate inseams with the paper measuring tapes that hung around their necks. I identified an untapped market, saw my opportunity, and grabbed it. Putting down a few grand of my own, I borrowed ten thousand dollars from my uncle at 15 percent annual interest. In spring 1971 I opened a jeans store I called the Pant Loft.

  The times were indeed a-changing in the changing rooms of the Pant Loft. The pent-up demand for denim was so great that the place took off like a rocket. I paid off the loan from my uncle in six months and watched as the cash flow steadily, magically increased. I had a cool shop, as hip as hip could be, or at least as hip could be in Cornwall. I burned incense, played rock ’n’ roll, and bought my own clothes at wholesale.

  So I was set. I had something I’d long dreamed of—my own business. I could have just continued on, with my future as a prosperous clothier ensured. But restlessness set in, an agitated sense of incompleteness that would become familiar. Soon enough, I began to sour on the Pant Loft. I remember when the breaking point came, one afternoon when I was trying to sell a pair of jeans to a mother and daughter.

  “I want these!” the fourteen-year-old girl was insisting, whining in a voice that was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  “They’re too tight,” her mom responded, poking and prodding at her child’s waist.

  “They’re perfect!” the teen screeched.

  “Can we have the next size up?” Mom asked.

  “Nooo!” wailed the girl, tears brimming. “I . . . want . . . these!”

  “They’re too tight, and you look like a hussy!” Mom snapped. “I’m not buying them for you!” She turned to me. “I’m right, aren’t I? The trousers don’t really fit well, do they?”

  Right then I saw my life rolling out in front of me. Sure, I would be a secure provider, but I would also have to endure an infinite number of scenes like this one. Jeans were not exactly a passion. While Pant Loft was a cool shop with plenty of music and atmosphere, for all I cared, I might as well have been selling plumbing fixtures. I had started the business because I saw opportunity, but the day-to-day life of a denim salesman grated on me.

  I cast around for an alternative idea. What did I enjoy? What did I love? What did I have a passion for? Well, I had always liked going out at night and having a good time.

  Alec Baldwin has a passage in his memoir, Nevertheless, where he fantasizes about alternate lives he would have liked to have lived. One such life is that of a nightclub owner. “I’d surround myself with a cast of lovably quirky characters. All men would envy me. Women, against their better judgment, would throw themselves at me nightly.”

  I’ve come to identify this image as the Alec Baldwin Fantasy of Club Owning, and I would eventually realize just how unreal it was. But back then, Alec and I might have had the same kind of stars in our eyes, because I decided to leave blue jeans behind and open a nightclub.

  There were two types of liquor licenses assigned in Ontario. The standard government license was heavily regulated and had last been available in the 1940s. Those licenses were highly sought after and became available when a shop owner decided to sell. But there was a second kind of license, one that was granted solely to hotels. Taking over an existing liquor license was the only way anyone could realistically break into the hospitality business. If I was going to flee the mother-and-daughter horrors of the rag trade, I’d have to buy into an existing hotel license.

  I was purchasing blue jeans at four dollars and selling them for eight. That’s an OK profit margin, but I knew the bar business had a much better one. A draft beer that cost you maybe a quarter could sell for a dollar twenty-five, a fivefold markup. I suppose there were other businesses I could have turned my eye on. I simply wanted to compete with my brothers, to find some way to rival them in terms of success.

  I scoped out the competition in Cornwall. Sleepy didn’t suffice to describe the state of nightlife and entertainment in town. It was more like narcoleptic. For people in their twenties, the only live music available came via local cover bands that churned out the hit parade of the day. There was a bar called Northway Hotel, which had a strip club on the lower level and a dance floor with live music, but only on the weekend. The owner was a middle-aged Yugoslavian immigrant who favored Elvis cover bands.

  Then there was the Lafayette House. Located in a run-down section of town, the hotel-tavern combo did its best to drag the neighborhood down even further. A squared-off bin of a building on First Street East, a block off the river, Lafayette was devoted to helping mill workers along their way to cirrhosis of the liver. The dive bar smelled of piss and whiskey and broken dreams. Pedestrians shivered as they walked by the door. The “hotel” part of the establishment was shabby and cheap, and only two of the eighteen rooms had their own bathrooms. The rest resembled single-room-occupancy lodging, more like a rooming house than a hotel, attracting transients and drunks.

  The Lafayette enjoyed the worst reputation in town. My parents would never have been caught dead stepping through the door. The only form of entertainment was the drunken brawls that erupted almost every night. As forlorn as the joint was, it had what I wanted, which was a liquor license.

  I poked around some and found that the proprietor wanted out, probably envisioning his golden years in a Florida beachfront condo. Selling the Pant Loft to a friend of mine, who went on to develop it into a successful chain, I used the proceeds to demonstrate my solvency to a bank, qualifying for a small-business loan from the Canadian government. I put $100,000 down on a $250,000 sale and bought the Lafayette House, lock, stock, and beer barrel. I was suddenly the proud owner of the land, the building, and—most i
mportant—the liquor license.

  I showed up at the place one afternoon in the spring of 1973, the new twenty-one-year-old owner of the premises, looking to make big changes. The mood in the place was drunk and sullen, with happy hour just about to turn sad. At first, the mill workers in the place paid me no mind. “All right!” I called, my words swallowed up by the seedy surroundings. “Everybody’s got to get out!” I was scared shitless.

  The clientele—the ones who didn’t have their foreheads glued to the bar in front of their half-finished beers—looked up, their eyes bleary and unfocused. Eh? Why, you little punk . . .

  “Now!” I added, shouting in an attempt to impress my will on the dozen or so drunks. “New ownership! We need the barroom cleared!”

  The room erupted. They barked their protests, but none of them bit, and eventually they left for bleaker pastures, staggering past me into the washed-out light of an Ontario afternoon.

  With my in-laws and friends helping, I embarked on an intense thirty-six-hour makeover, painting the walls black, installing new bars, and extending the existing ones. There were two separate spaces: a main room, which had an occupancy of three hundred, with the three bars and a stage, and a smaller one, which held about a hundred. As a crowning touch, I hung a mirror ball over the dance floor.

  I rechristened the place the Aardvark, after a character in the Ant and the Aardvark Saturday-morning cartoons, an anteater whose voice sounded like Jackie Mason with a corny Borscht Belt shtick.

  In the previous month I had paid several visits to Toronto, checking out the music scene. I hooked up with a booking agent named Ron Scribner, and he guided me on a search for a band to open my new place. Word had it that an explosive, newly formed blues group was blowing the roof off of clubs all over town.