Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  Can a sense of criminality linger in a neighborhood like mercury in groundwater? Most New Yorkers would scoff at this. It is the matter-of-fact nature of modern cities to be ever-changing, buildings razed, buildings erected, expressways inserted through the very space once occupied by families sitting down at the dinner table and couples talking in their beds, erasing all but the most notable events and personalities of an era. Many moments in our New York lifetimes, we step on the same pavement where precious life once bled out and we are, of course, unfazed. Nobody now walks along East 108th Street and feels a chill when they pass the spot where Ignazio Lupo was said to keep bodies on meat hooks at his infamous Murder Stable. Coney Island’s late Half Moon Hotel, from whose sixth-floor window mob turncoat Abe Reles (“the canary that sang but couldn’t fly”) took a fatal plunge, is mainly recalled only by the Jewish senior citizens who live in the retirement home that was built in its place. Whoever resides at 152 20th Street in Brooklyn, onetime home to Al Capone’s hangout the Adonis Social Club and scene of the 1925 Christmas Day Massacre, presumably does not sense Scarface’s spirit there. There are no haunted places in New York because no one can afford depreciating the real estate for such darkly sentimental reasons.

  But my new friend Sunny believed karma existed for neighborhoods as surely as for people. Accordingly, Red Hook, in its dereliction, was still suffering the consequences of misdeeds that had taken place long ago. Or, as Sunny would put it, “The residue of these actions is experienced by the children of their children.”

  There was a more prosaic reason for Red Hook’s current state, too: the late ripples of the Industrial Revolution. Containerization in shipping and the automation of the docks eliminated most of the unskilled port jobs by the 1960s, and thirty years later nearly all the remaining maritime industry had moved to Port Newark–Elizabeth in New Jersey. The century-and-a-half-long tide of families that had arrived first from Holland, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Scandinavia, Italy, and eventually Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic had come to an end, and when their descendants decamped elsewhere, following jobs and fleeing circumstances, they left behind untended houses and crumbling piers. Nearly all of the eleven thousand people who remained in Red Hook lived in the public housing towers of “The Front,” while the few who remained in the homes near the harbor enjoyed a backwater existence scarcely still found in New York. Its inaccessibility, its insularity, the residue of a violent past—whatever the cause, Red Hook was quiet as a neglected cemetery in the spring of 1995 when I arrived. Sunny once described the provincialism of his youth to me by saying, “Red Hook never left Red Hook.” But in the present day, the inverse was true—the rest of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan never entered Red Hook and looking across the harbor at Staten Island at night was like looking across the Strait of Gibraltar at the coastline of an unknown continent.

  With scant industry, few stores, little traffic—the occasional car was usually either being driven by a student driver lurching down the empty streets or being towed to the neighborhood’s impound lot—much of Red Hook had even been forsaken by the criminals. There was no one left to rob. Instead of bodies, it was torched cars that were dumped on the cobblestones (the unaccountably beautiful sight of a joyride left ablaze in the middle of an intersection during a snowstorm one night has never left me). The last time anyone at the bar could recall a body being ditched, it had been spotted by a customer smoking his cigar out front. But, in this case, the body was still alive. Beaten and naked, the man ducked and crouched, trying to cover himself as he crept from the unlit dead end of the street toward the glow of the bar windows. When the customers inside learned what had happened they took up a collection of clothes—a shirt, a sweater, socks (no one remembers which selfless souls donated their pants and shoes)—and Sunny called a cab and stuck enough money into the stranger’s pocket for the ride back to wherever he came from. In the course of an evening, the wretch experienced the truth of the words of sixth-century Roman philosopher (and hero of mine) Boethius, who wrote of Lady Fortune: “This is the way she amuses herself; this is the way she shows her power. She shows her servants the marvel of a man despairing and happy within the single hour.”

  The neighborhood was so quiet that Sunny once impulsively bought a Central Park horse carriage with the idea that he would rent a horse and driver when the urge to ride around the neighborhood hit him. This was a typical thing for Sunny to do; he lived life sumptuously though he never had much money.

  Sunny never actually got around to hiring a horse. Eventually—and impulsively—Sunny bought a dark green 1951 Jeep Willys that he saw idle and friendless in front of a gas station. For a couple years he even drove it, though rarely more than a quarter mile from the bar and at a speed somewhere between a trot and gallop. Nowadays it is parked permanently out front of the bar, where the cab is used as a smoking room or, when it’s raining, as a phone booth.

  * * *

  4

  Arcadia

  I know now that I was lucky to arrive when I did—when Red Hook was still sleepy and beautiful and cut off from the rest of the world in ways that are hard to imagine anymore. The rest of the world was where I came from. I would never actually say this, of course, when asked during bar conversation. For a time, I simply answered, “I’m from Park Slope.” This didn’t always go over very well at Sunny’s. I was informed by one man that the women of Park Slope had more periods than a Hemingway novel. Another said he had been to a bar in Park Slope for a drink recently and that he hadn’t slept so well since church.

  Eventually, I began telling something closer to the truth.

  “I’m from no place.”

  I had no hometown and I was raised in somewhat nomadic circumstances. By age eleven, I was on my third continent. Born in Bangkok in the fall of 1967, within a week I boarded a plane with my mother, bound for Laos where my father, a Foreign Service officer, and three brothers were waiting. Our home was an American enclave outside the capital, Vientiane, a kind of Levittown transplanted to a tropical countryside. I would spend my first seven years there, a montage of paddy and jungle, water buffaloes and elephants, monks and candles, comic books and cookouts, geckos and cobras, dry and rainy seasons, monsoon floods and makeshift boats. I pummeled tethered balls and shot marbles with my American companions and hunted bare-handed for crabs and fish with Laotian families who visited from nearby farms. I was deputized by the women who arrived in the evening carrying baskets to collect cicadas that had singed their wings on the streetlights and dropped to the street. Each Buddhist New Year began with a days-long water balloon fight that seemingly the entire country took part in. Holidays took us every summer to a stretch of Malaysian coast where snake charmers competed for my attention with seaside ice-cream men. It was an existence that was the closest thing to Arcadia a child could know. There was a distant war in the mountains but it would be years before I knew what the words “Pathet Lao” and “Vietcong” meant.

  After an abrupt exodus and my father’s transfer to Saigon, my older brothers were sent to English boarding schools while my mother and I moved to Germany, her birth country. We lived in a village above the Rhine River chosen solely for its proximity to the forest. Our new home was at the foot of a mountain named after the biblical Mount of Olives, on whose flanks I seemed to spend endless afternoons, searching for mushrooms, evading Cheyenne and Lakota warriors, and hunting game with bow and arrow and a make-believe rifle, never killing anything but time. I attended a village school, learned German, and, by means of a newfound talent with a soccer ball, made friends in the schoolyard though I would always be known as “the American.” I was never sure what being American required since I had only ever been to Florida on brief visits to a set of paternal grandparents. However, I accepted my title as an honorific since I was the only one to bear it.

  After three years, I was told by my mother that we would be moving again, rejoining my father in a West African city which, I quickly discovered, was located onl
y four degrees from the equator. This detail impressed me very much; I was at an age when the equator was a place of distinction. It was like being told that we would be living next door to the North Pole or in the vicinity of the Marianas Trench. I expected pitiless sunshine by day and intolerable steaminess at night, colossal insects below and oscillating primates above. To my dismay the climate turned out to be wholly bearable and rather than being in the bush, our new house was in an outlying district of ranch-style homes concealed by lush gardens and concrete walls and occupied mostly by French, Lebanese, and middle-class West Africans. The only wildlife I regularly encountered were a neighbor’s pet antelopes, a bushbuck and a duiker, whose front legs had been purposefully broken and deformed as calves to slow any escape attempts and who came over periodically for their share of my breakfast cereal. After they were killed and eaten by local road builders, I took my revenge with bottle rockets fired at eye level.

  I was a tireless reader in a way I never would be again and during the hottest hours of the day, I retreated to a wall in our yard shaded by pines and lost myself in L’Engle, London, L’Amour, Grey, Steinbeck, Cornelius Ryan, and John Hersey as well as the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog, which I examined and reexamined for much of the year, entranced by its skateboard and bicycle and Daisy rifle treasures. Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man was my vade mecum for much of the seventh grade, read aloud one night by flashlight in tents pitched along the ocean to a multinational audience of fellow Scouts. I studied my father’s whereabouts—he was forever traveling, it seemed—in a C. S. Hammond world atlas. Nouakchott, Niamey, N’Djamena, Ouagadougou, Lomé, Timbuktu, Dakar.

  My nearest friends, two brothers from Bremen, lived a mile away and the shortcut to their home took me along a dirt path that descended into a shrubby valley. All the trees here had been cut down for firewood, leaving behind hillsides of red clay and patchy brushland, divided by a muddy gulch. A single wooden plank bridged the two sides.

  Occasionally on my travels, I would be spotted and chased by a group of local boys. There was no reason for these pursuits other than the one imposed by custom everywhere: I was the outsider and they were the pack. I was a fast runner and vigilant enough never to have been caught, always reaching the safety of my destination in time. But one afternoon my luck ran out. I fled down the footpath with several silent boys not far behind. When I neared the trench, I realized that what on other days had been a routine sprint, my legs against theirs, had become an ambush. The plank, my bridge to safety, had been shoved aside and I was momentarily trapped. Turning, I pulled out the slingshot that I carried by habit, loaded it with a stone, and pointed it at my nearest pursuer, crying “Arrête!” By then, he was only steps away, a boy my age, ahead of the rest. I said that I would shoot if he came closer. We were like any two children, both unsure if this was still a game. Whether he took another step and whether I intentionally released my grip, I couldn’t say for certain, but the stone hit him in the forehead point-blank. We stood stunned, by the blow, by the act. A tear slid down his cheek. “Il faudra m’emmener avec vous à New York,” he said. You will have to take me with you to New York.

  I escaped that day, scrambling across the muddy channel to the far side of the ravine as the others arrived. In the remaining year that I spent there, I never again saw the boy who believed that all Americans lived somewhere called New York, but the core idea behind his words stayed lodged in my mind. New York was a place one wanted to reach.

  Although my father was born and raised in East New York, he never talked about his childhood, its scarcities still a source of embarrassment rather than pride at how far he had come. The first real emissaries from New York that I met were two Harlem Globetrotters who were on a tour of West Africa with the team. (There wasn’t a basketball court in the entire country so a swimming pool was drained and put into service.) I was worldly enough to know that New York wasn’t a place entirely inhabited by dazzling giants, but also starry-eyed enough to begin to muse about a future lived not on the Western prairies that I so often read and daydreamed about but high above skyscraper canyons. And after a record called Rapper’s Delight made its way across the Atlantic into my hands, the deal was more or less sealed.

  It would take another decade before I made my way to New York with the misty ambition of becoming a writer. In the years between, I returned to Germany, where I was admitted to the realms of puberty and taverns at the same age, and then attended college in the Midwest. My first apartment wasn’t an aerie above Manhattan, as I once imagined it would be, but instead, a ground-level arrangement on a quiet outer-borough street. A good word from a family friend landed me a job with literary lion George Plimpton of The Paris Review. In a strange coincidence, at about my age, my father, a top-of-his-class graduate of Yale Law School, had arrived for a job interview with Plimpton’s father, the renowned attorney Francis Plimpton, only to be summarily dismissed for the blunder of showing up bareheaded. Happily, this Plimpton didn’t stand on such ceremony. He would treat me with unexpected regard, giving more weight to my judgment than it deserved. And after I hit a game-winning home run at last light during a Central Park softball game against a crosstown rival, he looked at me with another kind of respect: the next time a former First Lady, twice-widowed and notoriously private, came over for pizza at the end of the workday, he invited me to stay for dinner.

  The first bona fide writer that I met through my work with George Plimpton displayed a gun and offered me a drink when I arrived to deliver him his edited manuscript mid-morning; the second proposed oral pleasure. Another fooled around with my girlfriend (an occupational hazard in the literary field). I politely turned down the first two and threatened the third. Despite my bravado, I was reserved by temperament and I would sometimes think that I was in over my head in New York, an immigrant from the provinces. It was an impression that wouldn’t entirely disappear for several years—at least until I met Sunny. He made one feel as though one had been waiting all one’s life to arrive here.

  After a year with Plimpton, I moved on to work at Columbia University as an aide-de-camp to a professor who was once the world’s authority on Raymond Chandler but was now entering his senescence. I traveled an hour by subway twice a day, carried along as if by underground river (the 2 and 3 lines being stand-ins for Acheron and Styx, respectively), and from time to time, in the close quarters of our cars, I would look up from Philip Marlowe’s troubles and notice a distant kinsman by the familiar afro-francophone accent or the tribal cheek scars once so common in that part of the world. I’d often think of my encounter by the ravine and of the two boys who wanted to come to New York. Only one of us made it here, so far as I knew and could ever know.

  * * *

  5

  Two Rivers

  “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. And the impression I had of him was ‘What an asshole.’ ”

  I had just taken what was fast becoming my usual seat, a somewhat secluded spot in the deepest recess of the bar from which one could watch the entire room. Not far from me, Sunny was in conversation with two men, both named Richard. They belonged to a certain breed of homesteaders of which there were then no more than about a dozen in Red Hook—middle-aged painters and sculptors who had been drawn by the rock-bottom housing prices and the promise of a laid-back lifestyle. All seemed to be at the bar every Friday night.

  “Who’s an asshole?” I called out. In those early days it was often so quiet at Sunny’s that one could both overhear and take part in every conversation that was occurring.

  “Larry Rivers, Timmy.”

  Sunny was one of those men who added a “y” to names whenever he could. All Sals were Sally, Bobs were Bobby. I was Timmy. Larry Rivers didn’t need it.

  I looked at him blankly, the name not immediately registering.

  “He’s an artist,” Sunny added, not condescendingly.

  “Yes, I know who he is.” I had actually once met the so-called grandfather of pop art in
Plimpton’s living room. “What did Larry Rivers ever do to cross you?”

  In our brief friendship, I had already learned that Sunny not only had a passion for acting and theater (he kept a copy of his favorite play, John Guare’s The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year, on a shelf behind the bar and during lulls he would sometimes put on his reading glasses and study the underlined passages), but that he also devoted much of his day to painting. Self-taught, he had taken it up in his twenties and from our conversations, I surmised that he had probably spent more time painting than he had engaged in any other single calling. He acknowledged he had never sold a painting, though—it seemed to be a matter of pride, as he was unwilling to put a price on his works. The closest he came was a bartering arrangement early in his career with the owner of an Upper East Side restaurant where he spent a year painting murals in exchange for French dinners. The restaurant and murals were still there. But one didn’t have to go all the way uptown to see a Sunny Balzano. He had converted a storeroom in the rear of the bar into his studio and when I went to visit him there one afternoon, I saw large abstract paintings whose overlapping lines and dismembered figures were reminiscent of Willem de Kooning. His greatest influence, he told me that day, just ahead of Picasso and Cézanne. There was nothing amateurish about his art, but I had assumed that he had always worked in the same monkish isolation that he presently found himself in. I hadn’t imagined him rubbing elbows with the likes of Larry Rivers.

  “He must have been a real son of a bitch, Sunny,” one of the Richards added. “You’re usually as genial as the goddamn Dalai Lama.”