Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  I nodded my head in agreement. I had yet to hear Sunny be outright contemptuous of anyone. The one instance in which I saw him lose his patience, he addressed a self-appointed avant-gardist who was being a drunken nuisance with “Listen, you fuckin’ banana,” and the man looked equally stricken and dumbfounded.

  “Well, it wasn’t anything he did to me personally,” he said, turning to include me. “What happened was, I was hired as a teaching assistant to Larry Rivers, who had been appointed to teach a summer workshop at Southampton College. It was the 1960s and a period in which I was quite involved in the downtown Manhattan art world and I was just beginning to make a name for myself.”

  One of the Richards must have given him a surprised look. “I don’t want to make it sound like I’m blowing my own horn,” Sunny quickly added. “Understand, I took my art very seriously for a time.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “Larry Rivers would come in once a week on his motorcycle, like he was James Dean—a middle-aged James Dean—and critique the students’ work. But the reality of it was he didn’t teach a damn thing. A lot of people enrolled in the class and mostly the students were dabblers and they were always going to remain that way, aye? And these poor students were there because they admired him, but whatever talent they had, Larry Rivers would destroy them. He was so shameful in his manner he would even cause people to cry.”

  A customer beckoned Sunny from down the bar and he excused himself. They exchanged a few words and Sunny reached into a drawer to sell the man a pack of black market Marlboros, but not before undoing the wrapper and slipping one out as his commission. Sunny smoked a great deal, being one of those people who considers a drink diminished without an accompanying cigarette and a story not properly told without one of each in hand.

  “I’ll never forget this older woman,” he resumed after he returned, puffing on his commission. “Her husband had died, she had raised a family, and her kids were off on their own and she wanted to rededicate her life. Her paintings were simple, Grandma Moses–like. And Larry Rivers, he tells her, ‘You’re eighty years old, you’ve raised a family, you probably bake a great apple pie. Why don’t you go home and bake pies?’ ”

  He looked at each of us in turn, his expression deeply indignant.

  “Isn’t that crass? Isn’t that cruel? Isn’t that terrible?”

  We all agreed that it was.

  “What would it have taken for him to say, ‘You know, you’re doing very nice. Your space is this, your color is this, it has a charm, you’ve captured something really unique in the subject matter.’ One could say a million things just to give her the feeling that what she was doing was worth continuing. After all, when you’re eighty years old, you’re not really doing this to make it in the art world. Like most people who paint, who play an instrument, who write, you do it because you love it. This is something she is going to do until the day she dies—if you treat her properly. But he put tears in her eyes and I wanted to get up there and belt the son of a bitch! Larry Rivers, he wasn’t just an ordinary asshole. He was a real asshole, aye?”

  Sunny excused himself again to attend to more business. One Richard looked at the other and turned his palms up. “I guess even saints have their enemies,” he said. “The Dalai Lama’s is China. Sunny’s is fuckin’ Larry Rivers.”

  —

  AS IT NEARED ten o’clock, a brunette named Debbie, who bore a strong resemblance to Genevieve, the world-weary waitress in my favorite movie, The Last Picture Show, pulled a stool into the center of the bar and, guitar across her lap, began a cheerful dismantling of the human heart. There seemed to be only two kinds—the cheating and the broken. At the bar a few feet away, a Stetson-wearing customer named Fred made a show of turning his back to her. He was a singer as well, who usually accompanied himself with an electric guitar and a single foot-drum. Although there were others who would play intermittently from opening to last call, this was prime time at Sunny’s, the hour when the bar generally began to fill, and these two feuded for this time slot with the intensity of late night talk show hosts. Both leaned as heavily on Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Tubb as they did on Ray Price and Patsy Cline. There was often more than a little of Red River in Red Hook on Friday nights.

  “Now, what can I get you, Timmy?” Sunny asked when he finally made his way back to my end of the bar. I had yet to be served but I felt no impatience. No one at Sunny’s, on either side of the bar, was ever in a hurry.

  Though usually a beer drinker of undiscriminating taste, impulsively I decided to ask for something different tonight. I ordered the first cocktail that came to mind. “You would like a Manhattan?” Sunny frowned. “Isn’t that like going to Pittsburgh and ordering a Philly cheesesteak? We’re in Brooklyn, Timmy.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. Well, what do you think I should have?”

  “I’m only bustin’ your balls. You know I’m not a real bartender by any stretch of the imagination and the truth of the matter is that I don’t have the knowledge as how to make a Manhattan. But…why don’t you have a berlermaker?”

  “A berlermaker?”

  “Yes. A pour of whiskey into a beer. It’s what the men working longshore used to drink.”

  “A boilermaker?”

  “That’s what I said, Timmy. A berlermaker,” Sunny said with a grin. “Let me get that for you.”

  As I watched Sunny make my boilermaker, pouring Four Roses whiskey into a collins glass and topping it off with Budweiser at a devastating ratio of one-to-one—a drink that would become “my drink” in the same way that I had begun to think of Sunny’s as “my bar”—I thought to myself, not for the last time, that there was something timeless about him. He seemed to be a spirit sentenced to presiding over this bar for perpetuity. A kindlier version of Lloyd, eternity’s bartender in The Shining.

  I should have known better than to try and order a Manhattan. Sunny made conversation, not cocktails. He was, in fact, singularly inexpert at bartending. When one night someone asked whether they could have a martini, Sunny replied, “Yes, you may…but you’re going to have to come around the bar and make it yourself!” So they did.

  When he wasn’t outright surrendering the bartending duties to customers, he was improvising as he went along. A wise guy’s mistress once asked whether Sunny had any garnish for the Sex on the Beach she had ordered (God knows what he had put in it). “Certainly,” he replied, without missing a beat and taking one of her bronzed hands into his. “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs,” he said. “Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes. Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.” He paused and gave her a meaningful look. “What is it else? A madness most discreet,” and handed her the glass. Somewhere, a maraschino cherry gave notice that night.

  Sunny was staunchly impractical as a proprietor as well. Rather than install an ice machine, a bar fixture as essential as a Solomon Burke record, he emptied and refilled standard ice cube trays all week long until, by Friday, enough had accumulated to supply his one night of business. He kept the ice in a cooler below the bar, groping around with his hands when a drink required rocks. Although the digital age had arrived in America some years ago, Sunny continued to play beaten-up cassettes on a monophonic stereo. When Fred and Debbie weren’t jockeying for the stage (the stage being whatever spot no one happened to be standing in) and there weren’t fiddlers or accordionists communing in a booth, he would open a drawer and search through his modest selection: The Songs of Audie Murphy. Marilyn Monroe. Billie Holiday. Julie London. Nat King Cole. Jimmy Durante, on whom Sunny must have modeled himself during his formative years. He usually put on his most prized recording, Chet Baker’s It Could Happen to You, several times a night. No one seemed to mind.

  —

  SUNNY’S WAS AN easy place to come on one’s own. The bar was a single long room (there was a back room where customers would go to make a call from a wooden phone booth but which was rarely in use otherwise). The oak bar took up the en
tire length of one side and three booths of sea-green Naugahyde benches most of the other. But there always seemed to be something to look at that one hadn’t fully noticed before. For the art lover, there was the row of framed illustrations of semi-nude boudoir beauties by the late French boudoir-beauty specialist Maurice Milliere. Near the front door, one could examine the charcoal portrait of Sunny’s great-grandfather and founder of the bar, Raffaele di Martini. Or a mussel-shell sculpture of unknown origin. For the lover of nautical themes, reproductions of sloops and brigantines battling high seas hung salon-style on the wall opposite the bar, while high above in the shadows, the U.S.S. South Dakota and other models of sailing ships sat in quiet repose, the dust in their miniature riggings a meditation on time itself.

  There was also a full-size anchor, a guitar-like instrument made from a bedpan, a bust of JFK, a child’s pair of coil-springed steel “Satellite Jumping Shoes” from the days of Sputnik and Laika, and a black-and-white photograph of several New York City harbor policemen standing on a patrol boat named the Lieutenant Ronaghan. There were doohickeys, thingamabobs, and whatsits. To the left of a bar mirror, a perfect set of shark’s teeth gaped like a monster’s misplaced dentures while to the right, a large button read, “Season’s Greetings from the White House.” A pair of ancient, cracked boxing gloves dangled from a nail and several homemade baseballs were arranged in a bowl like a boy’s whimsical still life. Meanwhile, a single moldering leather shoe with a hole in its sole had a display shelf all to itself.

  Midway between the two ends of the bar hung a copper wheelhouse bell. Occasionally a customer, not able to resist temptation, would strike the clapper, a near certain giveaway that he was new to the bar since he had just unwittingly announced that the next round was on him.

  The task of lighting Sunny’s was a collaborative effort on the part of a miscellany of fixtures. A couple of Pabst Blue Ribbon chandeliers and an electric Schaefer clock in the shape of a beer barrel were in charge of the bar, two Budweiser sconces the glassware shelves. The windowsill came under the jurisdiction of a pair of ship lanterns—one starboard green, the other port-side red—while responsibility for illuminating the room as a whole fell to the pale yellow bulbs fastened to the ceiling fans. The job of mood lighting was borne by several strings of colored Christmas lights and the odd hurricane lamp. In unison, they produced a gentle, exceedingly pleasant light, though some recesses of the bar were still so dark that if one had the urge to examine the back of one’s hand, matches might need to be employed.

  When one tired of looking at the wall art, there was always a diverting soul to draw one’s attention. A private investigator and neighborhood activist named John sported a mustache that had not been trimmed since Abraham Beame was mayor and John was deputy city council president. When unspooled, it extended to his knees. A downhearted-looking truck driver named Tony with brilliant blue eyes, a fondness for western shirts, and, as I would learn in time, a life story sadder than a mill horse’s (and the countenance to show for it) liked to stand in a corner with a guitar when no one was listening and sing songs such as “There Goes My Heart” and “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” with a delivery as unaffected by pitch as by any trace of happiness.

  Another driver, this one of limousines, named Bobby had been inspired by Sunny to form a classical theater company several years earlier. He had named it the Brooklyn Stage Company and its earliest productions had been works by O’Neill, Beckett, and Shakespeare. Rehearsals had often taken place in the bar and each of the plays had had a short run at various makeshift stages in the neighborhood. But customers could be forgiven for thinking that the plays had never really ended. Bobby was a declaimer and there was a correlation between the amount of Irish whiskey he drank and the frequency and fervor of his declamations.

  “I dreamed a dream tonight,” he might suddenly announce to no one in particular.

  “And so did I,” would come the reply from a few heads down the bar.

  “Well, what was yours?”

  “That dreamers often lie,” Sunny would shout.

  “In bed asleep, while they do dream things true. Oh, then I see Queen Mab has been with you,” Bobby would call out triumphantly and empty his glass. “Hit me with another one.”

  As I was coming to learn, when it came to Shakespeare, Sunny could go toe-to-toe with anyone. Furthermore, he himself often sounded Shakespearean without intending to. One night a soprano would spontaneously sing “Mon Coeur S’ouvre à ta Voix” from the opera Samson and Delilah, and Sunny toasted the woman and her group of friends by saying, “I raise my glass to you. May it suffice to touch you all!”

  The most fascinating object of study of all, of course, was Sunny himself. Sunny was so inextricably a part of the bar that if I didn’t know better, I could have been easily convinced that both of them had come into being in the same instant, fully formed.

  But as it turned out, Sunny was something of a recent returnee and the bar had only come to be known as “Sunny’s” not long before I arrived. While the bar had been in his family its entire existence, Sunny’s uncle John, along with Sunny’s father, Ralph, had jointly run it for nearly all those years and by habit or tribute, some of the customers still referred to it as “John’s.” (If one looked closely, the trim of the awning above the door still read John’s Bar.) The two brothers had never moved out of the neighborhood or indeed the house they were raised in, the tenement building adjoining the bar. At Red Hook’s height of activity during World War II, the bar was one of a few dozen on the waterfront and only closed for a couple hours each day—between last call and breakfast. But when the wartime industry came to a halt and the ships began to leave and the neighborhood emptied out, John and Ralph watched the other bars close and the number of customers dwindle every year. The only adaptation they made to the changing times was to cut back the hours until by the mid-1980s they only opened during the day and only on weekdays, never making as much as a hundred dollars by nightfall.

  Sunny, too, had joined the neighborhood flight, leaving days after high school graduation with no intention of ever living in Red Hook again. For thirty years, he followed callings that took him to SoHo and the Village, to California and as far as India, only paying his parents brief visits during that time. He didn’t return home for good until he found himself in the darkened woods of middle age, off course and out of places to go and in need of family and familiarity. Penniless, he began helping his father and his uncle with the bar, taking over at midday for the few steadies who came in during the afternoon.

  After Ralph’s death in 1987, Sunny was left with the uneasy company of Uncle John, whom he tried hard not to antagonize. By constitution, Uncle John was intolerant of nearly everything and everyone and was universally opposed to change. When a retired police detective bought a brick warehouse across the street with plans to refurbish it in the hope of a neighborhood revival, John would stand on his stoop once a day, shake his fist and say, “That summabitch,” and go back inside. He rarely drank and detested singing or reveling of any kind. His only expectation for the future was a series of drowsy days tapering off until he died, and the bar with him.

  One Friday, Sunny asked whether he could stay open past sundown and after several “Why the fucks,” he received his uncle’s reluctant blessing. Sunny invited a neighbor who played the fiddle who, in turn, invited his musician friends. Uncle John, at several instances, rapped on the bar ceiling from the room above, but by the end of the night the bar had a few hundred dollars in the till. From then on, Uncle John gloomily agreed to let Sunny run the bar one night a week as he wished. After he died, Sunny closed the bar entirely. Except for Friday nights.

  * * *

  6

  The Aleph

  “I went along the wet street through one of the quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side there stood in the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed with pleasure. Old and serene…often during the day I let my eyes rest on its rough surfac
e….This time, too, the wall was peaceful and serene and yet something was altered in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall….Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not noticed it….Now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written. I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain bright letters dancing and then disappearing, returning and vanishing, once more….Whoever hoped for any result from a display like that was not very smart….Why have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were:

  MAGIC THEATER. ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY.”

  —HERMANN HESSE, Steppenwolf

  * * *

  7

  Balzanos and Travias

  Sunny Balzano was born in August 1934, in a cold-water apartment next door to the bar, the same room his father had been delivered in twenty-six years earlier. He was the first child of his parents, Raffaele and Josephine, and the last to be delivered at home. His mother would give birth to six more children—Frank, Ralph, Rose, Joanne, Robert, and Louis. But it was to Sunny that she would always have the closest bond. She nursed him through the first year of his life as one day he would nurse her through the last year of hers.

  The first sounds of the world beyond the windows that he would have heard would have been the lunch whistle letting loose hundreds of dockworkers, their shouts as they rushed into the Balzano family bar next door, the bleating of foghorns from the harbor, the backfiring of trucks, the cutting of steel by welders at the iron works across the street. And among the first smells he may have smelled were those of paint and shellac and turpentine from Miles Paints, the small manufacturer next door where his father and grandfather worked intermittently. In a few years, Miles Paints would close and the Animal Hair Manufacturing Company, a company that processed horse, cow, and boar hair for brushes and brooms and violin bows, would move in and periodically a slaughterhouse truck would dump ears and tails and manes in piles behind the building. In the summer, the flies and stench of decaying flesh would seep into the Balzanos’ rooms despite the shut windows and Sunny would think back fondly on the fumes of shellac and turpentine the way others remember the fragrance of apple blossoms wafting in the bedroom window of their childhood home at night.