by Tim Sultan
“Zero ring? What are you talking about, Sunny?”
“Oh, I haven’t told you about my Zero ring? That’s strange. Let me see now,” he began, tapping his ever-present cigarette. “Well, it was one of the very early traumas that I had in my life. I had an uncle. Uncle Tony. He was my mother’s only brother and she loved him dearly. So did I. He was very quiet and he left a lot to the imagination so that one had to fill in the gaps—and that with which a child fills those gaps is always more magnificent than the truth, aye? Well, he was drafted into the army during the war. I must have been about nine or ten. Uncle Tony ended up in Guam, which was the base for many of the operations in the Pacific. It was susceptible to Japanese bombings and we were very fearful as to what might happen to Uncle Tony. I remember how the Daily News would give accounts of dogfights and of how many American planes had been shot down. So we were always very aware of the war and the importance of Guam to what was taking place.
“Well, Uncle Tony was a machine gunner. What exactly that meant I wasn’t sure, but when we used to play war, I was always my uncle Tony. I would find exhaust pipes that fell off cars and trucks—in those days, you hit any kind of bump, half the car would fall off. So I would find exhaust pipes and I would pretend they were machine guns.
“Uncle Tony used to write what were called victory letters. Well, I couldn’t read these victory letters because, to tell the truth, I couldn’t read at all. You see, I was dyslexic and back then they didn’t know about these things so they regarded you as being somewhat stupid. It hurts me even now when I think about it. I went to Catholic school and when I considered the nuns who I thought were supposed to be instilled with qualities of understanding and mercy and love, I’d like to think that they would have at least been able to extend themselves to a greater degree than they did. They tended to help those children who were very adept, who were smarter, rather than those of us who had some kind of handicap. They gave assistance more to those that had it, not to those who needed it. That didn’t make any sense. In hindsight, I think, ‘My goodness, how could an individual who was so educated have been so stupid and insensitive as to not know that you don’t help those who have it, you help those that need it?’ And God knows, I needed their help and I didn’t get it.”
Sunny paused and looked down the bar, his expression suddenly pained. The remaining customers were clustered in the corner, talking amongst themselves. He lit a new cigarette. Sunny’s way of storytelling could be so digressive that both he and listener often forgot the topic.
“Sunny, go on about Uncle Tony,” someone said.
“Forgive me for going off like that, but that’s my way. So, I couldn’t read but my mother would read the victory letters to us and to what degree that he could, Uncle Tony would say how he was. The way mail was sent, all communications had to go through some authority. That speaks to the secrecy that was considered necessary to fight a war. The letters were short but what they really validated was, ‘He is alive.’ Or at least he was alive when he wrote to us.
“Anyway, at some pernt, we received a victory letter and inside the letter was an aluminum ring and my Uncle Tony wrote: ‘This ring was made from a Japanese Zero that I shot down and I am sending it as a gift to Sunny.’
“Wow. A Japanese Zero! I was so proud. I put that ring on my ten-year-old finger. My pinky, actually. That gives you an idea of the size of the ring. I leave the house and I’m going to brag to all my friends. I was so full of enthusiasm. I ran to the White Rock pier over by Van Dyke Street. Half the neighborhood seemed to work there and we never had to buy a soda in all of our childhood lives. We’d go to the plant and peek in and they’d give us a case and we’d hang the bottles from ropes in the water to keep them cool. Like that.
“Anyway, we all hung out by the pier. It had to be around the beginning of summer. The Brooklyn Eagle would come by every year and give each of us a dime to dive naked from the piers into the river. They’d photograph us and they would use that to announce the beginning of summer. We always swam naked. No girls were allowed. There weren’t any press people taking pictures there that day but it was about that time of year.
“So I knew everyone would be at the pier and I ran down there to do as kids do—to brag to my friends that my uncle shot down this Zero. We were all so conscious of the war. If you were a four-year-old kid you knew there was a war, some place where your father or your uncle or a relative was fighting. It was such an effort by the whole of America, or at least the America I knew, which was this little corner of Red Hook. We never threw a can away. They’d collect in piles on the street and we knew that those piles would be taken away to build tanks out of. So, I ran to the docks and I shouted, ‘Guys, look what I got!’
“ ‘What the fu-uck is that?’ someone called out.
“ ‘A ring,’ I said. ‘My uncle Tony shot down a Japanese Zero and he made me this ring out of it.’
“There was one guy and I’m gonna say his name. I don’t like to say names when I tell stories but if he’s alive and he ever hears this story from anyone, I want him to know that he broke my heart. Richie Ross. I’ll never forget him. These guys, some of them were a bunch of bananas, and Richie Ross—he was one of the bullies of the crowd. I don’t know how old he was but he seemed to be a giant to me. He and his cousin, Goofy Gilbride, they were always bullying and once I stabbed Goofy Gilbride in the leg when he went too far with his teasing. He had to have been young and soft because the blade was so dull and it would have just bent ordinarily but it went in deep. Should have cut him in the balls, actually.
“Well, Richie Ross said, ‘Let me see that Japanese Zero ring.’
“I can’t say I gave it to him. I took it off my pinky and I held it up and he snatched it out of my hand. And then he proceeded to stick it on his little penis. I remember how he pulled his skin—we weren’t circumcised in those days—and he managed to get it on! He really stuck it back there and I cried, ‘Give me my Zero ring!’
“ ‘I got your fuckin’ Japanese Zero ring. You want it, you come and take it!’
“He was sort of dancing around in circles and shaking his little dicky. I said, ‘Come on, Richie. Give me my ring. My uncle shot down a Japanese Zero and made me that ring and I want it. Please, Richie.’
“ ‘I got it. You want it. You come and take it.’
“I said, ‘I’m not going to take it. Give me my fuckin’ ring!’
“Meantime, his little dicky started to get hard. Here’s this little ring stuck on his little prick and it’s choking him, you see? And he’s trying to get it off now, and he can’t get it off because the more he tries, the harder he gets.
“At that pernt, he was almost crying from the pain of it. So he jumps into the cold water figuring that’s going to make his prick go down and he’ll get the ring off. And the ring does get loose and it comes off and it sinks to the bottom of the Mississippi-Hudson River.
“I’m laughing now as I’m telling you this, but I cried. I cried. I got home and my mother—she was so proud of my uncle and she said, ‘Sunny, where’s your ring?’ and I told her I was down at the docks and it came off my finger in the water and it sank. I couldn’t tell the truth. How was I going to tell the truth? How could I? That day, I hated the fucking Japanese, but I hated Richie Ross more!”
The bar was quiet. Pinky Tomlin had stopped crooning on the radio long ago and Sunny smoked and we sipped our bottles. “Sunny, that’s a beautiful story beautifully told,” I finally said. “But…why do you call it the Mississippi-Hudson River?”
“Timmy, those docks. I think about them now and I realize folks won’t really understand if I just call it the Hudson River. Calling it the Mississippi-Hudson conveys the idea that we all had a little of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in us—though we had more fun there than those two ever had. We had everything. Everything came here, everything went from here, and the adventures we would have, they weren’t make-believe like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. They were real.
; “The cops used to come with their billy clubs and we would run under the pier and they would yell, ‘Come out, you little shits!’ and we’d yell, ‘Brass button, blue coat, can’t catch a fuckin’ nanny goat!’
“We never meant harm by it. We were basically good. But we did some bad shit. The ships would sometimes send a launch boat to shore and tie it up to a dock and the men would go to buy supplies. We’d steal the boat and then let it go so it’d drift away. You think of the sailors who came here from all around the world and when they got here, this is what they thought New York was. But this wasn’t New York. It was Red Hook. The people who were born and raised down here, we were different. Those people who lived in other neighborhoods, across Hamilton Avenue or even here in the projects, they graduated high school. Some went to college. We were like urchins down here. We grew up in a culture that was unique to Red Hook. We didn’t know anything about what those people knew and we didn’t know why we didn’t like them but we didn’t like them. We had this thing we used to say, ‘We’re the boys from Red Hook you hear so much about/ Every time we go down the street you hear the people shout/ Here come the boys from Red Hook you hear so much about!’ We loved being talked about that way. We took pride in being bad because it was our notoriety. We weren’t acclaimed for being good. Or for being educated. We were notorious. That’s the way it was. We tended to be badder than most. And those who weren’t as bad as most, pretended to be bad as most.
“But I wasn’t bad in the sense that I wanted to hurt anybody. If you hurt somebody, you hurt yourself more. You know what I mean, Timmy. Jon. Jimmy. I could tell you a lot of stories that took place on those docks, and I’m sorry for some of the things we did because those poor guys didn’t deserve it. You realize when you start talking about these things that when you’re young you try to hide a lot of the shit you did from yourself. You don’t allow yourself to realize the full impact of what you’ve done. But when you begin to talk about it thirty, forty, fifty years later, like we’re doing right now, you remember the things you’d think you’d forget. You don’t forget. In fact, the older you get, the more you remember the stuff with a clarity that you could never conceive you would have. You remember with regret, but what you also remember is the poetry of it. I mean, all these things that have taken place, it’s what you are. You are everything you’ve ever done. So, after all these years, you throw a lot of the bullshit, a lot of the excuses away. I was never malicious. I wasn’t the kind who ever set out with a mind to hurt anyone. Not like Richie Ross and Goofy Gilbride.
“In a way, remembering this as I am tonight, I’m reliving it again, in a different way. You need the time between the experience and the time of remembrance. It’s like wine that needs to ferment. Wine has to have the time in order to give birth to something really beautiful. And experience is the same way. It takes a lot of time to go from life to art, but if you wait long enough, it’ll give birth to poetry. It has to be that way. I really enjoy remembering in the way I do. I wouldn’t want to remember what I did yesterday because it hasn’t fermented properly. It’d be cheap wine!”
Sunny belonged to a vanishing breed of barstool rhetorician, which in him seemed to have reached its apotheosis. He strung words together not only into a few memorable sentences but into long luminous paragraphs, the beginning, the middle, and the end of his tales already perfectly formed. He did this effortlessly and without prior rehearsal, his mind seemingly sharpened rather than dimmed by liquor.
“Anyway, that was the story of the Japanese Zero. It was shot down in Guam and sunk in the Mississippi-Hudson River.”
* * *
9
Young Virginia Woolf
Sunny’s was an immensely romantic place, but actual romance was hard to come by. The ratio of men to women at the bar in those days was Alaskan. When a new woman did walk through that door on a Friday, it was as startling as spotting a bird in flight while midway across the ocean. You were filled with the same wonder—that this creature had arrived here; the same curiosity—at what motivated her to wander so far from whatever world she was usually at home in; and above all, you were usually filled with the same hope—that this being would come over and perch next to you and keep you company as you sailed on through the night.
This occurred very seldom. Sunny’s was far off most migratory paths.
Overtly making advances toward a woman was not prohibited by Sunny. This was still a bar and we were still men. But behaving honorably was paramount. I rarely saw Sunny intercede to deliver a woman from unwanted advances because it was understood that being disrespectful to any person here was being disrespectful to Sunny and to most of the men, being put out of his bar would be as crushing an expulsion as any from life’s feast. So a kind of old-fashioned decorousness dictated the men’s behavior—no doubt in part because many of the men were older (I overheard one septuagenarian socialist say to a young off-duty waitress one night after she had affectionately squeezed his arm, “Do you think it might be possible for you and I to make sweet love all night long?”), but also because the laws of attraction and alcohol and rash concupiscence that usually misgovern our actions seemed to be in suspension here. Or as Sunny would put it, “At my bar, people are able to be more than what they are, not less than what they are, as is typically the case in bars.”
My own amatory experiences at Sunny’s were limited not just by the scarcity of women but by my relative greenness in matters of love. The only encounter that came to any fruition occurred after I had been asked by a voluptuous brunette, who to my surprise had been eyeing me with unmistakable erotic contemplation, whether I’d come for a walk down to the pier to look at the water. The culmination of the experience—some kissing with beer on our breaths and brine in the air—was less the consummation of ardor than a sense of actually being consumed. She was the robust type.
More typical of my fumbling attempts to meet someone was the night I saw the Red Baron. I arrived one Friday evening, sat on a barstool, ordered a drink from Sunny, and, looking down the bar, saw at the far corner a strikingly beautiful woman. She was tall, wore her long hair simply, and had wrapped a red scarf around her neck. I immediately named her the Red Baron (though when a friend asked me to describe her the following day, I said she resembled “a young Virginia Woolf”—surely the first time the two historical figures have been conflated). I resolved to meet her after a few more sips, but when I turned to look again in her direction, she was putting on her coat and preparing to leave.
I leaned across the bar and said, “Sunny, please. Do you have something I can write on?”
Sunny had followed my gaze and guessed my intent.
“Not for nothing, Timmy,” he said as he handed me pen and paper, “but one never wants to be so blatant as to put one’s head in the guillotine.”
“Huh?”
“Let me put it this way. Although I am a great flirt, I am not and have never been an overt one. I always do it within the framework of respect and I always leave a question as to whether—‘Is he or is he not flirting?’—so I got a way out, aye?”
I still consider this some of the soundest advice I have ever had on the matter.
Instead of my phone number, I quickly wrote down the names of two books by Bohumil Hrabal, the great Czech writer known for customarily receiving his visitors while seated at a table in an ancient Prague tavern that I imagined was not entirely unlike Sunny’s. This was a time when I believed that knowing a person’s favorite books said more about them than anything they could say in passing during a few moments in a bar, and so I was going to let an old Czech do the talking for me. As she passed behind me I swiveled on the barstool and said, “You dropped this,” and handed her the folded piece of paper. She took it from me and, with a puzzled look, continued to the door. I thought to myself as I turned back to my beer, It’s all right, Tim. We’re all stumbling through life.
The Red Baron never returned. I like to think that circumstances intervened. That she was getting married or
that she had left on an around-the-world trip the next day, perhaps picking up a couple of novels while passing through Brno or Ostrava.
Over the years, as more women and younger customers began to come to Sunny’s, I would observe other notes being passed. Later, I would become the courier, and occasionally the recipient, of some of these letters. Some were left beneath tips and some were sent via the actual U.S. Postal Service. One was a dispatch written on a coaster at another bar and sent as a postcard. The most unusual communication I would receive was a large manila envelope sent by a young woman from Minneapolis I had met only once. It contained a college term paper she had written on the overlooked role that Minnesotans played in the Spanish-American War—she asked what advice I might have in turning it into a musical.
There is one note that I still carry with me to this day, one that I consider as romantic a gesture as has ever been made to me by a stranger.
On a rare busy night, I was helping Sunny ferry beers, as I had begun to do. There were two women seated close to the middle of the bar and engrossed in conversation. They must have tried and failed to get my attention—the next time I hurried by, one of them had left a note flat on the bar, a request for drinks and more Goldfish crackers. As I returned with their order, I looked at them more closely. There was something of a cowgirl about the one on the left with her checked shirt, her blue jeans, and hair that actually was the color of late-summer prairie. We spoke for several minutes, during which she told me she had come to the city from Oklahoma and that she built theater sets, and I told her how I had once written a note at this bar and how I had passed it to a woman who had reminded me of a young Virginia Woolf. I was called away and as I looked back a minute later I saw that she was writing again. Other customers kept me busy and as she was getting ready to leave later that night, she came to where I was standing and silently handed me a slip of paper and turned and walked out. On one side she had written “Marisa” and on the other she had written from memory: