by Tim Sultan
Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.
—To the Lighthouse, V. WOOLF
* * *
10
Speakeasy
Sunny was a man of particularly easy virtue. Though in many ways he had the habits and tastes of an old man, he had some of the appetites of a teenager in his lusty prime. He loved to be in love and his often-bawdy anecdotes suggested a lifelong love life of passing entanglements, the abundance of which would have put Errol Flynn to shame at his own comparative carnal inadequacy. Sunny was a bachelor’s bachelor, a role model to those customers who daydreamed about a less domesticated existence than the ones they found themselves in. So when he announced that he had met a woman with whom he had fallen in love, a Norwegian artist several decades younger than he, and that he had asked her to move in with him, there were considerable murmurs of surprise, some expressions of doubt, and one or two outright cries of dismay, as if the last partisan had raised the white flag. But the artist soon began appearing alongside him on Fridays. With Nordic features and a tomboy haircut, she was an attractive but conspicuously shy woman; her shoulders were usually hunched forward like the child who is ever trying to go unnoticed. Her name was spelled Tone though she pronounced it “Tuna.” “Like the fish,” she would say.
It wasn’t only their disparity in age that made them an unlikely match. Tone was as reserved as Sunny was demonstrative. She came from an island in the North Sea and a religious upbringing so cloistered that although she had gone to art school on the mainland, she seemed at times still to be acclimating herself to the tastes of the modern world. She was often unfamiliar with pop culture references and uncomfortable with practices that others might take for granted—she confided to me in an early conversation that she neither danced nor went to the beach. The idea of being in public in a mere swimsuit mortified her. Meanwhile, Sunny had the air of the unabashed nudist about him.
Tone spoke English fairly well and was already freely using local expressions such as “I don’t know from nothing” and “Fuhgeddaboudit,” the latter albeit with a Norse cadence that re-separated the phrase into distinct words. But her understanding of certain American expressions, including standard drink orders, was still developing and when I would ask for a boilermaker, which in Sunny’s rendition had always meant a shot of whiskey poured into a glass of beer, she would look at me uncertainly and ask, “You mean a submarine?” I had never heard of a drink called a submarine and decided she had to be thinking of the depth charge, the showy and teeth-imperiling variation on the boilermaker in which a shot glass is actually dropped into the beer.
“Sure. A submarine,” I would say, and she would happily bring me the usual boilermaker.
Tone did not always come in on Fridays and when she did she rarely had the stamina to stay till sunrise, which was often the time that Sunny bid his last customer good night. Sunny’s own stamina would at times flag. So it seemed only right and natural that I would sometimes step behind the bar to fill in. One such night, Sunny said, “You look good back here, Timmy. Why don’t you stay?”
I knew no more about tending bar than I did about tending sheep, but being asked to bartend at Sunny’s was not exactly like asking a season-ticket holder to take the mound for the New York Yankees. Or even for the Toledo Mud Hens. As far as I could tell, I would be opening bottles of beer and occasionally making drinks whose complexity was usually limited to two ingredients. Gin and tonic. Vodka and soda. Scotch and water. So I stayed.
Working at Sunny’s did not seem all that different from not working at Sunny’s. What Sunny had really meant was, “I’d like you to be with me on this side of the bar but I want you to have the freedom to do as you please.” There was no set time that he expected me to arrive or leave, and no such formality as a wage (it was understood that Sunny’s was a labor of love, for all involved). The only instruction of substance Sunny gave me was to not drown in the river while the bar was open on a Friday.
In the first months of our friendship I had experienced the contradictory impulses of wanting to bring Sunny a little bit of business by inviting a few friends who I knew shared my ideology when it came to old bars, and wanting to keep Sunny’s to myself—not an uncommon neurosis in New York when one comes upon a place as yet undiscovered by crowds.
Sunny had a self-effacing nature and any sort of promotion of his bar would have been, in his view, a sign of excessive vanity. He would say, “What kind of person would want to blow their own horn?” Now, however, although there were yet moments of great quiet at the bar—one snowy night, the half dozen of us who made it there amused ourselves by revealing each scar we’d earned and telling its backstory—Sunny’s was unmistakably becoming busier on its own. Each week it seemed as though there were a couple more customers than the previous Friday.
As we observed this phenomenon, Tone, always commonsensical, raised an issue that Sunny had cheerily ignored. Nothing about Sunny’s was lawful. The bar had no liquor license. No business license. No insurance. No certificate of occupancy. No permits at all. They had all been under the name of his uncle and had begun to expire not long after his death. Life had been so sleepy in Red Hook that it did not seem to matter whether these forms were filed. As far as New York City knew, the bar at 253 Conover had ceased to operate with John Balzano’s last breath.
It wasn’t that Sunny went out of his way to break these regulations—it simply was not in his makeup to investigate them. Except for a brief time during the 1970s after he inherited a small fortune from an heiress and supporter of the arts (she sponsored his creative ambitions while he sated her libido, still active in her ninth decade), he had never possessed a savings account. He had never written a check or charged a credit card. The world of forms and applications and registrations and fees was foreign to him. The bar was an unprosperous affair—it made just enough to sustain itself. The notion that one might want to pay for things like liquor licenses and insurance did not cross his mind. Doing so would have cost more than the bar was taking in. And since we only opened on Fridays, we thought of ourselves more as a social club than a regular business. So Sunny proposed that if we did not charge money for drinks, that is, if we were not engaging in business, the statutes governing bars in the State of New York would not apply to us. It was a logic best not probed too deeply.
The following week Tone hung up a small sign that suggested a three-dollar donation per drink. To further avoid the appearance that we were conducting a business, rather than have customers “donate” their money each time they ordered, with their first drink we would hand them a card on which we had written their name and a tally mark. That card was now their chit and for every drink they ordered the rest of the night, we would add a mark and hope that as they were leaving that night, they would present their card at the bar and we would add up the marks and figure out that evening’s donation.
There may have been cleverer ways to circumvent the New York State Liquor Authority, but few that would prove more popular. Customers loved the idea that they were in a legitimate speakeasy (that is, legitimately illegitimate, unlike a few other historic bars in the city that were speakeasies by reputation but not by contemporary practice). They loved the cards, which, on the front sides, were printed with illustrations of nautical terms such as halyards, stern fasts, dolphin strikers, and neap tides.
Above all, they loved the principle behind the cards—trust. Utopian ideals are commonly heard but rarely practiced in rooms where liquor is consumed, and when coming to Sunny’s for the first time, people responded to the honor system in the startled way that city folk respond to the roadside vegetable stand along a rural road where there is no farmer in sight—only a cigar box in which to leave one’s payment. In the rare event that a customer left the bar on a Friday night without paying, an envelope containing money and a letter of apology would appear bene
ath the door during the week.
Being licensed was not the only convention that Sunny did not follow. There was no happy hour. At a bar where drinks were already the same very low price, a happy hour would have been a redundancy. Besides, he considered eight o’clock to be the proper time to open up so as not to disrupt his or anyone else’s dinner.
The buyback, the practice of giving a customer a free drink after they have had several rounds, is established practice at all but the most ill-tempered bars, so new customers were often surprised to learn that their fourth drink wasn’t on the house. It was not that Sunny was not generous. But to his mind, the act of buying someone a drink should always be a personal gesture—when it became automatic, a policy of reward, it lost its sincerity.
One night I heard him announce that he wanted to buy a man and his son a round and I watched as he set their Budweisers on the bar, came around to their side, took out his wallet and placed a ten-dollar bill on the counter. Later, after they had left and he had returned to our side of the bar, he collected the money and put it in the register.
“Okay, Sunny. I give up. Why? Why are you buying drinks from yourself?”
“Timmy, I do it this way to show that while I may be the owner of the bar, I am paying for this drink out of my pocket,” he replied. “I’m not taking it out of the register. It says, ‘I want to buy you guys a beer on a personal level. It’s not the business buying you a beer—I’m buying you a beer.’ ”
As another customer once observed, Sunny had a thousand ways to make a person feel like a million bucks. This was not a tactic, but a characteristic.
* * *
11
That’s the Way It Was Around Here
There were three weapons kept at Sunny’s. Two nightsticks and a blackjack, all stowed behind the bar. Though serviceable, as their many dents confirmed, they hadn’t seen action in recent memory and I thought of them as artifacts from a time when bartenders faced with troublemakers were more inclined to reach down below than for the phone. Over the course of its existence, the bar had been largely spared any real trouble. So far as anyone knew, there had been only one fatal shooting and two holdups in near to eighty years, which has to be some kind of record for a New York City establishment of its type. The shooting had taken place when Sunny was only a boy and if one wanted to be precise, it had been peripheral to the bar—the ice delivery man was ambushed on the front stoop in what turned out to be a vendetta matter. The first robbery, too, had occurred so long ago, there were no living witnesses to give an account.
The more recent one, however, had taken place just a few years before I arrived. Sunny didn’t like to talk about it which was, in itself, intriguing, as it was so uncharacteristic of him to hedge on any story in which he played the lead. With some concern for our welfare, mindful that the bar’s remoteness would seem to appeal to robbers as much as it did to romantics, I persisted in pressing him for specifics until one night he grudgingly relented.
It had been near closing time. He and the few remaining customers were ordered to the ground by two men with shotguns. They were masked and the only good look Sunny got was from an ankle-high perspective while his face was being pressed against the floor by a gun barrel. He had seen those cuffed Levi’s and spotless sneakers before. They belonged to a man whose face he knew from the neighborhood and who had recently been showing up at the bar. Sunny realized he had mistaken casing for run-of-the-mill friendly conversation. The men raged when they looked into the till. “We’ve been watching this place all night,” one of them screamed down at Sunny. “No fucking way you only got seventy-five dollars in the register!” If they had been more observant on their previous visits, they would have made a mental note of the meager crowd and modest liquor selection and come to the sound conclusion that surely there had to be more promising locations for a stickup than Sunny’s. The other man issued the standard “Nobody fucking move for ten minutes or they’ll get their heads blown off,” before backing out the door.
“So, what happened? You told the cops you recognized the pants, the shoes?” I asked. “They went to jail?”
“No, not jail,” Sunny replied. “They were…how should I put it?” A grin flickered across his face. “Let me just say, they were taken care of, Timmy.”
After a pause, his grin widened and an unmistakable, if indecipherable, glint appeared in his eyes. “But I assure you it was done with love.”
Love, I was coming to understand, could be a guiding principle even when exacting retribution. And holding up Sunny’s could be highly adverse to one’s health and, possibly, one’s stay on earth.
In my time there would never be cause to grab one of the clubs, and although there were several customers whose appearance gave us a kind of dread, their crimes were usually only against decorum—the overbearing reciters, the notorious swooners, the political orators, the goatish poets, and the occasional senior citizen with a Don Juan delusion. If a person went too far, by, say, inflicting themselves on the entire bar, Sunny would, gently, put the person out by discreetly phoning for a car service and when the cab pulled up out front, tapping the offender on the shoulder and saying, “I’m so sorry to see you’re leaving us early tonight but I’m afeared your ride has arrived,” and leading the bewildered person out the door. Sunny always observed the principle that if one must ask customers to leave the bar, one should do so in such a way as to leave their dignity intact.
Even when he was confronted with true delinquents, I would never see Sunny unnerved. When someone came to him one night and said, “Sunny—there’s a couple guys beating the shit out of somebody on the street,” he didn’t for a moment consider calling the police but instead walked outside, where two men in the neighboring doorway were taking turns kicking a man lying on his back. Although it was dark, he recognized the men by their size—he guessed the smaller of the two weighed about 250 pounds. They were New Jerseyans and they, too, had only recently begun coming to the bar on a regular basis. They were not subtle about their aspirations in life—once he had seen them open the trunk of their car, revealing a cache of guns inside. Sunny considered them “wannabe wise guys.” In his view, a wannabe wise guy was a little more unpredictable, a little more dangerous than an actual wise guy. He also recognized the man being kicked as a neighborhood nuisance, someone asking for trouble wherever he went and who had now found it, perhaps deservedly so. Nevertheless, this beatdown was taking place in what he considered to be his territory, and so he strode over to the New Jerseyan he knew as Spanky.
“You guys want to continue to come here, you got to show respect ’cause this kind of shit don’t go,” he said. “You do stuff like this here, all you’re going to do is give me a reputation so other folks won’t want to come. You’re going to hurt my business, you’re going to hurt my people, you’re going to hurt me.”
The two men looked uncomfortable. They muttered apologies and promised to stop kicking their victim. They even helped him to his feet.
That was Sunny. He cudgeled villains not with a club but with his words, and did so in a manner they felt compelled to respect.
—
IN ALL THE years I would know him, there would only be two people whose appearance genuinely frightened Sunny; by comparison the wannabe wise guys were innocents abroad. Babes in the wood with Jersey accents. Their names were Jacqueline and Josephine and they were sisters. One walked with a cane, the other with God (when sober), and both filled Sunny with the kind of terror usually reserved for the uncle who shows up uninvited at your wedding with snapshots of his holiday at a swingers’ resort in his breast pocket. They were erratic in the way of Joe Pesci’s movie characters. They spilled their drinks, their bosoms, and their personalities onto whoever was unlucky enough to be sitting nearby. They considered yelling to be conversation and were as quick to proclaim their amorous intentions for you as they were to denounce your lower anatomy as being inadequate for anything other than emptying your bladder. Naturally they loved Sunny.
He never let his true feelings for Jacqueline and Josephine show but instead gave them the kind of attention that they mistook for reciprocation. He could be a very good actor.
Mercifully, Jacqueline and Josephine came to the bar seldom. On one such night, in the small hours when there were only a few people left in the bar, Jacqueline improbably hit it off with a man—he had a rakehell face and was the only customer I knew to wear zoot suits—and she left her sister on a barstool to go sit in a booth with him. Unhappy with the lack of attention or perhaps thinking for a moment she was someplace else entirely, Josephine suddenly pulled her top over her head. She reached back, unclasped her bra, let it slide to the side, and sat on the barstool with her breasts hanging over her stomach like one of Lucian Freud’s well-nourished models. She looked indifferent to the world. I considered the situation: an unpredictable half-nude in the middle of the bar. It was bad, in a way, but I was not then and never would be very good at handling moments like this. I retreated to the farthest corner of the room where the shot glasses are kept, and began re-drying them with a bar towel. I was prepared to let the situation play out.
Suddenly I heard, “Oh, Josephine! Look how beautiful you are! My, my!”
I looked up and saw Sunny standing in the doorway, his hands clasped together as if in appreciation. He had been smoking by himself in the back, where he appeared to have left his senses; beauty was not among the first dozen words that would come to mind for most people to describe Josephine. But Sunny wasn’t most people. Josephine, who had been slouching in the way drunkards do, stiffened her back and sat up straight. She lifted her chin. The stool had become her pedestal. She was preening. She was fluttering her eyelashes. She was in a kind of heaven—the heaven that those who are desired feel—and I marveled as I would so many times at Sunny’s ability to say the right thing.