Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  Shaken, but not overly so—Sunny embodied his name about as well as anyone this side of Busty Heart and Boston Shorty—he cheerily announced that this was merely an opportunity to get the paperwork in order and reopen under his own name. Not John’s Bar, as the expired documents had had it, but Sunny’s.

  The following Friday we sat by the front door in the dark, turning customers away. Another van pulled up, this time delivering ATF agents who presented Sunny with a warrant and combed the bar and basement, presumably for signs of speakeasy activity. While it wasn’t exactly Eliot Ness and a team of axe-wielding Prohibition agents destroying barrels of moonshine (indeed, the men seemed slightly ashamed), this follow-up raid left Sunny uncharacteristically spooked.

  He began to mistrust phone lines and whenever he wanted to discuss bar business or anything else that he regarded as private, he would ask that I come see him in person. He no longer considered the bar safe for such discussions either, and when I’d arrive he would say, “Let’s go sit,” and lead me outside to the old Pontiac that he had inherited from his uncle. Although Sunny might not have been in the mob, he seemed to have studied their customs carefully. He liked to get in back, roll the windows down, stretch one leg out on the seat, and smoke while I sat up front behind the wheel. I never actually put the key in the ignition and if a professional eavesdropper had been listening in they might have been intrigued, but not for professional reasons. They would have overheard accounts of thievery (liberating a safe from a nearby shipping company office with a forklift, a crime that remains unsolved a half-century later), travel (riding alone on beautifully painted steam locomotives through the Indian countryside with no real destination), and exotic amatory rituals (biting into an apple each time climax arrived, at the insistence of a Japanese lover). They also would have heard an appreciation of Piero Manzoni, the late Milanese artist best known for his works Artist’s Breath (balloons containing his exhalations) and Artist’s Shit (tin cans whose contents have never been verified), and a lamentation for the premature death of Tiger Flowers, the Bible-clutching middleweight champion from Georgia whose very name deserves resurrection.

  For all his secretiveness, Sunny really just wanted to shoot the breeze in his typically scattershot fashion and I was more than happy to indulge him. But one day he abruptly confided that he had another reason to get out of the house for a bit. “Tone has been needing some space, Timmy. You see, she’s been experiencing morning sickness.”

  I turned to look at him over my shoulder and he was grinning sheepishly.

  “Yes, it surprised me as much as it probably surprises you to learn that everything down there still works. I was ready to…you know, contain myself, and she said, ‘No, Sunny. This one is for me.’ I never expected this to happen to me again but I’m going to be a papa.”

  —

  IT WOULD BE the quietest summer and, for a week and a half, the quietest September in years. I continued to take the train each morning to my job in Manhattan, where I had risen, less by initiative than by the occasional updrafts that jettison higher-ups while sucking up those below, from clerical foot soldier to editor and sometime writer. My office had moved across town into the city’s newest skyscraper, a granite and glass tower at the foot of Times Square hailed variously as avant-garde, state-of-the-art, and forward-thinking. At its base, a video screen curled along an eleven-story turret relaying the minute-to-minute fortunes of the financial markets as well as round-the-clock communications from the advertising world to passersby below. A sharp-eyed visitor, aided by binoculars, might have caught sight of me seated in my office just beyond the screen’s upper right-hand corner—desk, chair, light, and air all ergonomic, of course. A Blade Runner future had arrived in small measure and I seemed to be in it.

  Indoors, we breathed an atmosphere cleaner, we were told, than Iceland’s. Though the rumor that the washroom urinals were handmade in Sesto Fiorentino turned out to be unfounded, another—that it would have taken the entire citizenry of Tuvalu three years to pay for our gaudy lunchroom—turned out to be true. It was a spectacle of undulating blue titanium ceilings and billowing Italian blown-glass walls designed by the preeminent maestro of undulating and billowing architecture.

  Sunny’s had served as my private counterweight to this rarified realm (there is only so much sophistication that one can put up with in the course of a week) and to compensate for its sudden absence in my life, I rented a second apartment in Red Hook to which I would regularly retreat several evenings a week and on the weekends. It was not lost on me that while others rented summer bungalows in the Hamptons or the Catskills, I found my haven next door to a bus garage in Red Hook. I was seeking escape of a different sort. I furnished the single large room with one table and two chairs from the bar, and three of Sunny’s paintings. My imagination supplied the sounds and faces.

  On the morning of the eleventh, I watched the distant collapsing diorama and heard the confused cries of responders on a police scanner from a Brooklyn rooftop. All that day, ashes and scraps of paper drifted across the river like churned-up flakes in a snow globe. By night, the view of the city from Brooklyn’s Promenade was dreamlike—smoky and strangely silent. A Kurosawa set piece. The only sign of life in the harbor came from the swirling sapphire lights of anchored police boats ringing the Battery in a half-moon formation. Sunny’s first reaction had been to run to his basement to retrieve an ancient gun he had hidden there, prepared to protect his home and family, though from what he wasn’t sure. But when I called him that evening, he sounded reflective, as if he had already internalized the events.

  “These things that we’re seeing and experiencing,” he said, “they’re not new to me, Timmy. They bring to mind other moments in my life. These ashes that came down from the sky, they reminded me of my childhood. They reminded me of Election Days.

  “As children we didn’t know politics but we knew about fires. In the weeks leading up to Election Day we would scavenge the whole neighborhood for planks, pallets, any kind of wood we could get our hands on. People would stand outside their houses and guard their wooden fences because everything that was wood would be taken. All of Red Hook did this, which to me meant that all of New York did this. After dark on Election Day, on all the street corners leading into the neighborhood, little fires were lit as diversions to keep the fire department from reaching the main fire, which would be built right on the next street corner outside the bar. The grown-ups would throw ropes over lampposts and swing effigies of the politicians we weren’t supposed to like—Dewey, O’Dwyer—over the flames until they lit. It was very dramatic. Walking to school the mornings after Election Day, the entire neighborhood would smell like burnt wood and saturated ashes. These were joyous occasions and what has taken place today is terrible, but there was something in the experience of looking up and seeing these ashes floating down today that made me think life is repeating itself.”

  Sunny had never been a reader and he didn’t have much use for newscasts or televised experts to account for days such as this. He would sooner take one image, a bit or fragment, and compare it to past moments in his life in order to make sense of an experience. Maybe this is what is meant when someone is said to have a painterly eye. That night, Sunny’s seemed as reasonable as any other interpretation of the day’s events.

  In November, I drove Sunny to the hospital to pick up Tone, whom he had married on the quiet earlier that year, and their new daughter, Oda Sophia. I would see little of them that winter. It was a subdued time in the city. I made halfhearted visits to other spots—the Lion’s Head in the Village and Marion’s on the Bowery, the Woods Inn in Glendale and Lento’s in Bay Ridge, but they left little lasting impression and I soon gave up on trying to reproduce a Friday night at Sunny’s. It wasn’t bars, not even venerable ones, that I was missing.

  Sunny’s quietly reopened in April, licensed and otherwise licit, and most of the old customers streamed back with the relief of squirrels who had been evicted from Central Park w
hile the trees had been closed for renovations. I had not been the only one who had had no other place to go. Reclaiming their favorite spots, they appraised the changes the bar had undergone in a year and for a time, the wisdom of each refurbishment was a frequent topic of discussion. Few took exception to the freshly painted walls or mourned the decades of dust that had been wiped off the ceiling fans, and only one or two submitted that the sealing of the rat holes in the basement was a bad idea as it would force the wayward critters up into the bar in search for a new egress. A Czech photographer named George, who had made historic New York bars the central subject of his work and had probably visited more of them than any native son, complained that the mechanical whir of the new ice machine beneath the bar added a white noise to the room that was disruptive to the bar’s “exquisite melancholy”—a grievance I privately agreed with.

  “It sounds like bastard offspring of Zamboni!” he said.

  Whereas in the “old Sunny’s” one mostly had only to decide between liquors, not brands, when ordering a drink, the back bar of the “new Sunny’s” was now lined with a modest selection of different whiskeys, gins, vodkas, and rums. Gazing at the array of labels one night, Paul, the onetime bakery- truck driver from Maine and balladeer of the Jericho Turnpike, said, “Staas are staas to me. I don’t need to know their names. Same with whiskey. When I come to Sunny’s, I don’t want to have to say ‘Give me this or give me that.’ ‘A shot’ has always been good enough and should always be good enough.” A holdover from the days of Uncle John, Paul was the single most quarrelsome man I had ever met. He never would come to accept that time’s progress had arrived at Sunny’s and, by and by, he came less and less.

  After James Cagney went missing (presumably not by his own locomotion), the statuettes of the Marx Brothers and Bogart and their fellow Hollywood luminaries were collected and lined up side by side on a shelf above the bar, as if forever giving a final curtain call. Opposite, on the wall over the booths, hung three large new canvases—paintings that Sunny had been working on over the winter and had decided to leave on display. Although they were abstract in style, some were soon playing a parlor game called Find the Hidden Penises in Sunny’s Paintings. There were more than a few.

  Not all the changes at Sunny’s were skin-deep. Some were profound. Drinks were now priced as they would be at any bar and the honor-system chits were put away into a drawer beneath the cash register like commemorations of another era. Coming to realize that conducting a legal business had hidden costs, Sunny and Tone decided to open up on Saturdays as well. And after meeting a young Cooper Union graduate and amateur electrician named Francis who appeared in need of some direction in life, they asked whether he would like to run the bar on Wednesday nights. Francis admitted he had no bartending experience and Sunny said that was to his credit. An actual bartender from County Galway had once briefly worked at Sunny’s until he took it upon himself to put the beer on ice one night and Sunny said it would be better if he returned to the customer side of the bar. If anything got a rise out of Sunny, it was this sort of innovative thinking.

  To the traditionalists, with whom I was a fellow traveler, these developments were heresy. Sunny had always maintained that it was his firm belief that the less something was available, the more desirable it became—a convincing theory usually applied to sex but one that Sunny had appropriated brilliantly for his bar as well. Opening a couple more nights might seem innocent enough, a reasonable proposition in the conventional business world, but threatened to make the experience of going to Sunny’s just a little less rarified, a little more commonplace. “Going to Sunny’s used to be an event that one looked forward to all week,” grumbled my friend Chris, who had met his wife at the bar. After a few more drinks he declared, “Sunny’s is dead,” though he would continue to return for years to come, apparently preferring to spend his time in a necropolis than in bars that aroused in him no passions at all.

  A more reasoned judgment came from the eldest regular customer of Sunny’s, a staunch leftist named Charlie King who usually arrived very late, hoping to encounter either a shapely divorcee or a Republican to divert his attention from his chronic insomnia. He had recently begun walking with a cane after some kids in the neighborhood sicced their pit bulls on him for the spectacle. Overhearing the new Sunny’s versus the old Sunny’s debate one night, Charlie, with Guinness froth on his Airedale mustache, weighed in by saying, “A woman in a picket line in Baltimore once expressed something so philosophically brilliant to me. She said, ‘Eat shit if you must, but never call it ice cream.’ You don’t do a brainwashing of yourself. Confronted with conflict, you compromise but you don’t deceive yourself that you’re doing something else. You make compromises but you don’t sell out. And as far as I’m concerned, Sunny might have made a few changes but he hasn’t sold out.”

  After a reflective pause, he smirked and said, “By the way, the tragedy of my own life is not that I sold out, but that no one ever made me an offer.”

  * * *

  22

  The Great Criminal Hugh Hefner

  My Sweet Tooth Says I Wanna, My Wisdom Tooth Says No.

  —FLETCHER HENDERSON

  One night the door opened and a woman entered with such theatricality that everyone turned to look her way. She was the kind of woman often described as maddeningly beautiful. As most men with a certain amount of life experience can attest, spend enough time with a woman who possesses this quality and eventually the balance is tipped—either the spell she casts dissipates and one finds her merely gorgeous but no longer unnervingly so, or the pendulum swings in the other direction and she causes one to lose one’s equilibrium altogether.

  Trailed by a retinue of a half-dozen men and parting the crowd with her looks, she walked directly to where I stood behind the bar and leaned over until her lips were a finger’s width from my face. “I want you to make me a drink,” she said. “And then I want you to dance with me.”

  Chester Burnett stopped singing, the world stopped turning for a tick, and when it resumed, Jimmy Dorsey’s “Amapola” came on, the kind of song that always ought to be playing when a great beauty has commanded you to dance with her. It was October but she was wearing a July dress. I came around the side of the bar and she put her hands around my neck and pulled herself into me with the reserve of Mata Hari. Although the burble of conversation had resumed, it was lost on no one that the bartender and a femme fatale who had appeared as in a dream were now slowly revolving like a music box couple in the middle of the barroom. I kept my eyes cast down lest they catch anyone’s gaze but through the chatter I recognized the voice of Buzz, a working-class laborer on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, named either for his basic-training haircut or his cutting commentary.

  “Someone’s thinking of baseball.”

  “Probably counting presidents, too,” added his constant sidekick, Tom.

  She clung to me like I was holding the only umbrella in town during a monsoon. I attempted to make conversation to break the tension.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  She buried her face in my neck.

  “Where did you come from?”

  Her clutch tightened. I was sure I smelled poppy flowers. Talking to her was like talking to the moon. Silence was my only answer.

  The words “I’m Tim” had never sounded more feeble than they did at that moment.

  If she had held me closer, she would have been behind me.

  “Nora,” she whispered when the song came to its end. “From New Orleans.” She turned and disappeared into the crowd.

  Sunny clucked when I stepped back behind the bar. “My goodness, what a candy store life can be,” he said.

  “I had an idea once for the opening sentence of a book that I never wrote,” I said. “ ‘She was my Mount Vesuvius, I was her Pompeii.’ Sunny…you’re looking at Pompeii.”

  “May I say, Timmy, you do look a little ashen at the moment.”

  I went back to
opening beers and pouring drinks and washing glasses, and a little later Nora reappeared with her men in tow and, without a parting glance, left as abruptly as she had arrived, a tropical depression churning back toward the Gulf.

  These kinds of things more often happened to Sunny, not me. Once I overheard a woman ask whether Sunny would look at her new butterfly tattoo and he agreed, not realizing until she unzipped her pants that the butterfly was located about six inches below her navel. He dutifully examined the tattoo and had the composure to say that it was an exceedingly good rendition of a butterfly and that it reminded him of a lesser-known Warhol.

  Another night, a brunette born some years after Watergate followed him into the back room, where he had gone to sit alone and smoke during the early evening quiet, and announced, “I’ve been in New York for five days and when I saw you through the window before coming in, I said to myself, ‘That’s the first good-looking man I’ve seen since I left Texas.’ I think we should make love right now.”

  Without giving Sunny time to formulate a diplomatic reply, she pushed him backward and in one continuous motion, straddled his lap, unclasped her bra, and pulled his hand beneath her shirt. Although Sunny was far from the most self-possessed man I had ever known, he had often shown the ability to think on the fly and to exhibit grace under pressure even in cases where the pressure was being brought to bear brazenly on his lap.

  “It would be good, certainly,” he said, “but…it wouldn’t look good, aye?” The woman slowly nodded in a resigned way and, with a sigh, slid off him, adjusting her clothes.