Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  After she had left in search of other pleasures and Sunny was sure the coast was clear, he came back to the bar where a small chorus of throat clearing erupted. I had been serving Joe, the bar philanthropist, and a row of his cronies up from Bay Ridge. Sunny smiled apologetically, as if he was returning to a dugout after whiffing at the plate with three runners aboard.

  “That was nutsy,” he said, pouring himself a shot. “This beautiful woman desiring me. How is a man not supposed to respond to that?”

  “Uh, Sunny…most men do,” said Joe, arching his eyebrows and giving Sunny a meaningful look over the rim of his glasses.

  “You’re probably right, Joey. I told her that as much as I would like to do what it is that it is that she wanted us to do, it wouldn’t make a very good impression on the customers. But I have to confess I only said it that way so as not to hurt her feelings. The truth of the matter is, at that moment I could only think of my wife sleeping next door, my baby girl sleeping next door, and I couldn’t respond in the way that she wanted me to respond. I couldn’t do it. Without elaborating, you get the gist of what I’m saying. We don’t want to put ourselves in situations we’re going to regret tomorrow.”

  The men bowed their heads, a little sheepish at their low-mindedness.

  “But, Sunny. She was exceptional!” one of Joe’s friends said after a moment.

  “Oh, fuhgeddaboudit. She was! She may have been the loveliest woman that I have ever had to rebuff. But to be the recipient of affections and not gorge on them is somehow giving up hell for heaven. It may leave you in a state of what might be called mundaneness but you don’t have to carry your yesterdays, aye?”

  The group murmured their agreement and a few looked at their ring fingers thoughtfully. The greater number of men (and the occasional woman) become moral relativists after their second drink.

  “You might say the circumstance that I found myself in tonight was unique,” Sunny said, taking a long pause and looking one by one into each of our faces again, “but I was a eunuch!” Sunny dissolved in laughter and we all joined in. He was one of those people who never laugh alone.

  —

  I ONCE HEARD a story about John Milton that went something like this: Milton was attending school as a teenager in the 1600s and one morning in his theology class, the schoolmaster asked each student to write an essay on the miracle at Cana, where Christ turned water into wine. The students spent the entire class scribbling with their quills—all but Milton. He looked out the window, lost in a daydream, his scroll blank in front of him. At the very end of the class, when the students had to turn in their essays, he picked up his quill and wrote: “The conscious water saw its God and blushed.”

  The story always stayed with me because it so well exemplified the ability to say something all at once poetic, concise, and memorable.

  It was unique but I was a eunuch.

  —

  SUNNY WENT AROUND the bar and returned with the bottle of Jameson and refilled everyone’s glass.

  “You think he ever let the thought of Jackie stop him?” Joe said, gesturing at the bust of President Kennedy above the bar.

  “Nye, not him. He was one of those. Pensa col cazzo…No self-control.” He relit his cigarette. “The older you get you understand that the joy one takes in a person’s sexual allure is the rarest kind. It’s a pleasure that replenishes itself without end—unless you become greedy about it, aye? One never really tires of the human form. That reminds me—did I ever tell you guys about the first real nudes I saw in my life?”

  In something close to unison, we all shook our heads. Sunny knew he had his audience captive.

  “I was just a child.” He pushed his hair back from his face and blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “My brother Frank brought it to my attention that there was this particular roller coaster in Coney Island that overlooked one of the bathing houses that was for women only, and he had heard that the women would be laying out, taking in the sun with no clothes on.

  “The bathing house was fenced in and you couldn’t just go on the roller coaster and look down and see inside during the whole ride. Apparently there was one particular pernt, the precipice of one of the big drops, and it happened to be that this drop was closest to where the bathhouse was. So Frank came to me and said he spoke with some of the older guys and they were going to go to Coney Island and were going to keep going on this particular roller coaster to look at the women’s boxes.

  “We were just kids without any sexual experiences, and you know how children have an inquisitiveness about everything they’re not exposed to. Well, I did go on that roller coaster with my brother and some of the other boys, and it was such a short moment that thank goodness for the imagination because you’re going over the top of this hill before the big drop, you’re looking down and you see this bush—but it’s like a thousand miles away! You’d shout, ‘There’s one!’ Maybe it wasn’t really there, but the imagination is such—‘I saw it! I saw it!’ How one could be so fascinated by this little shadow between someone’s legs? But we were kids and these were taboos and sex was a mystery to us. These women weren’t being sexual from their pernt of view and they could have had black rags in their laps for all that we could see, but as a kid sees it, he’s seeing…pussy.” Sunny’s eyes sparkled.

  “Those were the first naked women I saw in my life and it might have been for only one brief moment but it’s a moment that lasts a lifetime.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, each a little lost in his private reverie.

  “Thank God for Bettie Page,” Joe said finally. “And Playboy. Hugh Hefner must have cleared some things up for you, Sunny.”

  “He ruined it, Joey!” Sunny cried, slapping his palm on the bar. He was suddenly very angry. “Hugh Hefner, they should hang his ass! Sexuality was something that took place behind closed doors, something you did in your own space. That is no longer the case today and in my mind, it all started with Hugh Hefner. He planted the seed of a virus that’s as bad as smallpox. Freedom with discipline is a grand thing but freedom without discipline is terrible, aye?”

  He searched our faces for signs of solidarity. I thought of the hours he’d spent watching the Playboy Channel but bit my tongue.

  “There’s so much sweetness that is attached to the innocent who imagines,” he went on. “Only those who are innocent can imagine in the way that innocents imagine. Too much knowledge doesn’t leave any room to fill in the gaps. In my mind, Hugh Hefner is one of the worst criminals that has ever lived because what he did was take some of the joy out of childhood.”

  “Sunny, you make sex sound like paradise lost, not paradise gained.”

  “In a way it is, Timmy.”

  Sunny clinked his shot glass against each of ours. “Here’s to being able and to the ability to resist! Salut.” And we drank.

  * * *

  23

  The Heart of the Matter

  Whatever creature carries the common midlife crisis bit me at an exceptionally early age. I had barely reached my mid-thirties when I suddenly determined that I needed a vintage car—settling upon a 1962 Ford Fairlane whose truculent disposition would only reveal itself after I became its master. In short succession, I also fell in and out of love in the course of hours and minutes with a series of unavailable women, notwithstanding that I was already very much and very happily involved, and found myself frequently at my office window daydreaming of working out-of-doors. The usual symptoms.

  I had never given more than my divided attention to my full-time job, a self-limiting approach in most lines of work. That I had ever held another job would have come as a surprise to the customers at Sunny’s. I had always been slow to admit to a daytime profession, preferring to exist in people’s minds between eight P.M. and four A.M. Friday night and nowhere else. I was not alone in being unforthcoming about my weekday whereabouts; by tacit agreement people tended to leave their occupations at the door. It was years before I knew this one was a labor lawyer,
that one a seminarian. As one regular said to me, “Picturing half these people in pressed khakis and pantsuits seated behind computer monitors is like picturing your dream girl using the facilities. You prefer to suspend your disbelief.” By Tuesdays, my thoughts would turn to Friday, as central a day to my week as Sundays are to a defensive lineman. Mild-mannered by temperament, as the afternoon wore on on Fridays and anxious at the prospect of being held up in the office late, I would transform into a prickly clock-watcher. Others only had the 6:22 to Valhalla to worry about; I had New York City’s greatest bar to open, to say nothing of an appointment first with my regular table at Ferdinando’s.

  One such Friday, it was tersely suggested that my moonlighting was interfering with my work. I sputtered and huffed as much as I was capable of huffing, which wasn’t much, and I was still mulling over this rebuke that evening while eating my customary pasta con sarde below the gazes of Saints Francis (Assisi) and Michael (Piazza) when Frank came over and asked, “Wha’s new?”—his usual opening gambit. It’s been said that talking over one’s grievances with someone who has a bit of distance is, on occasion, therapeutic (there is a small fleet of cabdrivers to this day carrying news of my personal affairs) and I proceeded to tell him about the two-bit office squabble I’d had that day. Frank had always shown a very genuine curiosity and fatherly concern about my life. When I finished, he looked at me, shaking his head. “They gotta it right and they gotta it all wrong, Teem,” he said in the same tone he might use if he found it necessary to point out to me that John Paul II was a member of the Roman Catholic Church. “You moonlight but not atta de bar. You moonlight atta de day job, capisce? Your heart, it’s not in it.”

  I am convinced that I have benefited more from such exchanges in my adult life than I ever would have were I paying for them by the hour. By the time he brought me the limoncello he fermented in the basement for his choice regulars (bootlegging was a solitary diversion that endured in certain Red Hook circles), I had decided that the only principled thing to do was to give notice. I would be a one-day-a-week bartender at the only bar that I would ever want to work at and in due course figure out what to do with the rest of my time. And so I quit.

  After spending most of the summer along the boardwalk between Brighton Beach and Seagate (another luxury I had often daydreamed about), I took up seasonal work with a rooftop gardener I knew from the bar. She turned out to be as versed in Greene as she was in greenery (she was partial to The End of the Affair while I had a soft spot for Our Man in Havana) and we liked to fill the hours by discussing whatever book we happened to be reading. Odds-on, we were the only landscapers in the city involved in an ongoing dispute over whether Lawrence or Gerald was the most talented of the Durrell brothers. Many of her clients were well-off, scions and titans who lived in the legendary apartment buildings east and west of Central Park. Forest green awnings reached from door to curb, Gaddafian doormen adding a sense of ceremony to our arrivals and departures. Service elevators took us skyward to the aeries I once imagined living in, but I had come to believe there is a certain pleasure in only briefly visiting such places to prune the deadwood before returning to earth—the wealth, in itself, being vertiginous.

  The city’s major daily newspaper put me, by virtue of owning a period car and a word-of-mouth referral, on the vintage automobile beat, sending me on expeditions to murky garages in Brooklyn’s innards and to North Jersey junkyards and eventually on road trips to points farther afield. A journalist asked me to do background research for a book, innocently offering to pay me in wine. “As many bottles as you can fit into your trunk,” he merrily told me over the phone. Both he and his wife were renowned wine critics and they had the stuff in spades. When he opened the front door of his home north of the city in Cheever country to greet me, I could see by his fixed smile that it hadn’t occurred to him I might drive an American car built during the era when cars were known as boats. A Fairlane’s trunk capacity compares favorably to the hold of a middle-sized shrimp trawler. Nonetheless, he was gracious about it and I drove back to the city on the New England Thruway cautiously, laden low by my new wine collection in the stern but buoyed by the knowledge that I wouldn’t need to spend money on one of life’s necessities for some time to come.

  Intermittent gardening, periodic journalism, hebdomadal bartending, and the odd barter. It was an irregular living, but I reasoned that if Sunny, who hadn’t drawn a regular paycheck since his tour of duty with the Air Force, had been able to cobble a life together all these years, so could I. That modeling oneself on Sunny’s brand of bohemianism while living in one of the world’s costlier cities was more likely to put a person on the path to penury than prosperity was a thought I left unexplored. Most midlife crises clear up on their own; mine would take root.

  * * *

  24

  Francisco

  “Mother of Three Slain by a Fiend; Body Cut in Two. Killer Seized by Policeman as He Drops Severed Legs into East River”

  A man gazed out sullenly from the page of old newsprint. His cheeks were bruised and his mouth was slack and his eyes defeated, like a fish on ice. It was a humble and sullen peasant face, a stony and unlucky villain. It was also Sunny’s face.

  I had never doubted the basic truth of anything Sunny told me. Which isn’t to say that I always took him at his word. At worst, he was an exceptionally unreliable narrator (which has never been a character flaw in my opinion), remembering and misremembering events in his life with equal facility. At his best, he was a masterful confabulator who frequently ad-libbed his way through personal history, in order to cover up his lapses in memory, and general history, in order to make up for his limited formal education. I had figured this out long ago and so the proper names, the dates, the precise chronology of any story he told me mattered less than Sunny’s vision of the event. Where he digressed from plausibility, he usually enriched the past. Each time he recounted the murder of the bar’s iceman, for instance, it sounded less like an account of a real crime than an old-time radio detective drama. I was a boy, how old I don’t recall but I hadn’t taken my first communion yet, he might say. I was asleep next to my brothers Peanuts and Brother when I was woken, not by my mother as usual, but by the backfire of a car. Or so I thought. I began to drift off to sleep again when I heard a growing commotion outside on the street and I got up and ran to the window and leaned out and saw a pool of red as if a bucket of paint had been kicked over and the body of a man laying on the stoop. A crowd of longshoremen stood around looking on while in back of a booth inside the store, a gun was wrapped in newspaper like a butcher steak waiting for my father to discover it….” Sunny’s version was one part Weegee, two parts Hammett. He couldn’t tell you the year, the motive, the names of the shooter or the victim, or why the crime took place here and not elsewhere on the delivery route, but such details hardly seemed to matter. Only those who didn’t know him well talked to Sunny to come by information.

  This made it all the more peculiar that it was at Sunny’s request that I found myself in the microfilm room of the public library, scrolling through blurs of newsprint, in search of corroboration, and illumination, of an episode in family history that had been either forgotten, buried, or repressed.

  The day before, he had invited me over for breakfast as he did from time to time and while he had stirred eggs in a skillet and kept an eye on coffee warming in a saucepan, he said over his shoulder and out of the blue, “You know, Timmy, standing here as I am, I have to think of how my mother’s life might have been so different if her mother, my grandmother, had not caught on fire by the stove. In a sense, my mother never really got to have a mother….”

  Memories of working in her uncle’s Coney Island wine bar as a teen had given Josephine the lifelong conviction that bars were no place for women, and the only sign she gave of her existence to the outside world was a near-imperceptible parting of the curtains, a pious window peeping at the comings and goings in the street below. Increasingly frail in her fin
al years and in the end, bathed and changed and fed by Sunny, who came from a generation for whom nursing a parent was a filial, not a salaried, matter, she had died several winters earlier after taking a fall during the Christmas holidays. But Sunny still spent much of his time in her apartment, more comfortable amongst his mother’s simple furnishings and godly knickknacks than in the disarray of an apartment shared with a young child. Fatherhood had been more wearying than he’d expected.

  “Did your mother see her mother die?”

  “I don’t think she was in the room but if she was, she would have been very young. Too young to know what was happening, perhaps. But my mother did see a lot of bad shit and she had a lot of psychological problems later in life. She was always somewhat shy, somewhat quiet. Even when she was younger, I never knew her to go into the street to socialize with the other women. She had herself committed to a psychiatric hospital when I was in my twenties and perhaps several times after that, I am not really sure.”

  “I don’t think you ever mentioned that to me.”

  “No, Timmy, I haven’t. These things, it’s best to let them go, aye? But in this case, I haven’t been able to. You see, what had happened, at some pernt when she was a child my mother suffered a trauma. She witnessed a body being chopped up.”

  He scraped the eggs onto two plates with fried potatoes and set them on the table and he sat down across from me. We ate in silence while I waited for Sunny to continue.

  “I didn’t know any of this when I was growing up. I didn’t learn of it until I was a grown man when my mother came to visit me once at my loft on Wooster Street. My mother was never the type to get on a train and go to Manhattan. Manhattan might as well have been Chicago to her. But one day she showed up at my studio and it was like a miracle to see her. I hadn’t been to Red Hook in quite a few years and I was so taken by the sight of her at my door. This little woman, my mother. I made us tea and she began to relate this event to me, this atrocity that had been hanging in her mind her entire life.”