Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

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  SUNNY HAD EMERGED from surgery lightened of a cancerous mass and with the characteristic conviction of the chastened. He said that henceforth he would rein in his unhealthiest habits. His shortness of breath had been diagnosed as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was a longer way of saying he had smoker’s lung, and when he was told that he would have to give up cigarettes and hard liquor he took a shallow breath and nodded his agreement. But asking Sunny to forgo tobacco and whiskey was like calling on Lou Piniella to renounce temper tantrums. Just as every umpire once knew that despite expressions of contrition and pledges of reform, it wouldn’t be long before Mr. Piniella would be throwing first base into the outfield and kicking dirt on their shoes again, everyone acquainted with Sunny’s knew that smoking and drinking were inseparable extensions of his personality, not so much second nature as first.

  Sunny tried for a while. He began taking vitamins and eating the occasional vegetable. He avoided the bar even when it was closed and spent ever more time in his mother’s old apartment on the top floor while Tone and Oda remained downstairs. He said that he needed privacy and quiet to recover his strength but he confessed what he needed most were the two breath-stealing flights of stairs as a deterrent from temptation.

  It was the first leave that Sunny took from the bar in anyone’s memory. In the years since their daughter had been born, he and Tone had taken turns looking after her when the bar was open for business. Now Tone came in every open night. I had always thought that there were very few women who could get involved with Sunny without forever feeling overshadowed by his big personality and the devotion he received seemingly wherever he went. But, in his absence, she proved to be something of a Martha Gellhorn, who said of her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, “Why should I be a footnote in someone else’s life?” Tone was determined to put her own stamp on the bar.

  It had always galled her when customers referred to Sunny’s as a dive and she soon ordered a pristine awning with Sunny’s Bar printed on it. She converted the back room once used by mob conferees into an art gallery and the site of a weekly bluegrass jam and a knitting circle (Uncle John’s subterranean neighbors at the cemetery surely detected a shift in the earth when word of this got out). She created an events calendar and a mailing list, and when a travel guide included Sunny’s in their guidebook to New York, she placed their sticker prominently in the window. Always good with tools, she installed and secured and refurbished. She was well-intentioned in her industriousness. Quite unlike Sunny, it was her nature to keep busy and to always look for ways to improve on things. As one customer observed with a note of sadness, “Tone has vision.”

  Sunny kept to himself for most of a year. He occupied himself with drawing and watching television and plotting means to come by occasional cigarettes behind Tone’s back. When he succeeded, he tucked them away in ones and twos on door lintels, well above her sight line. After he discovered an actor that he admired even more than Marlon Brando, he and Oda tuned in faithfully every afternoon to watch SpongeBob SquarePants’s escapades. He was a very devoted father, though the relationship he formed with his daughter was one of equals rather than a paternal one. Indeed, after she had seen a popular pirate movie, Oda began referring to him not as Papa but as Captain Jack Sparrow. The resemblance was more than passing.

  When Sunny did return to the bar, he returned unhumbled. Overconfident with a renewed feeling of well-being, he lit cigarettes and poured himself shots with the abandon of a mountain hermit who had a change of heart, descended to the nearest village, and set foot into the first tavern he came across. It was the beginning of a series of boom and bust cycles for him, in which each valley would be deeper than the previous one. He could be an exasperating person to try and reason with. The arguments of causation had no effect; in fact, he turned them on their head. If I gave him a reproachful look or merely said, “Sunny, please…” as he waited for me to refill his glass, he would irritably reply, “Timmy, it’s living not dying that’s going to kill me.” He indulged himself in slow-motion benders until his breath gave out and he disappeared upstairs for weeks, months, and eventually entire seasons to convalesce. When people traveled to Red Hook expecting to find Sunny and learned that he would not be in that night, they were visibly crestfallen. I knew how they felt.

  When I was twelve, I often walked after school to a rundown zoo at the edge of the African city where I lived. It was a somewhat perilous trip, taking me through less familiar neighborhoods and eventually on a dirt path through a shrubby forest. There were few animals in the zoo and they were poorly cared for, but I came for the lone lion that lived there. Its home was a simple cage like those in old traveling circuses and when the lion wasn’t asleep it would pace restlessly back and forth. I had read the book Born Free by Joy Adamson that year and on my walks home I would daydream about breaking the lion out. One day I arrived to find the cage empty and a sign that read, Exposition Fermée.

  The man who took Sunny’s absence the hardest was Casey, the lachrymose mobster who had first come to the bar as a teenage longshoreman. He had moved away, to a warmer city by the water, and with each return visit, the Red Hook he had known since he was a teenager was a little less recognizable. Amongst the bright facades of new stores and the fresh faces wearing modish clothes, he was suddenly the stranger in the strange land. Not finding Sunny behind the bar only seemed to deepen his disorientation.

  He was often reckless when he appeared, parking his late-model car facing the wrong way or stretched across the sidewalk, throwing me the keys when I suggested moving it so as not to draw the attention of the police. And he was a mess—not from drinking, but from thinking. He was by turns in love and lovelorn, both states aroused by the same, much younger woman. He had begun to believe in retribution, not in the day-to-day variety that he may have dealt in at times, but one handed out by the cosmos. After his son had died suddenly in his sleep a few years earlier, he became consumed with the belief this was a rebalancing for some of the wrongs he had done in his life.

  The last time I would ever see him, he sat on a stool at the deep end of the bar, his ruddy color now swallowed up by a deep tan, and he began talking drunkenly to a young couple visiting from out of town. As I sliced limes on the cutting board, I overheard snatches of the stories he was telling. Of hijackings, of robberies, of the impunity he and his crew had once enjoyed in the neighborhood to conduct their business. He told them of the time when, in the middle of the day in the middle of Van Brunt Street, he gunned down the boom box of a drug buyer after the man had refused to turn down the volume. When the couple told him they were from Texas, he said he had been there on a weekend business trip once with a friend and by the time they left the population of Texas had been reduced by one.

  I searched the faces of the couple and decided that they weren’t entirely convinced this thickset blowhard wasn’t embellishing his exploits. Nevertheless, I didn’t want him to say something he might later regret and I came around the bar in the hope he would turn his attention to me. I poured us two shots and he pulled out his cellphone and showed me pictures of his girlfriend in her bikini. I cautiously complimented her. He told me that he should be happy—the sunny weather, the girl—but that he often drove his car aimlessly around this new home in tears. He said he was tired of the life he had lived since he was a boy and remorseful for his deeds, and that he wanted to do something else with the time he had left but didn’t know where to begin. Though a nonbeliever, I prayed then for Sunny to appear. But I was left to my own devices to console the gloomy hit man. I told him that it wasn’t too late to start over. “Casey, how do you see your life ten years from now?”

  He looked at me morosely. “A lot of violence,” he said.

  As the hours wore on, his eyes became redder and his mood bluer and I suggested he might feel better if he went home but he gave me an abject look and muttered, “I don’t got no home no more. I got no place.”

  Dawn eventually broke on the ni
ght and the darkness in which we had been sitting and he turned to the incoming light and said in a voice first surprised and then despondent, “The sun? The fuckin’ sun.”

  He was unmoored.

  He was Martha, the last passenger pigeon.

  He needed Sunny’s counsel.

  A friend finally arrived from Staten Island to pick him up—a giant and gentle man named Bartholomew, in an orange polo shirt that hung to his knees (a goodfella emeritus, as I was later made to understand)—and after I had seen them to the door and begun to wipe down the counter, the phone in the bar rang as it often did around this time. Sunny was a fitful sleeper and when he would wake in the early morning he liked to call downstairs to ask me how the night had been. The phone line was terrible and always full of static, as if he was making a transatlantic call from the distant past instead of calling from two floors above, but I found the sound of his disembodied voice comforting. The loneliest hour in a bar begins after closing time. I told him that Casey had been in and that he was in an unusually despondent state of mind, even for him.

  “It hurts me to know Casey’s hurting, Timmy.” his voice heavy with sleep. “He’s been a real good friend to me over time. I could always count on him to come by if I was anticipating there was going to be some kind of trouble. He carried himself in such a way that merely mentioning that I was expecting him later at the bar would persuade any troublemakers to go find someplace else. To him loyalty has never just been a word, aye? He really worked hard to have this woman reciprocate his very strong affection for her, Timmy, and I was hoping that would serve to make him happy. But you know what? If you’re not feeling good about yourself, a new relationship may do something for a while but you’re still left with the essence of your person and that will always show its face.”

  I would often think over the years that Sunny never reached his full potential. Without training, other than his life experience, his insight into the psychologies of people was often profound. I never did see Casey again, though the last I would hear of him, he was still out taking drives alone in his palm-lined sunny paradise.

  * * *

  27

  Disappearances

  I overheard two Orthodox Jewish men talking on the subway. One said to the other, first in what I took to be Yiddish and then in English, “Days crawl, years fly.” The words echoed in my mind for months. By then it had been well more than a decade since a series of random turns on a solitary drive had led me to a career as an accidental bartender. The title itself was a misnomer since I had assiduously remained, as George Plimpton would have said, a professional amateur, discreetly thumbing through a cocktail book when faced with such complexities as Sidecars or Tom Collinses. Whether one could rightfully call a four-nights-a month job a career was probably also questionable. I had never become convinced that opening the bar on any other night but Friday wasn’t a mistake and I passed up additional shifts, stubbornly holding on to the view that the only safeguard against routine—in life and in love—was infrequency. I could be uncompromising to a perverse degree.

  I had now been with Sunny three times longer than the years I spent in college—which at the time had seemed like a very pleasant eternity. My Manhattan job was a short-lived stint by comparison and my longest romantic relationship, too, had given way. The lone avid baseball fan that I ever met at Sunny’s once compared my longevity to that of the three most steadfast Yankees—Jeter, Rivera, and Posada. “All of you came up in ’95, which turned out to be a superb rookie class,” he said. The dark side of constancy was the faint fear that, after years of watching customers come and go—moving on eventually to other pastimes, other cities, or, with parenthood, other priorities—I was being left behind. The progress of others, whether upward or just onward, always seems to remind me of my own rootedness. And after the Queen Mary II began berthing in Red Hook, the ship’s ghostly passes just offshore seemed to carry with them a subliminal message. There is nothing like the sight of the world’s largest ocean liner setting sail to make one feel unaccountably restless.

  Unbeknownst to Sunny, I had made a private pact that I would stay as long as he lived. It was the sort of pledge one usually makes out of excessive self-regard—we all have illusions at various times of being indispensable in some province of our lives—but in this case, my motives were not altruism alone. I didn’t want to miss a single thing Sunny said. How often can one say this of another person? He was the first person I knew whose company never became tiresome, his stories, even on their umpteenth retelling, never stale. But life has a habit of not cooperating with our plans. Sunny was slipping from existence into memory in his own lifetime. More and more often, late arrivals to Red Hook didn’t know Sunny as a flesh-and-blood person but as a mysterious personage who was said to live in the top-floor room whose window light burned all night. Some customers didn’t know anything about him at all, assuming that like John McSorley or P. J. Clarke or Ludwig Bemelmans, he was an entirely historical figure after whom the bar had been named.

  Sunny and Sunny’s had always been inseparable—I couldn’t picture one without picturing the other, just as I couldn’t devote myself to one without devoting myself to the other. That this would not always be so seemed impossible to me. The only truly indispensable person at Sunny’s was Sunny. But the impossible was coming to pass. Like the headless horse on the wall and the nameless sailor in the window whose face was becoming more indistinct with each year, Sunny was fading as a presence in the bar and it seemed that not even his larger-than-life persona was able to slow the process.

  With appearances on Friday increasingly rare, Sunny’s periodic appointments with his urologist had become one of the few occasions we saw each other in person. Although having a camera eased up one’s penis is not most men’s idea of a good time—no matter how microscopic they make these things nowadays—and the waiting room was the kind of place where the fake flowers were wilting and Maury Povich was in the middle distance, forever appalled by someone’s moral shortcoming, Sunny was never outwardly glum during these visits. He mostly accepted the indignities of the urological scrutiny to which he was subjected with his usual cheeriness, and I did my best to support him in this by pointing out the bright side of the situation whenever I found one. When I suggested that he was a very fortunate man to have his privates handled by such attractive nurses, he replied, “Timmy, I’ve had so many folks touch me in so many places I don’t have any private ones left!”

  Sunny treated all rooms as places to form friendships. I had accompanied Sunny to traffic court once and after the case was heard and dismissed, he presented the judge with a Cubist portrait he had made of him during the hearing, and on the way out, he surprised the bailiff with a paper airplane, saying to her, “May this give you flight to grander places.” He was, of course, exceedingly popular with the hospital staff.

  During one appointment he explained to his urologist and the head nurse that while he owned a saloon, he was also a painter and that to show his gratitude for the attention they gave him, he would like to make several paintings for the waiting room. Remembering the hidden penises in Sunny’s paintings in the bar, I thought this was a sublime idea. His doctor was Slovenian and the nurses mostly Eastern European and they had the respect for the fine arts typical of those countries. Regrettably, he never got around to them, but Sunny was like that. He was forever making plans for the future. He had all the time in the world.

  Although there had always been something eternal about Sunny, in the sense that he would be at home in any century, the inevitability of his physical mortality was brought home to me one Sunday. It was winter, the time of year when his lungs were most vulnerable. He had been taken to the hospital by ambulance after struggling for breath. I relieved Tone—she had a daughter to return to—and found him in the emergency room, his eyes wide behind a respirator mask. I squeezed his hand as he gave me a muffled greeting. Those whom we love will always look out of place lying in a hospital bed, the clinical setting su
ch a contrast to their being as we know them. Many of the other patients were prisoners and were handcuffed to their beds, and the smell of the room was, at times, blinding. But to Sunny it was a matter of course to be gracious in ungracious circumstances. He asked that I write down the names of each orderly and each nurse that attended to him so that he could thank them in a more personal way. The afternoon turned into evening and the evening into night while we waited in the emergency room for a bed to open up. From the neighboring cot, a woman who had been beaten with a chair by her husband and who was illiterate asked whether she could dictate a letter for her social worker to me. “I’d rather live on the subway than go back home,” I wrote for her. A policeman led in a teenager and shackled him to a chair nearby. He had drunk an entire bottle of vodka, though whether he had done so before or after inscribing the word “anarchy” with a black marker on his pant leg, I never learned. Sunny smiled at him with a look of understanding.

  It wasn’t until after midnight that a spot in a semi-private room became available. In the other bed lay an ancient black man who had lost his mind. He had no family and he cried and whimpered in his sleep. A nurse had turned his bedside television loudly to MTV’s The Real World, which seemed like a cruel joke. The only reality was the one in this room.