Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  It helped Sunny with his lungs to sit upright. I slumped in a chair and soon drifted off, waking up intermittently to Sunny gazing at me from behind his mask.

  “That’s strange. My fingernails look like the wings of a squid.”

  I opened my eyes again. Sunny was studying his hands.

  “I wonder what’s happening to me.”

  Though he had been awake since Friday, I realized that he wasn’t going to fall asleep in the propped-up position he was in and I sat up, too, to give him company.

  “I’m not sure there is a marine biologist on call on a Sunday night,” I said. “But I’ll buzz the nurse if you begin to change colors.”

  “Tell her to bring some lemon wedges,” Sunny said, grinning a little.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he resumed in a croaky voice after a while. “I don’t think I ever told you, but my father was brought here right before he died. He never went home again. He had the same thing they say I have. COPD. As did my brother Frank. I came here to see my father. He could barely speak. I fed him his last meal, a teaspoon of coffee. He couldn’t get it down really, but I’ll never forget his eyes as he looked at me. They were so grateful. He died with his hand in mine. My father was a wonderful man, Timmy, as was my brother. Brother would tell you stories. But never bullshit. He didn’t know bullshit. A lot of the guys who he hung out with were Irish and Frank could sing every Irish song there ever was. He’d sing ‘Danny Boy’ and you’d cry because he sang it with such depth of feeling and he sang it better than the Irish guys, aye? I think of what the two of them had to go through.

  “Brother challenged my father once when he was going through one of the really intense periods of his life. He must have been fifteen, sixteen. My father never raised a hand to any of us. If you were doing something that it was that wasn’t right, he would pernt and you knew, you just didn’t do it. We all had a great love and great respect for my father. We never feared him and we never wanted to hurt him either. But Frank challenged my father until he was left with no alternative but to say, ‘You want to challenge me? You want to fight me?’ And he took off his jacket. And my brother, he responded with, ‘Yeah, I wanna fight you.’ My father beat him badly. It was the darkest day of my life. The darkest day of all of our lives. How could this happen? I don’t think we spoke to each other—anyone—for a month. It was like the house was full of clouds. But Frank did go to my father and he apologized and my father embraced him and he expressed how painful it was for him to have done what he had to do. He said, ‘It wasn’t for me, it was for you.’ And my brother never went back to the life that he was getting involved in at that time.”

  “Right now my ability to access the past is so magnificently poignant, Timmy. Probably because I haven’t slept for days. It’s not like I’m telling the story of yesterday but of today.”

  He fell silent. The gums of the old man in the other bed flapped with his every exhalation. With whatever consciousness he had left, he might have concluded that he had arrived in the underworld as the denizens of The Real World mercilessly yammered on by his bedside. Outside the window, lights in Brooklyn Heights, the stirrings of early risers, were turning on one by one. The sight of common life resuming was comforting after a long night.

  “We’ll get you out of here, Sunny.”

  “I know, Timmy. You didn’t pull me up out of the river so I could die one day in a place like this. I wonder if you could find me some coffee? My lips are so dry.”

  I went down to the street and I found a coffee-and-donut cart setting up for the day on the same corner from which Sunny and I had once waved at cabs in our hospital gowns. Given time, it seems that one finds oneself standing in the same spot in Brooklyn at least twice in one’s life (lending credibility to the idea we are following paths preset by celestial geometrists). When I returned, Sunny’s eyes were closed, his hair draped to either side of him over his pillow. In profile, he looked like one of those incorrupt bodies of Italian saints encased in glass over whose face a prankster had slipped an oxygen mask. But he was only feigning death, breathing deeply, finally asleep, his beautiful mind perhaps conjuring houses full of clouds, perhaps summoning to life the gone. This wouldn’t be my friend’s last coffee.

  * * *

  28

  Sometimes a Great Notion

  It is not down in any map; true places never are.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE

  Live long enough in New York and everyone tends to develop a theory as to when New York stopped being “New York.” This is strictly a local phenomenon. No citizen of Boston, Wichita, or Seattle has ever bothered with this sort of municipal introspection, while in New York it is compulsory to periodically rhapsodize about the days when the city was more elegant, more seedy, more avant-garde, more soulful, more disreputable, more sophisticated, more freaky, more tolerant, more incomparable. This theory has its sub-theories, one for every neighborhood.

  My oldest brother, Peter, tells a story. In 1979, he was a young paralegal living in an apartment over an East Village bar named after its owner, Slugger Ann, a retired wrestler and the grandmother of Jackie Curtis, the drag queen performer and member of Andy Warhol’s inner circle. My brother only knew Jackie Curtis by sight, but one morning as Peter was leaving for his job in midtown, Curtis approached him and asked whether he was going to be anywhere near the Pierre Hotel. Peter confirmed that he was. Jackie Curtis explained that he was working on an Audrey Hepburn act and that he very much needed to meet the actress to study her mannerisms in person. She was said to be staying at the Pierre and Curtis wondered whether my brother would do him the favor of delivering a note and a bouquet of flowers to her? Peter agreed and Curtis handed him twenty dollars. During his lunch hour, my brother picked up some white roses at a midtown florist and walked them to the Pierre. For my brother, the storied East Village was a place where a Warhol Superstar could hand a stranger twenty dollars and trust him to deliver flowers to an Audrey Hepburn.

  (Lou Reed told another Curtis story: “Jackie is just speeding away. Thought she was James Dean for a day. Then I guess she had to crash. Valium would have helped that bash.”)

  For me, the decline of Red Hook began when newspaper and magazine articles began to regularly announce the rebirth of Red Hook. Such pronouncements are the kiss of death to certain kinds of neighborhoods. It wasn’t long before sightseers and Sunday strollers trickled in like a nonnative species expanding into a once-inhospitable habitat and property speculators began to materialize as if confirming Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation. In every dilapidated house and grassy lot, they visualized the future condominium of moneyed tenants colonizing a frontier neighborhood.

  Sunny’s daydreams of riding through Red Hook in his white Central Park horse carriage were now being routinely interrupted by the rumble of cars delivering a steady stream of shoppers to the gourmet supermarket that had moved into the abandoned Reconstruction-era warehouse at the end of his block. The store’s generator, erected steps from the bar, hummed ceaselessly, and streetlamps blazed their mercury vapors all night long over newly paved parking lots along the water, obscuring the harbor from view.

  Soon a developer would raise for scrap Red Hook’s last sunken wreck, Lightship No. 84, a decommissioned Coast Guard ship that had been tied up and abandoned alongside the pier of the defunct Revere Sugar Refinery until taking on water some years earlier, leaving visible only two masts. It had served as a romantic port of call or an observation post, depending whether one was a bartender on an outing in the bar’s boat or a double-crested cormorant.

  The sugar refinery’s rusty cone-shaped dome, a structure older than the Empire State Building and, at least in Red Hook, just as iconic, was unceremoniously razed before anyone could say, “Wait just a moment.” For a time the waterside site was rumored to be the future home of a BJ’s, a term Sunny had always believed only applied to an activity more numinous than discount shopping.

  Down the block, the 140-year-old Todd Shipyard,
whose bright red-bricked walls I had encountered on my first drive into Red Hook, rising up sharply from the curb of Beard Street like the walls of a man-made canyon, was torn down and its graving dock, once repair shop to the great ships, filled in to make way for a megastore as impermanent-looking as the Scandinavian furniture that would be sold within. Outdoor speakers now broadcast European pop melodies in the dead of night to lost animals and lost souls, as well as the occasional bartender bicycling home from work.

  Walk around Manhattan or any other metropolis and occasionally you will come across the sight of a single building, no more than two or three stories high, wedged incongruously between newer high-rise apartments or office towers. The entire block might be taken up by modern construction many stories tall except for a lone limestone row house or a humble wood-frame cottage, absurdly dwarfed, whose owner refused all offers. In architectural lingo, these curiosities have their own name: “holdouts.” (In China, I was once told, these sorts of houses exist as well. They are given the more poetic name “nail houses,” their owners being as stubborn as old nails that refuse to be dislodged.)

  I was a holdout, too. It wasn’t property but a memory and a love for a place that I wouldn’t part with. There is nothing very useful about a sunken wreck, a retired shipyard, a crooked paving stone, or an untraveled street. They are no more productive than the Parachute Jump in Coney Island or the Pepsi-Cola and Citgo signs on the banks of the East and Charles Rivers. We are drawn to the window nonetheless, for these things color the view. As Sunny said after watching a smokestack being dismantled day by day, “These places are the personality of Red Hook. They’ve accumulated over time in just this way. Getting rid of them is like going to the doctor after you’ve lived most of your life and erasing the features that make each of us who it is that it is we are.”

  New York was, of course, only doing what cities always do—moving ahead. But like any committed holdout in good standing, I tried to carry on as if nothing had changed at all. I ate my weekly meals at the same two-seater front table at Ferdinando’s and drove straight through to Sunny’s afterward, never setting foot in any of the latest bars, shops, or restaurants and looking stonily past every upmarket condo going up. I was something of an ornery type, better than most at nurturing a state of denial.

  On a Wednesday night one December, an original harbor swimmer was in town, back from the Far West where he had moved some years ago. He wanted to see Red Hook and Sunny’s one more time, he said. It was intensely cold and a fine snow was falling. I drove us along what had been our favored route when we first began coming here, what in a more rural setting would be the equivalent of taking the back roads. Past the Hess fuel tanks, the ball fields, and the silhouette of the old grain terminal and down teeth-jarring Beard Street where the shipyard buildings had stood. My friend asked to be let out a quarter mile from the bar so he could walk the rest of the way. He looked around in amazement at the newly flattened landscape and shouted, “Goddamn, it’s all changed! All utterly changed.” I left him behind and, by habit, drove slowly the rest of the way though the wild dogs that had patrolled this street had also disappeared, hopefully to kinder lots. A steady wind blew off the water. The bar sign creaked and the awning crackled overhead as we entered. We ordered boilermakers from Francis, though we had both stopped drinking them long ago. Behind him, a crockpot of cider burbled, releasing a billow of spiced steam whenever he opened the lid. A man named Charlie was playing a fiddle and a man named Bob a pedal steel guitar and a man named Andy a small drum set and a man named Smokey a Gretsch. They all wore ten-gallon hats, embroidered western shirts, and kerchiefs and they sang “You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Grow Old” and “The Gold Rush is Over” and “The Sheik of Araby” and several dreamy girls stood alongside and mouthed the words and the moment might only have been improved upon if a figurine of Rudolph Valentino, the original Sheik, had been listening in from the shadows above. It was one of those splendid nights that Sunny’s had perfected—sounds, sights, smells, and whiskey’s sorcery blending to bring about a high degree of contentedness in the populace. Yet, a restlessness soon came over us. Perhaps it was the vanished buildings, the vanished stones, and Sunny vanished, too, upstairs, convalescing once again and listening to the overnight BBC as he now liked to do, but there was an underlying sense of disappointment to this reunion, like returning to one’s alma mater and feeling a visitor, everything less familiar than one remembered. More levelheaded people than us might have foreseen this—homecomings have been prone to letdown at least since Odysseus’s time.

  “Let’s get lost,” I said.

  We left our drinks behind and walked outside and made our way to the wooden pier behind the warehouse by which we used to climb down to the waterline. The pier had collapsed in places, leaving ominous gaps in the planks. Below, the water was rushing past, a conveyor belt to swift oblivion—too dicey even for nostalgic gamblers. “This way,” I said. We took a path I knew to a nearby inlet where the current couldn’t carry one away and we stripped and for a moment stood naked on the shore. It was very dark and the sky was low and the air full of snow. A curtain of inexhaustible flakes draped to the water. Somewhere there was a city. A statue. Another shoreline, perhaps with others, counterparts of ours, gazing at the same sight in reverse. All was obscured. There are passing visions that always remain, our private museum of images. A father swimming at dusk, a breast unveiled for the first time, a car burning bright in the night, a shoreline ringed with snow and us part of this vision, too. It was too cold to linger on these or any thoughts for long. We dove beneath the water and for a few silent moments, we were once again swimming headlong into the unknown, ecstatic boys in the Mississippi-Hudson River, invisible men moving through the lower depths.

  —

  ON SHORE, WE dressed quickly and hurried back to the bar, skin still wet, our faith in our invincibility and our own derring-do momentarily fortified. “We still got it!” Left unsaid that night (because who really speaks like this) was that Red Hook, as we had known it, only existed in traces. Mystique is of our own invention and the reasons for its passing are as hard to put a finger on as the expiration date of erotic love. One only knows that it’s gone.

  As reluctant as I was to admit it outright, I began to have the gnawing feeling that the best days (or rather, nights) of Sunny’s were behind the bar as well—thoughts that usually came to me as I drove home in the early mornings, stopping and getting out of my car to feed and address a few of the many feral cats that came out to the streets at that hour. The bar carried Sunny’s name but no longer quite his principles, woolly as they were, which had always prized the unplanned and uncalculated. His managerial style most closely resembled a game of pickup sticks: throw the ingredients skyward and let the night fall where it may. While musicians still trekked to Sunny’s in great numbers, their appearances were now earnestly promoted, the old bar billed as a venue. One was dissuaded from singing atop the bar or using a booth bench as a platform in order to make a horn better heard over the crowd. Tony, the downcast cowboy with the azure eyes, was forbidden from singing entirely; Tone worried that he would depress the customers (an indictment of the patronage, if there ever was one). And the bagpiper who on St. Patrick’s eves past had performed his crisp solitary parade stopped coming on his own.

  Dogs were no longer allowed entry, as health inspectors seemed always to be waiting around the nearest corner to enforce their gloomy laws, and the lone feline regular, a white tomcat named Icarus who had on many nights stood by the front door, a sentinel as loyal as Gunga Din, while his owner drank inside, disappeared, too, perhaps sensing that he wasn’t welcome anymore. It’s an ominous development for any bar when its most illustrious customers start turning tail.

  A trip to Sunny’s had always been something of a convergence of present and past. And, at its best moments, of reality and unreality. But in its newest edition, there was a good deal of the former and less and less phantasmagoria. One Friday, two
dozen twenty-something-year-olds arrived en masse, brought to the bar doorstep by a party bus, an infernal invention that shuttles its passengers on all-night safaris of bars throughout the city. Buzz, our resident cynic, surveyed the scene and asked me earnestly, “Are we on Spring Break, Tim? Have we been transported to Daytona Beach?” The band of nomadic revelers only stayed for the duration of one round but their brief stopover made its point. Sunny’s had become just another place—still one of the most striking bars one is likely to enter, but no longer one that stirs a person to renounce all other bars. The faces that now filled the room were the faces one might see in any number of the many spots that had opened Brooklyn-wide in recent years. And the conversations were conversations one might overhear anywhere. No talk of Johnny Keyholes or Blackjack. There were no Joes either. Nor Bimbo Sisters, Falstaffs, or bug eaters. Even the bilateral hermaphrodite who had arrived on a tricycle one summer to sing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” was certain to never return. She had moved home to Cleveland, I was told, and was working as a surgeon. Of trees.

  —

  IT IS ONLY in hindsight that one divides one’s life into periods. The college years. The enlistment years. A first marriage. A second bachelorhood. The happiest time of one’s life. A melancholia. Our individual periods overlap historical ones—hot and cold wars, space races and great societies, oil embargoes and cyber ages. A bar, if it exists long enough, experiences eras as well, both its own and the ones the world at large is undergoing. The Balzano family bar was a wine bar in its first manifestation, opened by an aging immigrant named Raffaele and his son-in-law Antonio, both of whom barely spoke English. The era of the two Balzano brothers, John and Ralph, lasted for roughly sixty years. It was a working class bar nearly all of its life but it is no longer one. There was the five-year-long speakeasy period, which came in the middle of the Sunny years. Now, his influence waning and his authority mostly titular, the bar had entered a post-Sunny era.