Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  Then, of course, there were the historical eras that affected not only this bar but all New York bars. The age of Prohibition. The period of the legal eighteen-year-old.

  I first came to Sunny’s near the end of two other such eras—the final years of the conventional telephone and of the barroom smoker. The passing of both has changed all bars. The ouster of the landline phone by the handheld, intelligent variety has led the solitary drinker to look for company in the glow of a miniature screen instead of their neighboring barstool. Bar bets, too, have suffered as there now is an instant resolution to all disputes of the trivial kind. The proscription on smoking in New York City bars has changed the view, the smell, the sensation of being in a bar—in this case, a tolerable metamorphosis in my view.

  I now know that my arrival at Sunny’s coincided with the tail end of another period, the final years before the real arrival of the Information Age. The Internet was not yet in wide usage in the mid-nineties and the impulse of the layman to reveal, review, document, or comment upon every existing establishment (and, seemingly, upon every place and subject on earth) did not yet exist. It was still possible to have a secret bar, a secluded neighborhood, a private getaway.

  Ken Kesey once said, “The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” This is something Sunny might have said and it is something that I believe in. When it comes to a business, it may be sensible to have a listing in the phone book, posted business hours, one’s name printed on the awning, a website, and a social media page—all of which Sunny’s would eventually adopt—but it’s hardly interesting. The less one knows of a place the larger its hold on our imagination, a principle that applies to people as well, which is probably why so many of the stories that Sunny told of his life seemed less accounts than fables. He intuited this and ran his bar accordingly.

  One of the other lost virtues of the pre-information age was that one could not preview an experience beforehand. The greatest pleasures, I’ve decided, are those that come to us by surprise and by our own discovery.

  I did in time chance upon another bar, deeper in Brooklyn, a diamond hiding in plain sight, where nobody knew me and all was new. Beneath elevated train tracks and along a particularly grim stretch of avenue where all other businesses within a half-mile in any direction were shuttered at night (in other words, in a highly compelling locale), it was disguised as a very ordinary sort of place. The standard neon beer logos filled the windows and inside, there were television screens galore. At one time known as a “bucket of blood”—that is to say, a notoriously dangerous dive—now its door was watched by a security guard twice the size of an ordinary man, patting down any new arrival possessing a scowl, a penis, or any other shady attribute. Those under thirty weren’t allowed entry at all. But the place was full of extravagant personalities, many of whom went by assumed names: Love Man, Silver Fox, Black Velvet, Lady Dante, Cassius Clay, Big Daddy, Dottie Diva, Stickyboy, Sippy, Chango, Lefty, and Ajax. Dressing stylishly was the standard. It was taken for granted that one could play an instrument or sing. Religious observance was prevalent though the demigods here weren’t named Williams, Sinatra, Baker, Dorsey, and Waits but Brown and Cooke, Franklin and Knight, Pendergrass and Vandross. By congregational agreement, one only went one night a week, in this case Sundays—a people after my own convictions.

  It wasn’t long before I, too, took on a new name and bought myself several suits. I found a regular date and we began going every week. A Belizean DJ with an instinct for showmanship announced each arrival and I can confirm that having one’s name called out as if one were a dignitary does a good deal for a person’s morale. Drinking was generally of only passing interest here while spontaneous acts of altruism were widespread. Seeing me bareheaded one night, a working cowboy (a misnomer only in the sense that the animals he worked with were equine not bovine) named JR led me outside and to an alley where an old white Cadillac was parked. He popped the trunk and presented me with a choice of wide-brimmed hats. On another evening, seeing me empty-handed, two brothers named Jacob and Esau presented me with a pair of maracas. “I first heard this song in 1970 in a country called Vietnam,” Esau said later that night from the bandstand. “I had been shot up by an AK-47 and as I lay in a hospital recuperating, it seemed the only song they ever played on the radio was this number by Mr. Brook Benton.” “Hoverin’ by my suitcase, tryin’ to find a warm place to spend the night/ Heavy rain fallin’, seems I hear your voice callin’ ‘It’s all right,’ ” he sang, the words so familiar but the pleasure in hearing them from this man made them fresh again. One singer outshone James Brown—and, yes, I know what I’m saying. Another was a master of the David Ruffin high falsetto and the sole practitioner of a shuffle he called the “Norfolk Shuffle.” It was, by and large, an older crowd—many in their seventh, eighth, and ninth decades—and the most senior of all, a woman also named Esau (in my experience, in bars as in Yoknapatawpha County, multiple people tend to share the same name), recalled for us the time she kept intimate company with a man named Pinocchio. “Keep lyin’, motherfucker! Keep lyin’!” she’d urged him on like a jockey exhorting a horse. What a line!

  A few of the customers owned actual horses and on noteworthy occasions, such as Mother’s or Valentine’s Day, they brought them along in trailers, taking the most intrepid of the women for short rides to the next corner and back. Through the windows one could see the animals neighing in the dark at the trains rumbling overhead toward Long Island while people inside danced either the wobble, the dougie, the step, the cha-cha slide, or attempted the camel walk. It was, as Sunny surely would have put it, a magnificent juxtaposition of images, a musical as much as a visual spectacle, but my involvement ran deeper than that of a mere spectator. I would soon make many honest friendships here.

  Somehow I had come across two singularly sublime bars in twenty years, each a magic theater, a better record than most, though only in the first instance was the discovery entirely coincidental. I had, unconsciously, been searching for something else as my sense of disenchantment grew, like a man whose marriage is unraveling and who begins looking around before its actual conclusion. To Tone, a resourceful and forward-looking person, I had become an obstructionist, protesting every supposed innovation and every incursion of modernity. I discreetly shut down the whirring ice machine whenever possible. I sent a salesman of credit card machinery packing with a gentle “Get the fuck out of here!” At her suggestion that the bar install an automated teller machine, I said, “Over my dead body.” Fearing that I meant it, Sunny, in his last executive decision, backed me up on this matter while Tone looked at the two of us with an expression that said, “Am I to suffer just because you’re allergic to the twenty-first century?” My loyalties and mind divided, I didn’t have the resolve after sixteen years to leave on my own volition, intuiting however, that with each dissent I was either digging my own grave or tunneling my way out the back. When it came, the final rift was a mere formality and as I turned the lock that night, I sensed it would be for the last time. Up above, Sunny’s windows were dark and though he seemed very far away right then, it was with relief as much as regret that I turned away. There is a corner turned, a direction taken, a door opened and a door closed.

  * * *

  29

  All Summer in a Day

  A year later, the greatest rain in memory arrived. Sunny and I had often talked of our shared love of storms. He had had a German neighbor once named Jackie Schultz who was in this regard a fellow devotee as well as an opera enthusiast, and when the sky looked promisingly dark, he liked to invite Sunny over and the two would sit, smoking and drinking and listening to Wagner, Brahms, Mozart, and wait for the show to begin. As a young child, I had watched from the windows as well, as the backyards filled with monsoon downpour, each a growing puddle until they connected and joined up with the overflowing rice paddies and all of the outdoors became to my eyes an inland sea. When the clouds dried up, I would navigate its waters in a red plastic
washtub, admiral of infinite space, or so it seemed. In West Africa, the lights usually went out at the first thunderclap. Our roof was flat and double-layered and an outer shell of corrugated aluminum would create a deafening percussion throughout the house when the rains of short-lived downpours drummed down on it. The rains in Europe weren’t violent in degree but unending. The sky was often overcast for weeks, once memorably drizzling daily for more than fifty days, and the broad Rhine would rise over its banks and lap up into the ancient towns that lay on both sides, nothing more than fledgling floods that enveloped benches and trees and a few forgotten cars. Even college in Ohio provided the occasional respectable squall, the farming plains a playing field for dueling thunderclaps.

  This storm would be nothing like those previous ones, though, all the constituent parts magnified many-fold. In Red Hook, nudged by wind and tugged by tide, the ocean approached the bar from the south, licking up the street and covering the distance from the shoreline to the tires of Sunny’s Willys in a few hours. It climbed the stoop and, finding the door locked and sandbagged, pushed its way through the basement windows. Once inside, it was a short leap to mount the stairs and seep between the floorboards like a drink spilling upward and rise three feet up the side of the bar before retreating.

  I saw none of this. I hadn’t returned to Sunny’s or Red Hook, other than to pick Sunny himself up once or twice for doctor appointments, in a year and a month. But the day after the storm’s last remnants blew out of town, I drove down spontaneously and, old disagreements forgotten, spent the afternoon along with many other volunteers wading in the unlit basement, raking debris and pumping sludgy water. Nearly all the family history and much of that of the bar, written in documents and photographs and barware long forgotten, had been stored—put away for a rainy day, so to speak—in two adjoining dirt basements and had disintegrated into a murky soup. There was no time for sentimentality and whatever was still solid was carried out to enormous demolition dumpsters. The bar would close for a year, and Sunny’s family endured a winter without hot water or electricity. Newspaper reporters and camera crews, local and from as far away as Europe, converged for the human interest angle. The rebuilding would cost many thousands of dollars and fundraisers, both virtual and the traditional kind, were held. “Sunny’s must be saved!” went the battle cry. The flood had weakened the foundations both of the bar and, out of the public eye, of Sunny and Tone’s marriage, an improbable union to begin with. Quietly and without lasting ill will, they separated as a wedded couple, making their upstairs/downstairs living arrangement a permanent resolution. At his age and in his weakened state, Sunny could contribute little to the actual rebuilding of the bar, which took place all around him, turning his attention instead on improving his guitar skills. His self-taught style resembled Django Reinhardt’s—his fingers, while not actually paralyzed, too thick for traditional guitar techniques. No one ever accused Sunny of practicality and art had always brought him solace in times of anxiety. On a leaky ship, he would sooner begin a new canvas than patch the hole—an apt metaphor perhaps for his romantic life as well. He abandoned any pretense of sobriety as well, contending that his life was his own and he no longer had to answer to anyone, putting out of mind the notion that parenthood late in life comes with some basic expectations of temperance.

  When it came time at each fundraising gala for the honored guest to make an appearance, Sunny would be ushered onto the stage, more of a figurehead than ever. “I feel like General MacArthur out here,” he once said, a reference, I was certain, that no one understood. He had taken to wearing a rakish fedora. At one such event, held at a large concert hall, he said a few misty-eyed words and then told an indecent joke (indecent if you were either Irish or a woman). The crowd applauded hesitantly, a trace of condescension unmistakably in the air by those who had never really known him. In the green room afterward, he said to me, “I’m so touched by all these people who have given what it is that it is they’re giving. But the truth is, Timmy, they may think they’re doing it for me but they’re doing it for themselves. I could have lived without the bar ever coming back. It’s had its time, a beautiful time, just like those sand mandalas that the Tibetan monks create. Aye?”

  The bar did reopen to fanfare and one can now go six days a week if one likes. It’s a vibrant sort of place. The crowd is generally young and there is music nearly every night. On Saturdays, a bluegrass jam. I returned a few times, not staying for longer than two beers, the sense of displacement never entirely subsiding. One early Sunday evening, Bobby, the founder of the Brooklyn Stage Company, one of the few people who remained from my earliest days there, four years sober now, put on the one-act Eugene O’Neill play Hughie in the bar. He played the role of the lead character himself and it was a marvelous rendition—one of those performances that spoils any future productions of the play one might see. As I watched Bobby pacing up and down the bar, holding forth, actor and character one and the same to me, I thought to myself that Sunny’s still exists as an inspirational place, if not for me, then for others. I accepted this with nothing but serenity.

  —

  SUNNY HAD NEVER seemed to care what people thought of him, a valuable trait undoubtedly made easier to sustain by his knowledge that he was widely revered. He had fewer regrets than most people; after all, his favorite phrase was, “I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam.” He squandered some talents, his artistic ones perhaps, and made the most of others. The ones that leave lasting impressions. His gift for gab as well as guidance, both imparted so eloquently, his hospitality, his grace. I know he is still spoken of, and most fondly, by the many people who in time have passed through and possibly by some that have passed on, life and afterlife differing only in that two-way conversations are exclusive to the former. He could be loyal and libertine, sometimes migrainous in his stubbornness and his foolish addictions. I admire him to no end for being the most original man I have ever met.

  Sunny once presided over a wedding held on a nearby river barge and later at the bar. The bride, an artist named Jen, was an ethereal woman, exquisite in all the important ways, and he was understandably as taken by her as was the groom. “There are paintings that are representations of women,” he said to me later. “But I look at this woman and I see a representation of a painting.” When I think of Sunny this way, as a painting of a man, it’s not Rembrandt or Titian or Close or his beloved Picasso that come to mind but Jackson Pollock. A different man to different people, interpretable in countless ways, no interpretation more true than any others. This is mine.

  In memory of my parents, Herbert and Ursula

  Acknowledgments

  An editor’s intuition and guidance are as invisible to the reader as gravity but, in my experience, no less profound. My deepest thanks to Noah Eaker for his indefatigable optimism, candor, forbearance, and friendship. I have been singularly fortunate and I know it. Also, to Maria Massie, my literary agent and steadfast personal advocate—thank you!

  A book’s creation begins long before the first word is written. Over the years the following people have, knowingly or not, provided counsel, loyal support, critical thinking, and uncritical camaraderie: John Pinamonti, Marianna Baer, Gabriel Cohen, Isaura Horenstein, Tone Johansen, Charles Bradley, Larose Jackson, Julie and Chris Cummings, Robert Francis Cole, Christopher and Antje Croton, Emily Votruba, Mark Adams, Sara Lippmann, James Linville, Francis Kerrigan, Louise Bauso, Sarah Welch, Rachel Schulder, Griffith and Sterling Iffith, Scott Murchison, Julie Qashu, Michael C. Maronna, Keith Romer, Jenny Witherell, Bill McBride, Frank Buffa, Jim Sucich, Robert and Annie Del Principe, Ralph Hassard, Bob and Rachel Prince, Pete Waldman, Jimmy Hill, Dorothy Lofton, Randy Gaffney, Denise Jones, Jason Elias, Meg Willett, Arietta Venizelos, and Christine Krol. A deep bow to Osamu Koyama, at whose sushi counter many of these pages were written, and to early supporters Laura Ford and Daniel Menaker, as well as the staff of the Brooklyn Collection at the Brooklyn Public Library.

  The Poisoner’s
Handbook by Deborah Blum, The Black Hand by Thomas Pitkin, and Sidney T. Smith’s 1942 study The Red Hook Section of Brooklyn all made essential contributions to this book, and I thank these authors for their diligence.

  About the Author

  TIM SULTAN’S work has appeared in The New York Times, The Spectator, and GQ. The son of a Foreign Service officer, he was raised abroad in Laos, the Ivory Coast, and Germany. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and lives in New York City, where he works as an urban gardener.

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