Tracy Westmoreland
On Friday night, at the grand opening of Manhattans, a new dive bar in Prospect Heights, it looked like the bearded, burly bouncer had a few too many. A tear in his eye, he looked at the tight crowd of revelers and said, “It fucking rocks. I’ve got a lot of fucking good friends and happy people here.”
In case you don’t know, the burly dude isn’t some biker—he’s Tracy Westmoreland, and he owns the joint. --- His old-time debauchery revival, Siberia, had been kicked around from pillar to post in Hell’s Kitchen, its toilets yanked out by Japanese landlords. It finally closed down; rudderless for years, its former booze-soaked denizens—writers, scoundrels, bullshit artists and misfits—have finally found a home on the fringes of Brownstone Brooklyn.
One of Westmoreland’s most ardent acolytes—Der Spiegel reporter Stephan Mueller—had to take a couple of trains out from Midtown. Tipsily, in his German accent, he said that it was totally fitting: “The first Siberia was in a subway station, and it still has to do with the subway!”
But some of Siberia’s more louche former clientele weren’t willing to take it quite that far. Observer columnist George Gurley jumped out of a cab with his half-brother, filmmaker, Jack Bryan. Glancing around like he had been dropped off on the moon, Gurley threw up his palms. “Am I in the right place?” he asked.
Westmoreland stepped out from the door and gave him a big hug. Bryan was so enflamed with passion for Siberia when it was closing that he directed a documentary about it called Life After Dark. (Sample reminiscence from lithe female former Siberia patron: “I loved to get naked there and fuck.”)
Inside there was no fucking, at least on the record: It was practically a journalist’s convention. Some of us even had jobs. Talking through the alt-classics soundtrack, Lauren Wolfe, from the Committee to Protect Journalists, was asking someone in my direction if they had gone to Columbia J-School. Oh, wait, did I go there?
Gurley was
slightly shell-shocked that his old therapy columns had just netted him
a book deal and pilot—what he calls, in a Kansas twang, “the TV thang.”
Wondering at the socialite dinners, power breakfasts and sheer family
connections that netted his book deal, he said: “It’s almost like I
didn’t do anything.”
Westmoreland came over and looked out at his writerly flock. Ben McGrath, a New Yorker scribe, was chatting with a girl in a darkened corner. Westmoreland asked me to turn on my tape recorder. “I’m pissed off,” he said. “David Carr didn’t get his silly ass over here.”
anonymous
