Flavor of the Week: In Love With a Dive Bar Regular
SEE THAT GUY at the end of the bar, telling the same story about auditioning for The Ramones for the umpteenth tourist? Meticulously counting out the drinks until his Sky and Seven buyback, glued to his stool, pupils black with the drink? Thats my man!
I first met Jonny in his basement, where he was lounging around on the cement floor, talkative and pale, chain smokin Marlboro Lights, impossibly frail and either pompous or alien in nature.Well, I met him briefly in 1989, when I was hosting a Smut Fest in a lap-dancing parlor, but I dont count that. I count 2007 or so, when he hit on me pretty quickly. Jonny lives in a zone of impulsive hedonism, tempered with Takin Care of Business, so his passes dont always carry a great deal of weight. His reach-around meant a lot to me, though. I loved him immediately. It was awful.
Yep, I had fallen in love with a Mars Bar regular. If you want to know what that means, look it up on Yelp, which has 118 reviews under the category of East Village Dive Bar. Most of them mention the unbearable stench of the bathroom, one review sneeringly miscalculates that Amy, the coolest barmaid ever, is a recent Barnard graduate. They all point out that the regulars are a repellant and lovable bunch of kooks. Characters. Its day care for drunks, more than one wag points out. Im comfortable with characters. Since I moved to New York, in the mid 80s, to go to the Columbia Writing Division on a tiny fellowship and a sweet student loan, the people I write about, know and love have been colorful, underground characters. Now that things have flipped around, the mainstream is crude and vital and counterculture is relatively genteel. The underground is safer, at least for me.
Jonny, though, like the Jonnys of song and screen, is not so safe. His blood is practically made of vodka, he can sell water to the ocean when hes in good form and whats more, he installed the very Mars Bar toilet that the First Worlders of Yelp hold in thrilled disbelief. Since he grew up on 57th Street, the child of two lively partiers, he talks in an articulate and constant stream, in the accent of his father, a Broadway actor who Im guessing had that Theater Academy training of old. In the who-suffered-more style thats propagated in much of Caucasian culture, this, combined with a sporty neckerchief, makes him a fancy pants, very much not an Average Joe, but I love that kind of thing.
As Hank, the owner of Mars Bar, well knows, in real life Jonny spackled walls and fixed plumbing just about everywhere in the LES at some point in time, a cerebral workman par excellence, before buying himself a building right on East First Street, installing a music studio in the basement, and retiring from most of the non-barfly aspects of society.
Lanky, garrulous Jonny got under my skin right away, and there he remains.Though he behaves horribly at times, predictably going from cheating with me to on me, unable to keep the firmest of engagements, he also takes me lingerie shopping, holds me tight, isnt afraid to tell the truth or a great lie and moves himself to tears reciting the plot of Great Expectations while forgetting the name of the author. Jonny watches Dr.Who on television and quietly weeps, tears streaming down his face during the sad parts, and chuckles noiselessly at the weak jokes.
Mars Bar, referred to by regulars only as The Bar, always has the best murals and the best women tending bar. In the East Village, with some exceptions, the barmaids are replacement girlfriends for the lonely guys, and nobody picks em better than Hank, the charismatic owner of The Bar. These ladies grow on you. They look good.Theyre smart.They can make you feel like the most dialed-in cool cat or the worlds most clueless jerk. If you fix your behavior, son, your fortune can change on a dime.
Jonny, alas, is my special needs boyfriend right now. Hes getting around on a walker, using a borrowed wheelchair to get home from The Bar when the snow gets slippery and bringing his flamboyant talkative style to it all. Though he seems to get injured a lot, and can recite the cost of an ambulance ride down to the last penny, this is a bad one.
Prior to this injury, every three months or so hed get clocked by another Mars Bar regular, which has resulted in black eyes, bruised kidneys and, one time, a nasty bite mark on his forearm. Its hard to tell if the frequency of these incidents is a result of his carrying on or just the general odds of standing in one place at any dive bar for a long time. Hell, Ive gone off in the place myself. I am no regular, but its hard not to cave in to the waiting-for-fabulous-disaster air of the visiting Europeans and other lookie-loos.
Though I find his friends draining at times, I have to hand it to them. I spent years in various performance scenes, as well as the atmospheres of putative recovery that dot this narrow island like cigarette burns on an old hospital sheet. I performed, I shared, I tried hard to listen, all in a show business replica thats gotten admittedly out of hand. In the late 80s I wrote a music column, pre-Facebook, and couldnt get my morning coffee without a flyer thrust into my unwilling hands. Ive seen people around for two decades who have never interacted with me beyond informing me of their latest spin on stage. And, to be fair, vice versa.
When Jonny broke his hip play fighting with a friend, Hamlet cooked him plates of seafood and sausage stew, Billy lent him his wifes wheelchair and Hank, with whom hes had a tempestuous past, hectored him to take care of himself.
I dont got it like that.True, Im not crazily effusive, and would often rather judge than join, but some of the folks Ive whiled away the hours and years with wouldnt cross the street if I was on fire. Especially if I was on fire, come to think of it. Some of those Mars Bar regulars, including mine, have real love to give, even if its not the kind we all had in mind. C
Jennifer Blowdryer is working on The Bitches Guide to the Lower East Side. Read more of her work at blog.jenniferblowdryer.com.