Lollipops & Cheese

Sunday nights are guest bartender nights in Long Island City. And a piece of advice for anyone interested:

Don’t do it.

I enter and instantly feel the moist scent of cleaning detergent. That is the good part. Here’s the bad: that’s all there is.

Frank comes from around the bar and introduces himself. He’s big, he has the body of a failed boxer, the temper of a jukebox – put enough in and he will play. Or so it seems.

“A little quiet, you know,” he smirks.

“I know,” I say. I smile. I introduce myself. For Frank’s sake, I stick to the first initial.

“Everybody’s home today, fucking long weekend, it’s all family time man.”

I tell him I’m used to it, no worries there. I think about giving him my resume, my long and fake list of central European long weekends and getting used to it, but – he does not ask. I keep it to myself. A look around the bar and keeping-to-myself seems like the thing to do.

Frank shows me around. The bar. The ice sinks, the cleaning sinks. Below the liquors are the beers, above the liquors are the lights. He has them on too bright, but I keep quiet. He shows me around apologetically, the way I have noticed people show their homes. I like him for that. We go down the back steps to the beer cooler, the booze reserves, the ice box.

It amazes me instantly how all bars, all empty bars in particular, are the same. I remember the old bar, the only bar where I worked some three or five times. The cellar was my home there, a place where I could hear the people without them eating me, a place where I could kick around the broken glass and think things over. Things really do make the most sense in the most unexpected places.


Some two hours later I’m behind the counter. A few of the regulars are in their seats, they hold their spots with an uncanny defense, this amazes me also – one look at them and they shuffle around over the stools. How much this instantly bring me back to the Midnight Gambler, that small little boat in international waters where housewives grab onto their seats at the low-limit blackjack tables, these Newport-churning princesses with the defensive tempers of eastern-front partisans. But that is a story for another time.

And so the regulars. There won’t be any fancy cocktails, that is obvious, and so I relax. It will be Johny on the rocks, back-to-back shots before facing the wife the kids the steps up to the evening news the frying pan the shower curtain… I project, but hey – I can’t help it.

Everything about this bar reminds me of the old one. The owner’s name is the same. The wooden finish is the same. The static of the Christmas lights in the window is the same. The manner of the regulars is the same. Two huddle at the end of the bar and chat. Three or four sit in a monk-like silence in front of their drinks. The rest, which tallies to about two, make it their Christ-governed destiny to fill me in on exactly who-drinks-what, what-goes-where, who-did-who, and so on. Just the sound of their voices puts Mary right up on the stool, Mary the sixty year-old self proclaimed accountant of the old bar, the part time exhibitionist of mismatched lingerie, her thick framed glasses, leaning back on the stool… standing at this bar here and now I can nearly feel her nasal monotone yelping for a refill.

I try to shake it off. I lean on the bar, try not to stand too close to the regulars, to keep quiet and listen. Several times I ask them a question, ask them about who they are, what they do, but I come off too aggressive, they retreat. And so I stay where I am. I clean the same glass several times, readjust the coasters, look at the television on the right, look at the television on the left, look concerned with the score, shoot the shit, refill the ice and soon enough, help to close. In this cold city filled to the brink with starving servers, I end up the only loony to make it.

Outside in the cold I hear my syllable and turn around. It’s Frank. I come back to the door.
“I like you,” he says. We shake hands, mine leaves with a twenty and I dip it in my pocket.
“I like you too,” I say.
We agree on the same time and the same place, knowing both that it won’t happen. We shake hands again, I smile, he laughs, and I make my way. At the end of the block I see a cab indecisively turning a corner and I make it mine.

The twenty gets me into the city. The man is from Haiti, half of the fare pays for his questions about my origin, the other for a collective struggle to cross the bridge. When the money runs out I mark it as my cue.
“This is good,” I yell from the backseat. “I’ll walk.”
The cab stops, he flips back in his seat and looks at me.

“Friend man, it’s fucking freezing, you crazy?”
“Yes.”
I close the door, the cab does not move, he is expecting me to change my mind, I cross the street while the light is still green, not that it matters. The streets are filled with nothing. It’s only me, me and the friend man.

I begin walking. It really is fucking-freezing. It is colder than it has ever been this year. It is colder than Dresden, it is colder than Prague, it is colder than all of that because at least there you could walk into a restaurant and stuff your socks with their napkins but here there is nothing, only a long weekend of offices still lit, corners empty without the coffee carts, diners and Au-Bon-Pain’s with their chains drawn and I keep walking. We’re somewhere on the east side. Of all places – Midtown. Of course.

There is a sense of peace, a nearly haunting sense of invincibility of having the world stop, when even within the belly of this whale, even within the back alleys of this wicked colony, you feel in your feet that all have fallen asleep and no one has yet waken up.

This is the world at pause.

And you walk right through it.

And places. These places that have made you theirs, places that you have made your own. There is a peace with them as well. Here there is Bryant Park. There is the Citicorp building, that three-legged witch of silver and steel. They are just places. And you are just you. And you keep walking, for an instant you want to become the Montag of your memories, you believe that you can incinerate everything, make the city objective, start everything new. But the places don’t move. Like manuscripts, they do not burn. They only shrug. They look at you, they smile at the futility of your self-obsessed fervor. And what can you do? You smile as well, the air becomes white under your nose, and you realize that in a way, you are laughing.


The sun is up when I get to the bridge, the sun is up and I am a slab of numb flesh with my eyes half open. I wish for McDonalds to serve whiskey but I know better.

I go onto the walk and go up and up.

And finally, somewhere
The water below
The sky so cold and clear
I sit down.

I lean my head back. I exhale. Somehow, even in this weather, this cold that can make you feel like an immigrant even in the places you want to call home, this bridge, this string of planks in the air connecting nothing and nothing has come to be the most grounded place there is. And so I relax. Through the frost the sunlight pats my face with the touch of a stepmother – alien, obligatory. But I take it. Yes, life isn’t so bad. If only I could have some napkins to stuff my socks with, if only I had stolen a bit of cognac to sip. Yes – napkins and cognac.

That would certainly hit the spot.