Six Bars in Search of a Story Teller

París es teatro divertido y terrible
(Rubén Darío, El pájaro azul)
image source: Abduzeedo
no copyright infringement intended

There are some days when you feel a terrible need to be alone, just with your thoughts, nothing else. To enter a hole and vanish. A big city with overcrowded streets, a small café or bistro in some corner of that city (not too pretentious, definitely not whimsy, more toward the dive bar kind). Maybe some jazz band of unknowns without any hype, in the background. Maybe an antiquated phone booth in the room, or a pool table that nobody uses any more. Surrounded by anonymous faces like yours, other people in search of loneliness. A bartender mastering the art of being discreet. A cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, beer, whatever. You and your thoughts, alone. And the big city around.

Hopper has given the definitive picture of the place: his Nighthawks, somewhere in the Greenwich Village, a spot like any spot there, and like no other spot, that Village of the thirties or forties, with guys the kind of Bogart or James Dean among the regulars.

I'm writing these lines seated in a small Bucharest café. It's the Falon, on Decebal Boulevard, close to what in bygone times was Bariera Vergului. I'm coming here almost any Sunday, for an hour or two, enjoying the atmosphere. Sometimes an old friend of mine is joining, to ruminate old memories together. But now I'm alone and the memories of other places like this one are coming to my mind.

I remember my first day in Manhattan, wandering through SoHo. A small restaurant appeared suddenly in front of my eyes. It was on the corner of Prince and Thompson streets, and its name was Milady's. From outside it looked like the entrance to some place of no return. Was it inside the same universe that I knew, based on those carbon atoms combining and recombining through all the chemical reactions that I had learned in school? Well,  it was my very first day, so everything around looked alien. I pushed on the doorknob and stepped in, very humbly. Actually it was a very nice place (with a pool table and all that stuff), and I would come back there several times in the following years. You could have there a  huge sandwich and fries, or some Eggs Benedict, you could drink beer at your liking, or anything you liked. I wrote once about the place, the lady serving at the bar was from Reykjavik, and she seemingly kind of enchanted me.  A sorceress? Only I was too scared, that happens when you are for the first day in Manhattan. That place is no more, as I heard. It went out of business, replaced by some stupid fancy thing.

Soon after discovering Milady's I found another pub in SoHo, this time on Spring Street between Greenwich and Washington streets, pretty close to the Hudson. It was the Ear Inn, a bar with a fabulous history spanned throughout more than 150 years, with the upstairs apartment being over the times a brothel, a smuggler's den, a doctor's office, a speakeasy during the Prohibition, and so on and so forth. Of course, I was totally unaware of all this when I entered for the first time. I advanced to the counter and ordered a glass of vodka (now I realize that I was by that time quite a regular vodka drinker, and I'm wondering whether I should be ashamed of that, or rather ashamed of giving up this noble habit; good question, with no easy answer). I came then several evenings in a row, and the bartender asked me where I was from. I said Romania, at which he mentioned immediately Budapest, the confusion that is generalized all over the place there. When it comes to Romania, all those people know only two names, Budapest and Dracula. But a very nice spot, I came once during the day, the saloon was empty, and I took the time to admire the setting. It had definitely some style.

The Campbell Apartment, well hidden inside the Grand Central Station building, that's a bar that deserves a visit, if you enjoy classy settings that seem to shelter also some skeletons, remained from old strange stories, à la Agatha Christie, à la Edgar Poe. Well, I visited it only once, I was with one of my sisters and she mentioned the possiblity of skeletons, laying in some huge timber closets standing along the walls. Actually a waiter came up and, very casually, opened one of those closests: it was full of Scotch and Bourbon bottles.

Maybe it's better to look for the places described by Joseph Mitchell in his New Yorker profiles. I did that and I discovered some. Sloppy Louie's is no more, but McSorley's is still there on the Seventh Street, behind the Cooper Union, You enter inside and get a bit of a feeling of the good old days. Good Beer, Raw Onion and No Ladies, that was the standard back in the nineteeth century: supposedly men couldn't drink in tranquilitty in the presence of the other sex. Those were the times. Now, of course, women are allowed, but it was necessary a court order for that, and it came only in 1970.

I succeeded to find also Minetta, the tavern that had provided shelter, back in the 1930s and 1940s, to Joe Gould, the famous eccentric pretending to know the seagull language and claimimg to have written no more no less than The Oral History of Our Time (an encyclopedia existing actually only in his troubled mind). But, I must say, I was deceived with this Minetta Tavern: too much hype, and nothing to remind of what had been before, of that spirit.

Well, New York City has many bars of all kind, for all kind of appetites and all kind of purses. One that I love is in Chelsea, on the Seventh Avenue cornering the Nineteenth Street. It's the Peter McManus Café. I discovered it by chance and I was immediately hooked, Everything there brought in my mind the atmosphere of The Time of Your Life, the play of Saroyan. I started to look around, to find Joe, the loafer with a good heart, and Kitty Duval, the streetwalker longing for a better life, and the Arab, that Eastern philosopher and harmonica player, and all the other guys.  Actually they were there, only with other names and other faces, talking casually and drinking lazily. I ordered a beer, a lady of indefinite age observed immediately that a beer is tasteless without a sip of something strong, I accepted the challenge and poured some Scotch. A guy of about forty or so, carrying a tag of Jews for Jesus, asked me if I was from Eastern Europe. I said yes, and he started a story about his ancestry. His grandma had come from Bessarabia and married a Bulgarian. His father was a Greek. It was quite complicated, but the guy liked to tell stories...

Well, I will stop here, not that I don't like stories, only this McManus deserves a tale of its own. I promise to come with one, pretty soon.

And here I am now, at Falon in Bucharest, thinking of all this, and of other places I visited, in Philly and in Baltimore for instance, thinking also at some imaginary bars, invented by some authors and movie directors that I love, and placed by them in Paris and in Istanbul, in Tokyo and in Hong Kong. Which is definetely another story. All in good time. For now what I'd recommend you would be this text by Andrew O'Hagan: A Love Letter to Drinking in Bars


(Andrew O'Hagan)

(New York, New York)