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Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World
by Tim Sultan
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But the final movies of the night were several silent cityscapes of 1970s New York, shot, our curator explained between reels, when he was with a girl who had a peyote habit. The girl appeared several times, sitting mutely on a couch, as the camera swung from one window to another, each a framed portrait of the city skyline.
The whirring projector stopped for good and a few yellow lights were turned on. I gestured down the bar for another round. As I waited for my beer and gazed around the room, a spindly, hollow-eyed man with a guitar in hand suddenly stood up and announced he was going to sing a song he had written in a Texas basement. His voice was resolutely unmusical and his guitar playing paid a debt to clanging radiators but the song’s refrain would have made greater and lesser poets despair with envy: “She’s not a vixen, she voted for Richard Nixon.” What a line!
I sat on the stool, twirling my now empty bottle, taking it all in.
The films. The singer. The nautical farrago that cluttered the walls and shelves. The trio of coffee urns the size of fire hydrants near the front door, the Blatz Beer boiled-egg dispenser, the plaster mannequins of stars of the silver screen—Bogart, Fields, Durante, Marx (Groucho), West, Marx (Harpo)—mingling in various corners. The bar counter was charred in places where cigarettes had been stubbed out. A painting of a horse hung on one wall in a spot where over time just enough sunlight must have fallen to bleach the head out: a headless horse in a nameless bar. A hook, which looked as though it once served as someone’s prosthetic hand, dangled from a chain of Christmas lights. And high above the bar sat several model ships in glass cases. There were no pinball chimes, no televisions turned to hockey, no machines at all (other than the projector and the stereo tucked somewhere behind the counter on which Julie London was now singing). The letters Avenue P pointed the way to the bathroom, but there was no signage that would give away the year or the decade we were in. Only the clothes of the customers revealed the era, and then only fitfully. The bar looked old and worn but not in the overly careful manner of certain New York saloons where amber beer seems to take on a whole new meaning.
My eyes came to rest on the barkeep. He was laughing, chatting, smoking as he made his way along his side of the bar with my next Rheingold. From a distance, he looked vaguely Native American, like Chief Dan George of Little Big Man fame. But he also resembled Tony Bennett, if Tony Bennett had last seen a barber in 1957. Up close, I decided that if one took Tiny Tim’s hair and put it on Gertrude Stein’s face, one would get a very good likeness of this man. From what little I had heard of his voice, he sounded kind of Irish, but when my beer arrived and I introduced myself, he said, “My real name is Antonio. Antonio Raffaele Balzano. But please. Call me Sunny.” He gripped my hand in both of his and leaned across the bar.
He was tall and very slim but the features on his face were large and rounded as a ship’s weathered figurehead. His eyebrows were two silver caterpillars that had come to a halt while walking Indian file across his brow. His fingers were as thick as a stout woman’s wrists. In the shadows, he had appeared a little otherworldly and a little epicene—less the ghost of the Ancient Mariner than that of the Mariner’s sister. But now he grasped my hand with the vigor and enthusiasm and curiosity of a man coming upon a compatriot after months lost in the jungle. It was a greeting startling in its sincerity and intensity, and one that I would come to see made to others many times. It expressed: “You belong.” To say that he exuded charisma would be like saying Mussolini liked to hear himself talk.
Antonio—Sunny—eventually continued on, stopping to speak with each person or party seated at the bar. I watched him and I watched how everyone else kept an eye on him, as if awaiting a turn to be in his company. He kept a cigarette continuously lit and often tilted his head back to blow plumes of smoke in the air. He sipped whiskey out of shot glasses that looked like thimbles in his hands while telling stories about rats he had slain at various times in his life. Though I only heard snatches, I assumed he meant the kind with whiskers and tails. He recited several lines of what I took to be Shakespeare. He pronounced words in a way I had never heard before. He might say, “I ate a plate of ersters and then I slipped on some erl on my way to the terlet.” He used strange words rarely heard in casual conversation, like “verbiage” and “personage.” And he used words strangely, saying for instance, “Within the framework that it is that it is that we’re existing in.”
Excerpted from Sunny's Nights by Tim Sultan. Copyright © 2016 by Tim Sultan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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