FLASHBACK: One Million B.C. A tribe of starving Neanderthals is grunting in a cave, gnawing at whitened bones, fighting off shrieking pterodactyls. Suddenly, a herd of deer wanders by. It’s a new species, never saw them around here before. Bleating fawns wobble from nursing does to nibble the sweet grass by the water hole. Look at all this soft, yielding prey. The cave men blink at their good fortune, then attack with gleeful cries.

FLASH FORWARD: Soho,1974. Gray cast iron buildings, home to warehouses and small industry. In sweatshops  immigrant ladies hunch in clouds of dust, stitching piece work to the roar of sewing machines.  Skeletal Chinese, gasping in  metallic fumes, turn out miniature bronze Empire State Buildings for a bowl of noodles and a pellet of opium. 

A few blocks away In Little Italy minor mobsters grunt and squabble in their social clubs.  Soho is a place to extort from sweatshops, sell swag, run crap games and dump bodies. A risky living.

Suddenly,  the sweatshops are transformed into artist’s lofts. Guys from the midwest splatter paint or weld pieces of scrap metal into odd shapes. The novelty factories become galleries selling those splats and welds.

The neighborhood dives are hangouts for the midwestern guys and the art crowd that lives off them.  There’s a lot of drinking and bloodless brawling. New, glossy restaurants  offer brunch to the weekend art lovers. A theater group grows on Wooster Street. A jazz joint on Green Street. Famous galleries open Soho branches. Cool clothing stores, gourmet shops and real estate agents appear. Europeans with ski tans drink Chablis in the afternoon. 

Soho has gone from B&W to Disney color. Bambi Bohos wobble by on their way to the bank. They’re a new species. Soft, yielding prey. The mobsters blink at their good fortune, then attack.

Years later I will hear a wiseguy’s wistful reminiscence of the shakedown racket.

“You didn’t have to steal nothin’ or smack nobody around. You just sat in the club and the money came pourin’ in.”

It’s a Gigante operation. Very suave. An affable young man in a business suit offers a business card for “Sentry Security.” You pay a monthly fee plus a cash “surcharge” for extra services. For those who are slow to sign on  a scowling man appears in the salesman’s wake. He sits at the bar scaring the customers until the owners get the message. 

A Frenchman named Jean-Jacques, whose restaurant is a favorite with the fast-forming Soho elite, calls the police. When they are enigmatic he tries the FBI.  They descend in force, but the young salesman is gone and no one else in the neighborhood wants to talk.  A week later a carload of mice turn up in Jean-Jacques’ kitchen. A few nights after that an exiting patron is jostled and threatened on the sidewalk. Then, on a busy Saturday night the restaurant’s front window is blown out. Several people are injured by flying glass.  Soon afterward the FBI removes its mikes and cameras.

I’m working at the Spring Street Bar. The place is three deep, day and night, six days a week. (Tuesday is always slow.) They rush the bar like it’s the Fountain of Youth.  One of my bosses, B… is an architect with a red beard, a rock climber who has never been seen in public without a Heineken. The other, J… is  a former Woodrow Wilson scholar with a thick black beard who reads a book a day and does everything to avoid sleeping.  His wife paints pictures of cats with huge eyes. They sit at the bar, drinking pitchers of Commemorativo Margaritas with no apparent effect. 

The partners look down on the restaurant business with aristocratic disdain.  It’s fun to work for them because they hate the customers and are always cutting someone off, throwing someone out or tearing up a check with a “get out of my restaurant  and don’t come back.” 

The Mob controls every aspect  of restaurant supply. It sets prices and decides which family will service each restaurant. My bosses  bridle under its monopoly. They are dangerously snide to the seafood man whose company is in the Genovese-controlled Fulton Fish Market, snub  the table-cloth, cutlery, toilet paper guy who represents the notorious  Matty “The Horse” Ianello and insult Sam, the garbage man who works for the Gambino branch of the private carting cartel. 

“Garbage is a good metaphor for what you people are,” B… says to him one night. 

Sam is offended. “I’m a human being…”

“That’s stretching the definition.”

Sam takes a step toward B… “You pickin’ a fight ?”

“I don’t engage in physical violence,” says B…”I’m a Gandhian pacifist.”

Sam doesn’t get it. He looks at me. I shrug like I don’t get it either. “Sanitation Department won’t collect from businesses,” Sam says. “Somebody’s gotta get the garbage off the street…It’s a public service.”

“You could do a real public service by jumping into the landfill with the rest of the garbage,” B… says.

At 4 am Sam catches up to me in Dave’s Diner on Canal Street. “So who’s your boss with?” he asks.

“He’s not with anybody.”

“He’s tryin’ to get me to take a swing at him so he can get me off the route and go with his guy, right?”

“This is his first restaurant,” I say. “He doesn’t know that Soho is cut into territories.”

Sam still doesn’t buy it. “He wouldn’t talk that way to me if he didn’t have somebody behind him.”

I want to tell him that Mob logic doesn’t apply to my bosses. “There’s nobody behind him,” is all I can say.

Sam gets stubborn. “He wouldn’t let you in on it, anyway. It’s a power play.  Some big shot is backin’ him for sure…”

I’m not around when the amiable salesman from “Sentry Security” shows up, but I hear all about it when I come to work that night. The guy went into his spiel and J…cut him off. 

“We don’t need you. Our bartenders protect the place…So get out of my restaurant, I know who you are.” 

I am about to tender my resignation when a scowling man slides into a stool at the end of the bar. It’s a busy Thursday, people shoving and breathing down each other’s necks. But he puts up a force field and nobody intrudes on his space. He’s one of those little guys who doesn’t look like much at first glance. Lucky for me I’ve been decked by midgets; I’m not lulled. His ruby pinky ring glitters when he lights his Chesterfield with a gold Dunhill. He holds his outsized hands in front of him like paws. His knuckles are pounded smooth from the hundreds of jaws he’s broken–mine about to be next. I avoid eye contact, wary of the trick question “what are you lookin’ at?” for which there is no safe answer.

He orders a Dewars and milk, a throwback to Prohibition when steady drinkers took the antidote with the poison.  As the hours go by the customers recede like low tide. By midnight when it’s usually frantic  the joint is dead calm. Only a few regulars at the other end of the bar are watching with horrified fascination.

Finally, B… can stand it no longer. 

“Cut him off,” he says.

“He’s just here to intimidate people,” I say. “If you leave him alone he’ll go by himself…”

“You can blame it on me,” B…says. “Tell him I say he’s scaring the customers.”

The scowling man waggles his glass as I walk down to the end of the bar. “You run outta milk?”

“Boss says I can’t serve you,” I say.

He looks at me in puzzlement and I realize no one has ever said that to him before. “Whaddya mean?” 

My mouth goes dry. “He says you’re scaring the customers.”

He looks around. “I don’t see no customers.”

I have to lick my lips to get a word out.  “That’s ’cause you scared ‘em all away.”

He slides his glass to the edge of the bar. “Dewars and milk.”

He walks on the balls of his feet like a boxer.  B…looks down at him without flinching as he asks the trick question:

“What’s your problem?”

“You’re spoiling our fun,” says B…

The scowling man steps into punching range.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

B… stands his ground. “You have bad karma. You’re making everybody nervous.” 

“You want me to go?” The man shoves  him. “Throw me out…”

B… doesn’t stagger as far as expected. So the man shoves him harder against the bar. “C’mon tough guy, let’s see what you got.”

“I don’t use physical violence,” B… says.” I’m a Gandhian pacifist.”  

“Then how you gonna get me to leave?”

“I expect you to do the right thing.”

The scowling man turns and challenges me.

“You a pacifist?”

“I’m a punk,” I say.

“Then gimme a Dewars and milk.”

B…moves in front of him and warns me with a wink: “If you serve him you’re fired.”

The man kicks B…’s legs out from under him. B…falls forward,  his head thumping against the bar. He drops to his knees, blood pouring out of his nose.

“Now you’ve gone too far,” he says.. 

Once these gorillas get wound up there’s no stopping them. The next step is a hard kick to the ribs and then a few stomps to the head. Scared as I am, I can’t let that happen. 

“Wait a second,” I say. My arms buckle and I barely make it over the bar. 

“Wait for you to piss your pants?” the scowling man says.

B… searches through a puddle of blood for his glasses. “Don’t you know when you’re not wanted?” he says.

The scowling man stops and squints at me. “What the fuck are you guys up to, anyway?” He backs out of the door, as if he’s afraid we’re going to start shooting.  

B…feels along the bar for his Heineken.

“Well I guess we told him,” he says.

By closing B…has ingested every painkiller–legal and illegal–in the pharmacopeia. I’m heading down West Broadway toward Dave’s when the scowling man gets out of an El Dorado. “Hey you,  wait up, I wanna ask you something.” 

Every atom in my body is screaming: RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Instead, I fold my arms and lean against a lamppost.

He is fooled by the casual pose.

“Tough guy, your boss. By not fightin’ back he puts  the onus on me.”

“He’s a Gandhian pacifist,” I say.

“He told me to do the right thing. What did he mean? What am I supposed to do?”

It’s a linguistic impasse. “Do the right thing” means something very different in Little Italy.

“Nothing,” I say. “Forget about it.”

“Forget about it “means something very different as well.

“Look, I don’t wanna step on nobody’s toes,” he says. “If somebody’s protectin’ the join then fine with me. I just work here, know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

He moves in and drops his voice, getting positively collegial. “Somebody’s makin’  a move here, right? Who’s your boss with?”

I shake my head. Suddenly my voice is hoarse and confidential. “He’s not with nobody,” I say. “Forget about it. “

The scowling man nods with a knowing look. ” Yeah…That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Reprint from Nov. 2008

Soho, 1974 BC, Before Coach…(Prada and Gucci.) Old cast iron buildings, half sweatshops, half artists’ lofts. $500 a month gets you 5000 feet of raw space.

Spring Street Bar, the hippest place in the city, just ask us. On a good night you can see Johns and Cage, Raushenberg and Cunningham. Richie Serra comes in to punch people out, Andy Warhol shows up with his entourage after a Castelli opening. John and Yoko nurse beers. There has even been a “Clyde” Frazier citing.

But on Thanksgiving everyone dutifully turns into good little bourgeois and eats turkey en famille. Restaurants offer special menus, but only tourists and those with parents in elder care show up.

It’s the slowest and most hazardous day in the bar business. There’s no money to be made and you risk mutilation at the hands of some resentful reject who is drawn in by the lights. There had been a bit of a rush around noon as the locals fortified themselves for dreaded dinners. But now at 3:30 it’s dead. I’m using a lemon to show Mei, the Chinese busboy, how to throw a knuckleball when a guy in a green car coat slides in at the end of the bar.

He answers before I can ask. “Any kinda beer.”

People who don’t care what they drink just want to get loaded fast and act out their drama. This guy is white and blotchy with a sloppy red comb- over that starts under his ear and hardly covers his freckled bald spot. He’s got a blunt chin and a fighter’s caved-in nose. His watery blue eyes seem focused somewhere else even when they’re looking right at you. He’s the kind of holiday wacko who sets the alarms off , but for some reason I’m not concerned. He raises his glass. “Cheers, fellow outcast…”

I never speak to customers, even regulars. “No confessions please,” is the standard line. But the holiday has loosened my defenses. I pour myself a Remy.

“Cheers.”

He chainsmokes and stares into his beer while I chug Brandy Alexanders at the service end. When I go to empty his ashtray he puts down a fifty.

“Is there a magic cocktail that’ll put me in a festive mood?”

“Nothing that works on a holiday,” I say. “Holidays are God’s way of telling us we’re having too much fun.”

It’s a half-smart gloss on the cliche mantra of the decade: “Cocaine is God’s way of telling us we have too much money.” But he looks up at me like it’s the Sermon on the Mount.

“That’s really true, man,” he says. “Christmas is a total ordeal, too. Nobody ever gets what they want…”

“Because what they want can’t be bought in department stores,” I say. “Like the song says: All I want for Christmas/Is my two front teeth. But they’re lost forever like your youth and your innocence…”

He slaps the bar “That’s so profoundly true, Man. Christmas in a nutshell. But look at New Year’s. It starts out so great, but ends in disappointment.”

He wants a guru. Not usually my thing, but for some reason I rise to the bait. “That’s because people aspire to an ecstasy that is only available to the insane.”

“Then let’s get crazy,” he says. “Let’s have a double Bacardi 151.”

It’s the strongest booze in the house, 75% alcohol. I never touch it, but now I’m filling two rocks glasses. My new best friend throws down his drink with a practiced flip and waits for me. I follow suit. The rum burns a flaming trail of lava from my throat to my rectum.

“There’s three houses I”m not welcome in,” my pal says. “My parents, my ex wife and my girlfriend who just threw me out because I’m always stoned. How about you?”

Sirens wail in the distance. Everything here is totally under control.

“I’m past unwelcome,” I say. “I’m not even an afterthought. I’m only here today because they need somebody to turn off the lights.”

He gets up quickly, knocking over his stool. Through the mist I think I see him smiling.

“Man, you’re in worse shape than me,” he says. He pushes a hundred at me. “Thanks, you really cheered me up.”

“Any time,” I think I say.

I watch him go out and turn the corner. A hundred and fifty bucks is more than I make on a good night. “Nice guy,” I say to someone.

There’s a plate at the end of the bar. Turkey breast and glazed ham with pineapple…Brussel sprouts… Sweet potatoes with marshmallows…

“Thanks, maybe later,” I say.

Mei is at the bar, tugging my arm. “Come outside…”

A cold gust brings the smell of burning rubber. My friend is shivering in a storefront across the street with Jimmy the Irish cook. He offers me a thin, tightly rolled joint.

“Here, man, Happy Thanksgiving.”

I’m not a big reefer man, but I take a toke to be sociable. It’s harsh and unfamiliar, but I’m not a big reefer man so I take another when it comes around.

There’s a lot of hugging and hand clasping.

“You guys got me through,”my friend says. “I love you guys.”

Back in the bar, Mei’s face is very big.

“He your brother?” he asks. “He looks like you.”

“You think all white people look alike,” I say. “You guys…one billion twin brothers.”

“And you, two hundred fifty million,” he says. “So we going to crush you…”

And that’s the funniest thing we’ve both ever heard…

How did I get into Van Gogh’s yellow room? It feels so good to wash my face with soapy dish suds.

I realize I’ve turned myself inside out and got stuck into my brain.

“I have to get out of my head,” I say.

I ride my tricycle down the long, dark foyer. Can’t ride your bike in the house, grandma says.

In the bedroom I open the closet door. My mother is hiding behind the dresses, holding a handkerchief to her mouth, tears pouring out of her eyes.

The radio says it’ll go below zero today. I’m waiting for the 41 Flatbush Avenue bus. There’s nobody at the stop, which means I just missed it. The wind goes through my black leather jacket. My feet are so cold they’re burning.

“Hey, you okay?”

“I’m waiting for the pus,” I say. “That’s funny, huh ’cause that’s what I really am waiting for.”

My feet are sliding along the cold ground. In the sudden warmth of a car, the rum burns a lava trail from my rectum back to my throat…

“He’s puking…”

My head is in the cold air. Yellow vomit runs down the side of the car.

“We found you in the schoolyard in Thompson Street.”

It’s the owner. They had called him when I bolted out of the bar, screaming “I have to get out of my brain!” I had walked across the street to the schoolyard and had been there for hours.

“That guy slipped you a joint laced with PCP,” he says.” Mei freaked out. They had to give him Thorazine in Bellevue. Jimmy ran his car into a lamppost, but he’s okay.”

Mei was too humiliated to return to work. But I heard he had stopped losing all his money at fan tan games in Chinatown and bought into a takeout in Jackson Heights. Jimmy joined AA and went back to Dublin.

I ended up with pleurisy and had to wear a belt around my chest for two weeks. In the doctor’s mirror I saw the booze flush starting to spread through my cheeks.

“I can’t live this way anymore,” I said to someone.

When I was better I made the rounds looking for the guy. I had bloody fantasies of beating him with a bar stool. Never found him. For years his face was fresh in my memory. I knew that if I ever saw him again I would easily summon that vengeful rage that still festered.

But then, his face began to fade. The rage subsided.

Now I think he might have been sent to make sure Mei stopped gambling. Jimmy took the pledge and I never spent Thanksgiving alone again.

It’s 1973 and nobody goes home until they run out of money, drugs or hope. At 3:45 am Le jardin in the Hotel Diplomat on Times Square, is so crowded that short people are having trample anxiety. The dance floor is too jammed to do anything but bump and grind. The DJ has forsworn elegant variation and is blasting one jump tune after another. Drunks pass out and are held up by the crowd. People hang over the ledges of the roof garden nine stories up, flashing boobs, dropping pants. Behind the bar I’m confronted by a wall of clutching hands. In my dive joint experience, a four deep bar at last call means one shove too many, an elbow, an angry word and suddenly an ugly brawl, which the bartenders, in those pre-bouncer days, are required to break up. But we are in Disco Eden, before the fall, and good spirits prevail. There is a lot of pushing, groping, giggling, waving money, making friends. Not a cross word or a clenched fist in the crowd.

Sal Mineo is surrounded by devotees, talking theater. Jill Haworth sits outside the charmed circle, the beard that’s no longer needed.

Roy Cohn is leading his muscle boys in a spirited rendition of “God Bless America.” He glares at me. “Don’t you know the words?”

Ira slips under the bar and lifts the drawer to remove the stacks of 50′s and 100′s. My paranoia flares.

“Can you put a slip in saying how much money you took out?” I say. “I don’t want to be short in the total.”

Ira grabs a fistful of 20′s. “Now who would ever accuse a bartender of stealing? Don’t worry, a man comes in and re rings the tapes for Uncle Sam every morning.”

An hour before the tip cup had runneth over, bills sprouting like a bonsai. Now it’s almost empty. Has Jimmy been skimming? I check the cup. The singles, fives and tens have been “married” into a thick stack of twenties. Jimmy gives me a thumbs up and I feel a twinge of guilt for my suspicion.

People are screeching in desperation. “I didn’t hear you give last call.”

Bianca Jagger squeezes through the crowd and holds out her glass. She’s been drinking Cinzano, but now says: “Can you make me something better?”

If I get the drink right I’m in. I decide on a stinger, Remy and white Creme de Menthe, shaken over ice. She takes a sip…”Delicious…” Before I can ask “are you Bianca…?” her German friend pushes her aside…”And a Tequila Sunrise, extra grenadine…”

Suddenly, the music stops. Everyone is frozen in the silence for a moment. Then, they charge John Addison, pleading for one more dance. He shakes his head, sternly. “There’s a cop in here somewhere, checking his watch, who would love to lift our license if we serve a drink at 4:01.”

As senior man, Jimmy divides the tips. I get fourteen nice crisp twenties, the most I’ve ever made. That’s almost half my child support. I’m jubilant.

“Hold out your thumbs,” Jimmy says. He sprinkles cocaine on both my thumbnails. “Blast off…” This is not a good idea, but I have to show solidarity. I jam my thumbs into my nostrils and take a huge snort. The coke races like a burning fuse. I can feel the brain cells flaring like emulsifying film.

Jimmy holds his thumbs out. “Do me…”

The coke makes me edgy and talky. I’m wiping the bar, cleaning the ashtrays. Jimmy shows up with two shots of 151. “Going off drink…”

We click glasses and throw down. I am immediately on fire from my throat to my scrotum.

“C’mon boys, leave some for the customers.” It’s Addison. I can’t place the accent. “Are you Australian?” I ask.

“No, are you a fucking college graduate?” he says.

On the way out I get the wobbles. The Pippin gypsies are pushing into the elevator singing: “Gay Gay Gay/Is There Any Other Way?”

“I’ll take the stairs,” I say.

I descend into the seven circles of Disco Inferno. Every landing a different sexual permutation, a different piece of paraphernalia. Clinging to the banister I stagger through smoke and over writhing bodies. People are moaning, screaming with laughter. Somebody grabs my ankle.

Finally, the fresh air of Times Square. I cram the tip money deep into my sock and leave a twenty in my pocket to satisfy any mugger I might encounter. It’s a few blocks to the subway and then to an unmade bed in a sweltering apartment where I’ll lie in wakeful torment. Suddenly, death seems a viable alternative.

A redhead in white short shorts, black boots and a halter top runs across the street and right by me to Jimmy.. A big kiss.

“This is Adrian,” he says. “She dances at Robbie’s Mardi Gras.”

“Robbie’s Mardi Gras used to be the Metropole,” I say. “A Dixieland club. You could see the greatest musicians playing on the bar—Gene Krupa, Red Allen, Buster Bailey, Marty Napoleon…” The coke is talking, but I can’t shut it up. “I used to stand out there in the freezing cold to watch these guys–Max Kaminsky, Pee Wee Irwin and Pee Wee Russell who wasn’t really that short…”

A stretch limo glides up and Bianca’s German rolls down the window. “Get in tarbender,” he says.

The limo is crammed. Bianca is sharing the jump seat with two skinny blondes who are dressed like twins. She smiles an invitation. Is that Addison in the front seat?

“We’re going to 228 and then I’m preparing omelets for anyone who is still breathing,” the German guy says.

228 is an after-hours club in the Village. It’s in an old sweatshop with blackened windows where you can lose days at a time.

I can’t go.

“The Loew’s 83rd. Street had a kiddie matinee at 11 today,” I say. “They show cartoons and the Seven Voyages of Sinbad. Sometimes they even have a clown…” The coke is broadcasting again. “I take my son, you know. He gets really mad when I fall asleep and keeps poking me–’wake up, dad, wake up–so I should try to get a few hours…”

The limo rolls away, but I’m still talking…”Although I’ll have to take six Advil and then I’ll be groggy all day and he’s going to want to fly a kite…”

I never worked at Le jardin again.

The Disco scene was too good to last. Everybody got too high too often. They lost control, talked too much, did too much and ended up dead. Everybody got too rich and drew too much sinister attention. The wiseguys who ran the gay bar scene in the Village branched out into the clubs. Addison had to seek police protection from a very tough guy from Brooklyn, who later became a big TV star. The IRS locked up all the major club owners for tax evasion. The wild sex turned lethal in the 80′s when the AIDS epidemic hit. Life became dangerous for the hard partyers. Sal Mineo was stabbed to death outside his West Hollywood apartment. Roy Cohn died of AIDS, denying to his last breath that he had it. John Addison also died of AIDS. By the late ’80′s Disco was dead. Only the music lived on.

It wasn’t all bad. Jimmy gained 50 pounds, married a model and became a movie producer.

And Bianca Jagger must be a grandma by now. If that was Bianca Jagger.

July ’73, Times Square, New York…There’s a recession on, but you can’t tell by me. I’ve got a bar job– twenty-seven bucks a night and all the goldfish I can eat. It’s at the Hotel Diplomat, an SRO on 43rd. St. and Sixth Ave. We call it “the Roach Motel” because once you check in you don’t check out. Half the tenants are seniors, shuffling around the mahogany chairs and sputtering lamps in the lobby until they find a spot on a lumpy sofa where they can lean on their walkers, muttering to the ghosts in the gloom. They stop breathing in rooms filled with fifty years of clutter, and lie forgotten until their stench signals their demise. The stronger ones make it to the hospital, bounced down the steps on a gurney, heads turning for one last dazed look around before they vanish into the ambulance of no return.

Hookers live in rooms rented by their pimps, who hang out in a bar off the lobby. They are hustled out, handcuffed and hysterical, by Vice Squad cops. New girls immediately take their places like there’s a waiting list. The seniors lean on their walkers and watch as they lead raucous sailors, nervous high school kids or furtive men in suits across the lobby.

Slouchy guys mutter in the phone booths by the elevators. Some of them are found with the needles still in their arms. Alerted by a trail of blood under the doors the maids enter to find the others tied, gagged and slashed in ransacked rooms. The seniors hobble down the hall as EMS workers wheel the bodies out, wrapped in their bloody sheets.

Rats the size of anteaters raid the liquor room, ripping open the bags of pretzels, unscrewing the tops of the maraschino cherry jars. We shout and sing to get them to scatter before we enter, but there are a few practical jokers in the pack. You don’t know what terror is until you’ve been startled by a giant rodent covered in Red Dye No. 2.

The Diplomat was once the hotel of the soft Left. The Socialist Party had its meetings and dances in its three ballrooms. Now promoters rent the spaces for dances and special events. Friday, Saturday and Sunday night the Crystal Room, so named for its chandeliers, is taken over by Alfredo, a twitchy middle-aged Neapolitan and Gerry, his blonde Brooklyn girlfriend. They put on dances for Italian immigrants. They charge ten dollars at the door and the hotel gets the bar. The room has a capacity of seven hundred and fifty. Every night begins with Alfredo pacing nervously as a few people straggle in. But by ten o’clock the place is jammed.

Three of us work a ninety foot bar. It’s Paul, a retired mailman from Harlem, Al, an angry butcher at Gristedes, who sells swag steaks out of the trunk of his car and me, a recently separated hack writer with a six year old son. We each have a bottle of Seagrams Seven, Highland Dew scotch, Gordon’s gin and Wolfschmidt’s vodka–and a soda gun. Seven and Seven is the cocktail du soir; we go through at least three cases of Seagrams a night. All drinks are $1.25 and served in plastic cups. No bottled beer; quarrels often erupt and the management doesn’t want any throwable glassware available.

The customers rush the bar, hundreds of them, shouting and shoving and clamoring for drinks for like they’ve been crawling on the Sahara for weeks. They pay in small change. “These greaseballs don’t go for spit,” Al says. By midnight, we have so many nickels in the register that Lester, the night manager dumps them in a huge sack. A quarter is considered a big tip and is presented with much pomp and ceremony. A few of the guys proffer a buck like it’s the papal crown on a plush pillow, but then they want free drinks for the friends and any stray girl who happens by. We do the math and figure that with people coming and going Alfredo is grossing ten thousand cash a night on Friday and Saturday and about five on Sunday– twenty-five G’s for low. Figuring an average crowd of twelve hundred, averaging three drinks at $1.25 per, that’s about $4500 for the hotel. For very low. “Everybody’s makin’ money and we get screwed,” Al says. We decide to charge the customers and steal from the till.

A quintet plays Top 40 and traditional Italian. Vito, the vocalist, a short kid with a gimpy leg and coke bottle glasses, is the ideal cover singer, doing Marvin Gay, Frankie Valli or Domenico Madugno with equal fidelity . Gerry rakes the dance floor with disco lighting, flashing, strobing, changing color, sweeping the room like a prison spotlight. The dancers do the same steps to a proto party list, going from Swear to God to Let’s Get It On to Volare.

There is a hard core of about a hundred regulars who show up every week. Among the men, an older group, smooth-shaven and slick-haired in wide-shouldered suits clusters at one end of the bar. They own pizza parlors all over Brooklyn and Staten Island, Vito explains. Another faction, young and modish in jeans and leather vests over sleeveless tees comes to my end. They work in “debt collection, you know what I mean?” Vito says flicking his nose. The two groups greet each other guardedly and never mix.

The females are either overdressed, heavily made up and deliriously sexy, at least to me, or mousy and awkward and giggling with each other. They arrive in groups like a bus tour and dance together for the first hour until the men join in. Everyone usually pairs off, but one night I spot a melancholy lady staring at me as she knocks back Seven and Sevens. At closing an invitation to coffee leads to a lurching clinch in the lobby and more stumbled kisses on the subway steps. But she sobers up on the long ride out to Brooklyn and by the time we get to Bensonhurst it’s life story time with lots of names and places, weddings, spiteful cousins, he saids, she saids… I find out she lives on 18th. Avenue with her parents and her “fiance” is a few doors down and I’m out of there. The next week she’s at the bar with one of the “debt collectors,” giving me a complicit smile like we’re having a mad affair.

The ’60′s had been a stressful time, what with psychedelics, army physicals and the shock of parenthood. Now, in the ’70′s I wake up broke, rejected and full of guilt on a mattress on the dusty floor of an empty apartment. But I’m not in school, I’m not in the army, I’m not married and I’m up for a job writing porno novels at ten dollars a page. Life is good.

One night I come to work to find a line a gleaming limos in front of the hotel.

“We doing weddings now?” I ask Lester.

“They’re havin’ a big party at Le Jardin tonight.”

He’s a black dude who’s been at the Diplomat for forty years, working his way up from porter. You’d think he had seen everything, but he shakes his head in amazement.

“They had Diana Ross and the Supremes up there the other night. They get just about everybody…”

I remember a few weeks ago when the place opened. “They got a fag joint on the roof,” Al had said.

Vito had gone up there one night and come back with a dismal report. “No live music…They got a DJ like on the radio. Two turntables goin’ back and forth…” He looked at me helplessly. “Everybody’s gonna do this now. We’re dead…”

It’s the beauty of narcissism. A seismic cultural phenomenon was erupting right under my nose and I didn’t even notice it.

For the first time I notice that the lobby has a new population. Young, stylish, flamboyant, pushing the seniors off their perches, interfering with the orderly process of prostitution, even sending the dope dealers into temporary retreat. They jam into the only elevator that goes to the roof, making so many trips that the motor burns out and they have to take the stairs.

“They wait on line like they’re givin’ out twenty dollar bills,” Lester says. “You oughta go up there. They got everything goin’ on…”

TO BE CONTINUED

New York City, Christmas Eve, 1973…Global warming hadn’t become an A-list cause. Ozone layer sounded like something you inhaled at a party.

In Washington, the hottest present was a bootleg White House tape of President Nixon drunkenly ranting about the Watergate investigation to Attorney General John Mitchell. It was played at office parties all over town.

On Dec. 16, with the help of an Eagle Scout and a Brownie, Nixon, planted a 45 foot Colorado spruce, which was to be the first live White House Christmas tree. A few days earlier the North Vietnamese had rebuffed Kissinger’s peace plan. That day the Arab oil producers had announced they were lifting their oil embargo against every country but the US and Netherlands, who they said were being punished for giving aid to the Israelis during the recent October War with Egypt. As he delivered his greetings to the nation, promising to “maintain the integrity of the White House,” Nixon knew that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were running an espionage operation against the White House. Not only were the Democrats crying out for his impeachment, but his own military commanders were spying on him.

It had been a cruel month. On December 17, ice storms had delayed the opening of the Stock Exchange. Christmas Eve, a blizzard was dumping 30 inches of snow on Buffalo. In the city , a dark cloud settled like a wet blanket over the stars. Fluttering shreds of wrapping paper clung to my legs as I walked to the subway. Twin brothers in Santa hats marched outside the 72nd. St. station carrying signs reading “USEFUL IDIOTS FOR THE CIA.”

The energy shortage had curtailed the decorations on the tree in Rockefeller center. Fifth Avenue wasn’t its usual glittering self. The faltering economy, the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal had dampened the Christmas spirit.

Downtown, in Soho, the only way you could tell it was Christmas was that the galleries were closed and the sweatshops had sent their Hispanic ladies home early. The artists emerged from their lofts, hunched in fatigue jackets, with an occasional scarf as a gesture to the cold. Everything was closed. Only one light burned like a beacon in the night–Spring Street Bar.

We had no tree, no lights, no Christmas dinner. And we only had one customer: Kobe, the son of an Admiral in the Japanese Navy. Rumor was that he had been sent packing after he stabbed some guy with his father’s ceremonial sword. Earlier in the evening Mei, the Chinese busboy, had knocked over his drink It seemed like an accident, but then I saw Loq, the Chinese dishwasher giggling in the kitchen doorway. Kobe saw him, too. Now he was downing tequilas and glaring at Mei, visions of the Rape of Nanking dancing in his head.

Marisol was a famous Venezuelan artist, who was having an affair with Jack, my bar partner. She was known for her explosive temper. “Get ready for some shit, I stood her up today,” he had muttered as she lurched in, having fortified herself elsewhere for an epic confrontation.

I watched warily as he poured her a red wine, which she knocked back like a shot of whiskey, while glaring at him. Then thrust her empty glass at him for another…And another…

A couple came in out of the flurries. She was tall, graceful, wet snow glittering on her dark hair and cashmere coat, the kind of beauty who never buttoned her coat, even in bitter cold. He was shorter than she and softly fat. Biology hadn’t given him a break. His face was red and chapped by the cold, just as it would be red and blistered by the sun. He steered her to the bar and glared as I smiled at her. There was a lot of glaring going on tonight.

“What would you like?” he asked her with what sounded like a parody upper class drawl.

“I don’t know…anything.” Her indecision gave me an excuse to look at her. Dark eyes under thick, unplucked brows, were focused somewhere else.

“What was that crazy drink you loved in Venice?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t remember.”

“Pousse cafe,” he said.. He threw down the challenge. “Can you make that here?”

I had never made one in my life. “I can make it anywhere,” I said, defiantly.

I rummaged in the office behind the bar and found a torn copy of Mr. Boston’s Bar Book. Pousse cafe had six ingredients floated on top of one another to produce what the author called “a striped rainbow of color.”

The liquors had to be floated in the right order, the heaviest down to the lightest. I would have to make the drink in front of her because if I carried it the colors might run.

First, I covered the bottom of a highball glass with Grenadine. Using the back of a mixing spoon I floated Yellow Chartreuse on top of that. Then… reddish Creme de Cassis…White Creme de Cacao…”

A stool scraped.

“Nobody move please,” I said. With a steady hand I floated Green Chartreuse and a final layer of Cognac.

I stepped back and contemplated a work of art, one layer of gorgeous color on top of another.

“This is probably the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” I told Jack.

But the girl pushed it away with a sob. “I can’t.” The drink came apart, its colors sloshing and bleeding into one another. She got up.” I’ve got to go back there.”

“No…” He pushed her down and whispered vehemently. “We’re going to have a Christmas drink just like we said…Then, we’ll go uptown…”

You stand behind the bar and try to get the story straight. This looked like a long term relationship finally crumbling. He trying to hold it together. She desperate to escape.

Peggy, the waitress, sipped the ruined pousse cafe. “It tastes like poisoned candy,” she said.

The girl found a crumpled cigarette. He fumbled with his lighter. “What do you think they’re doing now?” he asked

She took a sucking drag and blew the smoke through her nose. “I don’t know what they do anymore.”

“Your Mom’s making her special egg nog like she always does, right? Well, we can have one, too.” He turned to me with a pleading look. “Bartender, two beautiful Christmas egg nogs…”

We made a classic egg nog at Spring Street. Three parts heavy cream, two parts cognac, one egg yolk and gomme syrup in a mixing glass (we didn’t use blenders back in the day.) Shake vigorously and pour in a tall glass. Sprinkle with nutmeg.

The beauty lit one cigarette off another. Not a good sign.

“Talk to me,” the fat kid said urgently. “What did you do on Christmas when you were a kid?”

“You know…”

“Tell me anyway…”

Another deep drag. “We’d spend a few days in town with Daddy…Skate at the Wallman rink…Then he’d put us on a plane to Aspen to meet Mom and Bart. Mom and Bart would go skiing and Francy and I would freeze in that dark chalet…When it was dark, they’d come back with their friends. Bart would try to get the fire going and everybody would laugh because he was so loaded. Mom would come out of the kitchen. Time for my special egg nog, she’d say…”

Almost on cue I laid the drinks in front of them. He took a tentative sip and brightened. “This is good…Just like your Mom used to make… “

She could hardly put it to her lips. When she did she shook her head…”No, it’s not like it at all …” And got up again. “I have to go back there…”

On second look I saw that her long, graceful fingers were yellow with nicotine. The face under that mass of dark hair was gray. The eyes had the panic of a trapped animal. “Let me go back there, please…”

What was “there?” A pile of coke? An abusive lover? Was this fat, red-faced kid trying desperately to save a tragic beauty he would hopelessly love forever? Suddenly, his face had a suffering nobility. His shoulders sagged and he stepped away. “I’ll get a taxi.”

He slid a twenty under the ashtray.

“Sorry about the egg nog,” I said.

He shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Merry Christmas.”

He stood arm raised in the middle of Spring Street where cabs never came, while she shivered in a doorway.

Peggy took a sip of my spurned masterpiece and made a face.

“More like ugh nog,” she said.

Soho, 1974 BC, Before Coach…(Prada and Gucci.) Old cast iron buildings, half sweatshops, half artists’ lofts. $500 a month gets you 5000 feet of raw space.

Spring Street Bar, the hippest place in the city, just ask us. On a good night you can see Johns and Cage, Raushenberg and Cunningham. Richie Serra comes in to punch people out, Andy Warhol shows up with his entourage after a Castelli opening. John and Yoko nurse beers. There has even been a “Clyde” Frazier citing.

But on Thanksgiving everyone dutifully turns into good little bourgeois and eats turkey en famille. Restaurants offer special menus, but only tourists and those with parents in elder care show up.

It’s the slowest and most hazardous day in the bar business. There’s no money to be made and you risk mutilation at the hands of some resentful reject who is drawn in by the lights. There had been a bit of a rush around noon as the locals fortified themselves for dreaded dinners. But now at 3:30 it’s dead. I’m using a lemon to show Mei, the Chinese busboy, how to throw a knuckleball when a guy in a green car coat slides in at the end of the bar.

He answers before I can ask. “Any kinda beer.”

People who don’t care what they drink just want to get loaded fast and act out their drama. This guy is white and blotchy with a sloppy red comb- over that starts under his ear and hardly covers his freckled bald spot. He’s got a blunt chin and a fighter’s caved-in nose. His watery blue eyes seem focused somewhere else even when they’re looking right at you. He’s the kind of holiday wacko who sets the alarms off , but for some reason I’m not concerned. He raises his glass. “Cheers, fellow outcast…”

I never speak to customers, even regulars. “No confessions please,” is the standard line. But the holiday has loosened my defenses. I pour myself a Remy.

“Cheers.”

He chainsmokes and stares into his beer while I chug Brandy Alexanders at the service end. When I go to empty his ashtray he puts down a fifty.

“Is there a magic cocktail that’ll put me in a festive mood?”

“Nothing that works on a holiday,” I say. “Holidays are God’s way of telling us we’re having too much fun.”

It’s a half-smart gloss on the cliche mantra of the decade: “Cocaine is God’s way of telling us we have too much money.” But he looks up at me like it’s the Sermon on the Mount.

“That’s really true, man,” he says. “Christmas is a total ordeal, too. Nobody ever gets what they want…”

“Because what they want can’t be bought in department stores,” I say. “Like the song says: All I want for Christmas/Is my two front teeth. But they’re lost forever like your youth and your innocence…”

He slaps the bar “That’s so profoundly true, Man. Christmas in a nutshell. But look at New Year’s. It starts out so great, but ends in disappointment.”

He wants a guru. Not usually my thing, but for some reason I rise to the bait. “That’s because people aspire to an ecstasy that is only available to the insane.”

“Then let’s get crazy,” he says. “Let’s have a double Bacardi 151.”

It’s the strongest booze in the house, 75% alcohol. I never touch it, but now I’m filling two rocks glasses. My new best friend throws down his drink with a practiced flip and waits for me. I follow suit. The rum burns a flaming trail of lava from my throat to my rectum.

“There’s three houses I”m not welcome in,” my pal says. “My parents, my ex wife and my girlfriend who just threw me out because I’m always stoned. How about you?”

Sirens wail in the distance. Everything here is totally under control.

“I’m past unwelcome,” I say. “I’m not even an afterthought. I’m only here today because they need somebody to turn off the lights.”

He gets up quickly, knocking over his stool. Through the mist I think I see him smiling.

“Man, you’re in worse shape than me,” he says. He pushes a hundred at me. “Thanks, you really cheered me up.”

“Any time,” I think I say.

I watch him go out and turn the corner. A hundred and fifty bucks is more than I make on a good night. “Nice guy,” I say to someone.

There’s a plate at the end of the bar. Turkey breast and glazed ham with pineapple…Brussel sprouts… Sweet potatoes with marshmallows…

“Thanks, maybe later,” I say.

Mei is at the bar, tugging my arm. “Come outside…”

A cold gust brings the smell of burning rubber. My friend is shivering in a storefront across the street with Jimmy the Irish cook. He offers me a thin, tightly rolled joint.

“Here, man, Happy Thanksgiving.”

I’m not a big reefer man, but I take a toke to be sociable. It’s harsh and unfamiliar, but I’m not a big reefer man so I take another when it comes around.

There’s a lot of hugging and hand clasping.

“You guys got me through,”my friend says. “I love you guys.”

Back in the bar, Mei’s face is very big.

“He your brother?” he asks. “He looks like you.”

“You think all white people look alike,” I say. “You guys…one billion twin brothers.”

“And you, two hundred fifty million,” he says. “So we going to crush you…”

And that’s the funniest thing we’ve both ever heard…

How did I get into Van Gogh’s yellow room? It feels so good to wash my face with soapy dish suds.

I realize I’ve turned myself inside out and got stuck into my brain.

“I have to get out of my head,” I say.

I ride my tricycle down the long, dark foyer. Can’t ride your bike in the house, grandma says.

In the bedroom I open the closet door. My mother is hiding behind the dresses, holding a handkerchief to her mouth, tears pouring out of her eyes.

The radio says it’ll go below zero today. I’m waiting for the 41 Flatbush Avenue bus. There’s nobody at the stop, which means I just missed it. The wind goes through my black leather jacket. My feet are so cold they’re burning.

“Hey, you okay?”

“I’m waiting for the pus,” I say. “That’s funny, huh ’cause that’s what I really am waiting for.”

My feet are sliding along the cold ground. In the sudden warmth of a car, the rum burns a lava trail from my rectum back to my throat…

“He’s puking…”

My head is in the cold air. Yellow vomit runs down the side of the car.

“We found you in the schoolyard in Thompson Street.”

It’s the owner. They had called him when I bolted out of the bar, screaming “I have to get out of my brain!” I had walked across the street to the schoolyard and had been there for hours.

“That guy slipped you a joint laced with PCP,” he says.” Mei freaked out. They had to give him Thorazine in Bellevue. Jimmy ran his car into a lamppost, but he’s okay.”

Mei was too humiliated to return to work. But I heard he had stopped losing all his money at fan tan games in ChInatown and bought into a takeout in Jackson Heights. Jimmy joined AA and went back to Dublin.

I ended up with pleurisy and had to wear a belt around my chest for two weeks. In the doctor’s mirror I saw the booze flush starting to spread through my cheeks.

“I can’t live this way anymore,” I said to someone.

When I was better I made the rounds looking for the guy. I had bloody fantasies of beating him with a bar stool. Never found him. For years his face was fresh in my memory. I knew that if I ever saw him again I would easily summon that vengeful rage that still festered.

But then, his face began to fade. The rage subsided.

Now I think he might have been sent to make sure Mei stopped gambling, Jimmy took the pledge and I never spent Thanksgiving alone again.

CHICKEN SALAD AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

It was 1973. The Playboy Clubs were packing them in and it wasn’t for the Surf’n'Turf. Half-naked women serving highballs were all the rage. We called it “Chicken Smarmygiana” in the trade.

I was working at a place called “Maude’s” in the Summit Hotel on 51st. and Lexington. It was done up as a Gay Nineties, brothel. The eponymous Maude was a buxom store window dummy dressed as a madame with an electric eye that squawked “C’MON IN BOYS!” whenever a customer entered. The bartenders wore pleated shirts, red bow-ties and were issued one black garter, which management insisted they wear on their right sleeve. The waitresses squeezed into decollete spangled leotards and mesh stockings and teetered on spiked heels as they carried heavy drink trays. Hiring was democratic. Some girls made the costumes work. Others had you running for a raincoat.

I was the new man, so I had to open and work lunch. This meant getting up at nine-thirty, which for me was the crack of dawn. After I had stifled the staticky blast of the alarm, slid that fifty pound cement block off my chest and coughed up a cup of ashtray soup, the day started to get better. I had perfected the art of sticking my head under the shower without getting my shirt wet, which for me was the equivalent of a triple axel landing in a split. Most of my neighbors slept later than me so I could swipe the NY Times from a new door every morning. The 104 bus was a block away and I always got a seat. Now if I didn’t sleep past my stop and end up at the UN I would have it made.

Hotel security stood by the main entrance making sure all employees stayed out of the lobby. I was caught in a stream of chamber maids, cooks, clerks and janitors heading for the time clock.

Not a drop had been poured in that bar for twelve hours, plus it had been swabbed down with ammonia, but it still stank of cigarettes and stale beer. No problem. I made myself a French Kiss (cognac, kahlua, white mint and half and half.) In no time a warm feeling of well-being spread through me. Once in a while I’d find a dead mouse under the duck boards and twirl it by the tail to freak out the waitresses. I was suffering from what later became known as George W. Bush Syndrome–I thought I was just brimming with wit and charm. Nobody agreed, but I didn’t notice.

There was Marcy, a chunky Brooklyn brunette, who was always on the floor looking for a lost contact lens. “Hey, Marcy from Canarsie,” I ‘d say.

She’d look up sourly. “Hey, Dickhead from Schmuckville.”

Inga was tall, and Nordic with haunted Garbo eyes. “Inga, the Swedish Nightingale,” I called her.

“I’m Norwegian,” she said.

I wracked my brain. “Okay…Inga, the Broad from the Fjords…”

To this day I break into a cold sweat remembering her baleful look.

Monique was from Harlem. One afternoon after a few French Kisses I grabbed her hand. “Weird goddess, dusky as the night.”

She pulled away. “What’d you call me?”

“Dusky as the night,” I said. “It’s from a famous poem by Baudelaire.”

She slid a cocktail napkin across the bar. “Write that down…There better be a Baudelaire or my boyfriend’s gonna come down here and beat your ass.”

You could understand their sour moods. Lunch was an all-you-could-eat-serve-yourself buffet bar, $6.85, drinks and dessert extra. The specialite de la maison, Maude’s Famous Chicken Salad, dominated the table in a huge, gleaming silver tureen. It was the creation of Bob, the big, black gay chef, and was made with chicken chunks, Miracle Whip and Heinz Hamburger relish, studded with dried cranberries, apples, raisins and walnuts. People pushed and shoved to get to it and then piled it onto their plates out of spite. The waitresses only served drinks and coffees. As much as they wriggled and jiggled and giggled they still couldn’t get decent tips.

It was a union job, local 6, Hotel Workers. All that meant to me was a dues checkoff out of my check. I wasn’t planning to be around for the pension.

After I had been there a month, Red Eisenberg, the local’s Business Agent came to visit. If thugs hadn’t existed he would have had to invent them. He had a Cro Magnon head and walked like his species had only recently become erect. It was early February, but he was wearing a knit golf shirt and gray slacks. He rested his massive, freckled forearms on the bar

“What part of Brooklyn you from?” he asked.

How did he know I was from Brooklyn? “All over,” I said. “We moved a lot.”

“Why? Your father in the rackets?” He handed me a form. “Your health plan. Don’t get sick…”

On his way out he warned me: “Don’t make too much money. They’re watching you.”

I had been hired by Personnel and forced on Mr. Carney, the Food and Beverage Manager. He was from Oklahoma, a little guy with a blond comb over and wispy mustache. I heard him saying “when I was in the military” to Marcy one night and found out he had been a manager of the Officer’s Club at the Pensacola Naval base. I could imagine him hating the foreigners, the degenerates and the draft-dodgers he had under his command.

The kitchen help was mostly foreign, Hispanic, and Asian, who spoke halting English. Carney forced them to work extra shifts for straight time. He docked them for sick days. He didn’t provide locker space. The employee washroom was a disaster.

“He’s violating the contract ten times a day,” I said to Bob, the only American in the kitchen.

“If they’re too dumb to take care of themselves that’s their lookout,” he said.

The waitresses were constantly harassed. Somebody had drilled a hole in the wall of their dressing room. Customers pawed them and followed them after their shifts. Security wouldn’t help them, saying what did they expect if they walked around like whores.

I was ashamed of my own crude overtures. Of thinking that these ladies were fair game because of the costumes their exploitative employers made them wear.

“This place needs a shop steward,” I told Marcy. “Somebody to confront management. The union’s not doing enough.”

“The union’s protecting our jobs,” she said. “You’d have to blow the place up to get fired.”

But a week later I came to work to find a knot of anxious workers at the bar.

“Carney fired Mei,” Gus, the Dominican garde manger told me.

Mei was the Chinese dishwasher, the only one in a kitchen that turned out hundreds of covers and cocktails every day. I knew him as a a pair of splotched pants and stick-like arms behind three racks of washed glasses.

“You’re not a dishwasher, you’re a pearl diver,” I had told him once. After that he laughed whenever he came to the bar.

“No pearls today,” he would say.

Sometimes I would slip him a short beer. He would open his wallet and show me his daughter, who was playing cello in the Juilliard Youth Orchestra.

Why had Mei been fired?

“He was eating the chicken salad,” Gus said.

Every morning Bob would sculpt a mountain of chicken salad in the tureen and cover it with saran wrap with a big sign: “DO NOT EAT.” But when he returned to put it out he noticed the saran wrap disturbed and a huge gash cut into his mountain.

After Bob secretly complained, Mr. Carney had security install a hidden camera in the kitchen. They had caught Mei walking by lifting the saran wrap and jamming a handful of chicken salad into his mouth.

“So he was fired for eating chicken salad?” I said.

“For insubordination,” Marcy said.

“But did he even know about that rule?”

“The sign was clearly displayed,” she said.

“But does he even speak English?”

Carney came glaring to the door and everybody scattered.

I started cutting lemons, indignation boiling within me. Mei was the hardest worker in the place. You couldn’t see him behind that cloud of steam in the kitchen. He never missed a day.

They had all come to the bar to tell me. They were expecting me to do something, I could sense it.

And why not? I was the same kid who had taken the bus to Washington in 1963 to cheer Martin Luther King. Who had walked picket lines and demonstrated for all kinds of causes. Who had protested the Vietnam War even after I was drafted.

In a second I had an idea. It was 10:30. Lunch started at 11. We didn’t have much time. I called the waitresses together and went into the kitchen.

“Are we gonna let the bosses get away with this?” I shouted.

Everybody stopped slicing and dicing.

” Let’s show solidarity with Mei.”

“How?” Gus asked.

“Let’s each take a bite out of their precious chicken salad. Right on their sneaky hidden camera. They can’t fire us all…”

Bob jumped at me on a panic, his cap quivering. “The man don’t want you to eat his motherfucking chicken salad, what’s the big deal?”

There were a few grumblers, but Gus quieted them in a torrent of eloquent Spanish.

“Form a line,” I shouted.

The waitresses looked at me with new respect.

“Okay,” I said, going to the head of the line. “Look right in the camera…”

I marched up, grabbed a handful of chicken salad and crammed into my mouth.

Everyone followed me, laughing, hugging and hi fiving, At the end, a few scraps of chicken salad were smeared in the bottom of the tureen.

“And we’ll do this every day until Mei is reinstated,” I shouted into the camera.

Everybody cheered as they went out to work.

Bob was busily cubing chickens. “Now I gotta make a whole new batch…”

Lunch was especially busy that day. But I could sense an elation and camaraderie in the air. I remembered what an old anarchist had told me:

“Collective action is the source of all human happiness.”

At two-thirty when the crowds thinned I saw Carney talking to Red Eisenberg at the door. Eisenberg came to the bar.

“Step outside with me for a second,” he said.

It was one of those all-weather winter days where the sun shines warm in one spot while the wind screeches in another, invisible snow flakes crinkle your face and cold shadows fall across the street.

A man in a dark overcoat was leaning against a gray Coupe De Ville parked in front of the hotel. He had a Florida tan and a mountain of coiffed white hair that reminded me for a second of Maud’s Famous Chicken Salad.

“This is Mr. Prinza, President of the union,” Eisenberg said.

“Who do you think you are, John L. Lewis, famous labor leader?” Prinza asked mildly. He lit a cigar with a gold Dunhill. “What part of Brooklyn do you come from anyway, the Russian neighborhood?”

“Just trying to save a man’s job,” I said.

“You incited an unauthorized work stopage,” Prinza said.

“This could cause them to tear up the contract and move to renegotiate,” Eisenberg said.

“Insubordination is grounds for dismissal in every labor agreement,” Prinza said.

“This guy hardly speaks English,” I said. “He should at least get another chance.”

Eisenberg shook his head. “He’s illegal. Working on somebody else’s Social Security card. He’s lucky they don’t throw his ass in jail.”

“He was stupid to break the rules,” Prinza said. “When you’re on the run you obey the speed limit.”

“There’s a lotta other people in that kitchen and busboys, who are illegal and supporting kids,” Eisenberg said. “You wanna open a can of worms they’ll all lose their jobs.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “It’s my fault,” I said. ” I started this. They should just fire me.”

Prinza flicked a big white ash off his cigar. “Don’t fall on your grenade, soldier. Nobody’s gonna get fired.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to help this man…”

“Sometimes you gotta sacrifice the one for the many,” Prinza said.

In the silence I felt a strange sort of sympathy coming from both men.

“You payin’ alimony, kid?” Prinza asked.

It was as if he knew everything about me.

“You can get a good loan from our Credit Union,” Eisenberg said.

“Smoke cigars?” Prinza asked.

I shook my head, but he handed me a cigar anyway. ‘I’ll bet you’ve got an uncle who loves a good cigar…”

He even knew that.

“Go back to work, kid,” Prinza said. “And don’t feel so bad you won a major victory…

“Management says from now on you guys can eat all the chicken salad you want.”

.

The big hotels had commercial bars (Maude’s, The Jockey Club) where the traveling salesmen left nickel tips at the bottom of a water glasses filled with soggy cigarette butts and guffawed by the door as you fished them out.

There were discreet rendezvous for gigolos and wealthy widows (The Drake), cheater trysts (A Little Table in the Corner.) Bars that called themselves “Cocktail Lounges” and had music lovers in moth-eaten tuxedos plinking show tunes on scarred baby grands. The ones that said “Bar and Grill” featured oldsters drinking out their Social Security checks at a buck a shot and getting “bum-rushed” by the seats of their pants when they demanded “one on the house for a disabled veteran.”

There were dingy saloons where on-duty cops and off-duty crooks muttered in booths. There was even a bar for black people trying to pass as white.

It had been that way for fifty years when, suddenly, in the mid 1960′s, a pod opened and a new creature emerged, shucking its fetal membrane. It was known as the “Swinging Single.”

No one knew where it had come from. One theory was that the Sexual Revolution combined with the growing financial independence of young women had lengthened the marriage age from early to late ’20′s. Nubile females filled the high rises on the Upper East Side. The neighborhood became known as the “Girl Ghetto,” thousands living three or four to an apartment. Soon the scent of their Arpege wafted downtown and across the rivers to the outer boroughs. Males looked up, noses wrinkling, then dropped what they were doing and charged howling across the bridges.

Like penguins the singles needed a meeting place for their elaborate mating rituals. And so the singles bar was born.

The Persimmon (name changed to protect the guilty) opened in the spring of 1966 and became an instant institution. Everybody had a cute name for it–” the antique store from hell.”…”Marcel Proust’s bad acid trip.” It was a huge space done in Art Nouveau, Tiffany lamps, stained glass from floor to ceiling, ceramic animals. It originated the “bar food” menu, serving everything from burgers to “fine cuisine,” all equally inedible. It was the first bar to make a virtue out of bad food. Many more would follow.

I was working catering at the big hotels, 22 dollars an event, plus a meal, usually spaghetti and Sloppy Joe sauce, so I was ecstatic when a friend called and said there was an opening at the Persimmon.

At lunch the place was packed. The head bartender was a black dude named Noah who wore a vest and a derby like an old time barkeep. I would get a tryout in the service bar, he said, making drinks for the tables before they decided if I was ready to deal with “the public.”

The service bar motto was: “What the customers don’t see won’t hurt ‘em.” We had four bottles of rotgut– scotch, bourbon , rye and vodka. No matter what fancy brand they ordered, that’s what they got. Martinis were premixed in a Gilbey’s gin bottle. Vodka martinis got no vermouth. Whiskey sours were made with sweet vermouth and a sour mix, so sugary that the maddened fruit flies would find a way to bore through the glass for their mating rituals. All cream drinks, alexanders, grasshoppers, white russians were made with Yoo Hoo. The wine of choice was Lancer’s Rose. We made 27 dollars a shift, no tips. But the wait staff threw us a couple of bucks, or they’d never get their drinks orders.

I’ve never seen such a busy place, before or after. It was like working in the hold of a ship, shoveling coal into the furnace. The sweat poured off you. You were working so hard you didn’t look up, but you could hear the noise. It was a low roar from opening to last call.

After a few weeks I met Patty Nolan. He was in the process of becoming the first legendary bartender on the Upper East Side– still polishing the act. He was an ex Marine with tattoos on both brawny forearms, a black Irish New York newspaper intellectual, who read the sports pages, saw the latest Bergman and knew who Saul Bellow was, so he could make small talk with almost anyone. They had fired his partner and he had chosen me to replace him.

My first night I met the owner. He was Hollywood royalty, the grandson of a studio head, son of a famous director. A rotund little guy doing the flamboyant thing with plaid suits and loud ties, he had a constant parade of celebs moving through the joint. He was genial and welcoming, but gave me an appraising look when he thought I wasn’t watching. He was doing four million a month and didn’t want to share.

We worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday brunch, the prime shifts. At 8 when I came on the place would be hysterical. Every table taken, people willing to wait for hours until one opened up. Four deep at the bar, screaming for beverages like Legionnaires lost in the desert.

Sometimes a rumor would spread, “Warren Beatty is here.” And then you’d actually see Beatty or even Cary Grant and the owner at a table surrounded by women. In 1972 New York a movie star siting was huge.

The bartender as sex object hadn’t quite taken hold yet. Neither had the bartender as entrepreneur. I was making a hundred a night, which was a fortune for me and going home alone, which seemed only natural. But Patty wanted more. It was the first time I heard the expression “chump change.”

“This ain’t Con Ed,” he said.”We ain’t in this for thirty years and the gold watch.”

He had a motto for everything. “Swing in the cup, contract in the pocket.” The “swing” was what we stole through short ringing, short changing, stealing soft drinks, and that we shared. The “contract” was what we made from giving people free drinks and getting huge tips in return. And that we kept.

Patty was a local boy and had the “contracts”–cops and waiters, who came to see him. I was a West Sider and didn’t know anybody so he made more than me. But I was doing two hundred a night and at this rate would be able to quit and finish my Great American Novel.

It was strictly business between Patty and me. At closing he’d go off with his buddies. Drugs, especially cocaine, were still a secret passion in those days. I was never invited.

One Saturday night I noticed the owner at the end of the bar. He rarely came on the weekends, and when he did it was with a serious Hollywood crowd.

Patty came over to my sink. “They’ve got spotters on us tonight.”

The story came out while we were working. Somebody had gotten greedy. “Somebody’s killin’ the goose that lays the golden eggs,” he said. There had been shortages and now they were trying to catch the thieves.

Patty had spotted the spotters. It was a couple, man and woman, longhaired and tie-dyed up the gazoo. They came from an agency and, hard as they tried, they didn’t fit in.

“They have to work in pairs,” he said, “so they can both be witnesses in case there’s a criminal charge…They have to write down every time you do something for the same reason.”

It was scary. “Criminal charges?” I asked.

“I got a trick to beat it,” he said. “It’ll take balls, but it always works.”

Patty’s trick was simple. “Steal,” he said. “Steal right under their noses.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Steal blatantly from them,” he said. “Short ring their drinks, short change ‘em, buy drinks back after the first. Steal all around ‘em. Be flagrant, pack it all in the cup until the money is flowing out of it…”

“How’s that gonna work?” I asked.

“Trust me” he said.

So I stole. The spotters were down at my end. They got so excited they almost spilled the drinks I bought for them. I was swinging, contracting, almost picking customers’ pockets. They took turns writing frantically under the bar. The girl would watch me and whisper to the guy while he wrote. Then he would watch in amazement and whisper to her.

At the other end Patty was “contracting” the whole bar, dropping tens and twenties in the cup, which was like millions in those days.

Every hour or two he would make change from the register to the cup, which was a big no no, and jam some bills in his pocket.

At closing I was counting the tips when I saw the head bartender and two big guys in the mirror.

Patty saw them, too, and rushed over, full of righteous indignation.

“Noah, how long I know you?” he said. “I don’t appreciate you putting spotters on me.”

Noah’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“That couple of hooples at the other end,” he said. “I spotted them right away. I suppose now they’re gonna say we were stealin’ all night long, but we weren’t. We work clean, don”t we kid.”

“Clean,” I said, although you didn’t need a polygraph to see that I was lying.

Noah nodded to the two bruisers and they came behind the bar. “Those people were decoys, Patty. We knew you’d spot them. The real spotter was that Chinese chick, the one you kept buyin’ drinks for…”

“Hey, I’m allowed to get lucky, “Patty said.

“She’ll back up everything the other two say,” said Noah. “You’re out, Patty.”

They made us turn over our tip cup. The bruisers searched me up and down.

“Leave him cab fare,” Noah said.

Then we were out on the street. The Great American Novel was indefinitely postponed.

“That didn’t work,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Patty said.

He ducked into a doorway and slipped off his shoes. There were two piles of bills in his socks, one for me.

“Actually, I got a new job, managing at Spaldeens,” he said.

Spaldeens was a newer, hipper place in the ’70′s. Patty was stepping up.

“Tonight was my last night so I figured I’d make a killing anyway,” he said.

I counted my money. Two hundred, what I always made…

“Now that I’m out of work, can you give me a job?” I asked.

“You kiddin’?” Patty laughed. “You’re a thief.”