My Left Shoulder, The Copycat and the Loser Bar

The First Essential Scary Truth

According Harry, barfly and crime victim, I am a copycat of the worst order.  I know it sounds like a comment straight out of Junior High School detention and it is close, actually.  However, allow me to explain.  

In the late fall of 1987, one of my night walks took me to the wilds of West Chelsea.  After doing the usual: having few of the shitty college era beers not to mention whatever drugs were available up and down my dorm floor, off I went to find Cale’s, a bar that had been profiled in the New York Press as having the best Irish bartenders in New York.

The bar, located at 23^rd and 10^th Ave. was located on as dangerous a corner as could be found in New York City.  Four blocks down, there was an ongoing war between several gangs and one of them, a loose conglomeration that called themselves the Chelsea Boys, hung out at Cale’s.  These weren’t some group of fey men that were, at the time, beginning to populate the district and turn it into the Mecca for gay culture that it is today.  No, these Chelsea Boys were the AAA Farm Club for the uber violent Westies, the Irish mob that ran Hell’s Kitchen beginning in the late 1960’s and were not to be triffled with.

So when I walked into this joint with the cheesy moustache I grew to cover the braces I had to have put on six months earlier, everyone knew I was out of neighborhood.  After John, the owner and barman, gave my requested bottle of Bud and took my $1.50, he decided to find out what my story was.  “What the fuck are you doing here,” he asked.  Of such interrogatives, long friendships are made. 

After a few years of living in the artist’s ghettos of the West Village and the Lower East Side, I moved to the more settled Gramercy district of Manhattan.  John had a bar on 3rd Ave. in the mid 20′s and told me I wouldn’t have to worry about drinking somewhere I wasn’t known.  At the time, I viewed this as a good thing, as my horizons would expand beyond the Cale’s, Chelsea Grill, Blue and Gold, House of Sublimation and Max Fish’s axis I traveled in.

At first, I didn’t care for John’s Speakeasy an 3^rd.  If the Chelsea and West Village bars stunk of stale beer and smelled of urine, at least you could picture the Beats and Longshoreman mixing together with the neighborhood folk.  The Speakeasy just smelled like cat piss, plus it had no single women, just cynical older locals that looked at me like I was interloper in what they viewed as their private club, not a public house.  Besides, just 6 blocks down, Barfly was a target rich environment, full of women looking to hook up, especially on Wednesday night.

However, over the course of the years, I became fond of the joint.  An interesting conversation could always be found and the clientele was occasionally hip.  One night, I shook Joe Strummer’s hand and on another I chatted with Jack Bruce from Cream.  Also, several New York icons were regulars and we became acquainted, enough to claim first name status.  The major plus was my bill; the more I went in, the lower they were.  On occasion, I didn’t even get a check.  The strategy to win over my business worked.  After a while, I found myself spending between 5-7 days a week having a pint or four at the Speakeasy once I got off the job.

What I failed to notice was how I was becoming one of the late night regular cynics that I used distance myself from, someone who found it easier to push forth an arrogant “I’m better than you at anything.  I could be a star, I just choose not to” view of life. It seemed safer than actually going out and putting myself on the line and failing or, heaven forbid, succeeding.

From 2005-2007 I rarely wrote when I walked into the place, which is something I had done for years once my shifts were done.  I just sat there becoming a loser among some other losers.  Being Mr. Bad Timing, this attitude problem just happened to coincide with my lit agent actually getting interest in my work.  When I starting writing in earnest because a deal was in place for one of my unpublished books, I discovered the writing muscles had gotten so flabby I could barely put a proper sentence together.  My mother blamed it on the girl who had just broken up with me, calling her the ‘evil anti-muse’ but the issue was mine alone.  I was wasting far too much time in the joint.  After a proper dressing down from a dear friend about the deteriorating quality of my work, I put my nose to the grindstone to become the ‘great’ writer I claimed to be, or at least a better one than I was at that point. 

Although I knew hanging out at the Speakeasy was part of the problem, I had yet to admit it to myself.  Fortunately, I got hit with Karma’s big stick.  Last February, Harry, one of the regulars who was about my age and a musician/bartender to boot, walked out at 5am, into the deli next door for cigarettes and proceeded to get into a fight with three coked out of their minds Guyland knuckleheads.  Why he didn’t walk away is beyond me but I took his answer of ‘I didn’t have a choice’ at face value.  Whatever his rationale, Harry ended up with a broken shoulder socket that needed to be repaired surgically and, of course, he had no health insurance. The gang at the Speakeasy offered their help, as we should have, and tried to help him get to a victim’s compensation board. 

At roughly the same time, my left shoulder decided to fall completely apart.  23 years earlier, my high school wrestling coach had partially torn my bicep’s tendon by throwing me into a wall and asking me if it worked.  While being treated for the injury, the orthopedist warned me the shoulder would deteriorate.  “It could be 3 months or 63 years but it will fail,” he said.  In truth, the old injury had been giving me fits for over a decade and I chose to ignore it.  At first, I decided it was an issue any real man would forget after a beer, then two beers etc.  Finally in March of ‘08, when it became a beer and a bourbon back simultaneously, I made my appointment to get it fixed. 

By this point, Harry and I, who had a friendly relationship, had stopped speaking.  Previous to my shoulder woes, I was losing a book contract and other opportunities, mostly due to me getting in my own way all the time.  However, I spoke a little loudly as to what these opportunities were and just how much I would be making from them.  What I couldn’t see was how I was alienating Harry and several other people he brought in with him; a group who shared a life goal of drinking in the joint while discussing movies.

For the record, I am my own worst enemy.  I have managed to shot myself in the foot many, many times but have always tried to re-group, in a vain attempt to follow a quote from General Patton: it’s not how far you fall, it’s how high you bounce up.  As near as I can tell, when Harry’s band broke up and his self-pressed CD went nowhere, he bounced up to the top of a barstool.  I noticed the difference in how I was being treated by Harry and his minions in the run up to my surgery and just afterward so I decided to keep my distance.  I had managed to get some interest in my work and didn’t want to lose whatever momentum I had managed to create.  This time, I was determined to stay out of my own way and not shoot myself in each piddy for everyone at the Speakeasy’s amusement.  What I didn’t hear until someone said it to me drunkenly in passing one night is that I was labeled a ‘copycat’ by these same people for having my shoulder repaired.

Frankly, I was shocked.  Apparently, Harry and pals were treating me like I was some victim of Munchhausen’s Syndrome and had to have this surgery to keep up with him.  I’m sure I was a terrible pain in the ass while I ran my feelings about my shoulder, my possible deals, why the Tigers were better than the Yankees and all sorts of other topics of which I have major opinions, sober or drunk but a copycat for surgery?  I suppose you have to admire the creativity of the weird mind that came up with that idea.

In the months following my Road To Damascus moment, I have gone into the Speakeasy occasionally and have heard, through various sources in and out of the bar, even worse things about me and a very dear friend who is quite successful in her own right and is trying, along with my Mother, to pull me by the hair in the direction of writing success.  Which, by the way, may explain why I have that bald spot on the top of my head.

The real shame is the Speakeasy on 3^rd used to be a bar for adults and is slowly being turned into a place for bitter losers to snipe and gossip.  At least that’s what I heard Harry and his minions say when the new twenty-something’s in the neighborhood come in to have a few.

Before I sign off, I’d like to address whoever is running the Speakeay’s pool on when my shoulder is going to fall completely apart and I’ll be going on disability.   Do me a solid, put me down for 3 weeks from the 15^th.  I think I’ve got a shot to win it all.