Posted on 01/24/2004 11:10:03 PM PST by drakeraft
Call me Ishmael. Not so long ago I found myself back in New York, walking the windy spring streets around Times Square, trying to find a place I couldn't get out of my mind ever since I'd first found it there a couple years back. Perhaps it was too formidable a task, for the place was not so much a physical locale, nor a building, but it was more of a feeling. The doorway to it had been inside the Times Square Brewery, and though the Brewery was still there, the doorway to the feeling was gone, and search as I might, I could not find her again amongst the passing faces.
Within the story of this search lies the foundations for THE JOLLY ROGER POETRY & PIANO PUB, which we sailed ashore one foggy night a couple weeks ago, and opened for business on Manhattan's upper East side. To me a tavern should be like a good poem--her meaning should deepen every time you return, and yet her ultimate mystery must never be apprehended, so that you keep coming back. And like a poem, a pub is best created in honor of a mystic memory, like the tombstone of Gatsby's great mansion, which was built in honor of a fantastic dream of that which would never again be. And it should also be a place where you can hang out with some old Midwestern buddies and talk about The Federalist Papers over a Guinness. Upon the walls of many reputable taverns I have seen engraved famous quotes by the likes of Melville and Frost and Yeats, but I've yet to be in a pub where the quotes can be heard in the conversations. Until recently.
I remember well that night I found the place, when I saw a ghost over St. Patrick's Cathedral. I had been flown to the city to meet a publisher, and having little more to do than get over a cold at around midnight in my hotel room, I called Greg--an old Ohio friend--and left a message on his machine for him to meet me out at the Times Square Brewery. I had first seen the Brewery earlier that evening, from the taxi on the way to the hotel. I was supposed to be staying with Greg over the weekend--he was a good high school buddy from Akron, and I figured I'd try to meet him out that night.
So there I was at the Brewery, standing in the shadows and people watching, which is a unique experience in Times Square, as nobody that you see have you ever seen before, and you can be fairly certain that you will never see any of them again. There were three guys hitting on two pretty girls who were attempting to enjoy their glasses of white wine at the bar--I'd actually noticed the girls poster shopping earlier on 47th Street--that's the kind of pretty they were. They kept ignoring the guys to talk to each other, and after a small eternity, one of the guys finally took the hint and dragged his friends away from their victims. I waited awhile, gathering the courage that it takes to look like you don't need time to gather courage, and then figuring I could do no worse than the previous act, I walked up to the girls.
"Hey--is this a girl's night out?™"
They laughed.
"What are you reading?" I noticed one of them had a book kind of sticking out of her little black back pack, and I was thankful for the discussion topic.
"I just bought it--some guy was selling them on the street."
She held out a copy of Moby Dick--the kind with the deluxe binding and gold-embossed covers.
"Some guy was selling Moby Dicks?"
"He was selling all the classics--this was only five bucks. I heard it was good."
We got to talking, and I found out they were both doing PR work in the City, or at least one was, and the other would be soon. I caught the inflections of a Southern accent, and it turned out they'd been in the same sorority down in Mississippi. And when I got around to explaining how Greg had ditched me, I decided to exact revenge on my good friend.
"You guys should come over for dinner on Friday. My friend Greg has dinner parties every Friday."
At first they didn't quite believe me, and Caroline asked if Greg was gay, as she worked in the fashion industry at Ralph Lauren, and all her male coworkers were always having dinner parties. Susan and Caroline were their names, and I got Caroline's email before they headed back to her place in Chelsea--I told them I'd email them directions to Greg's. They promised me they'd come to dinner, and they said they'd bring the wine and flowers.
At first I'd figured they'd probably have boyfriends, but I have heard that nice girls often stay single in New York city, as a few vindictive feminists and their liberal brethren have degraded the culture to such an extent that the higher ideals have been lost in the postmodern fog, along with the pristine feminine, the noble masculine, and enduring, eternal romance. But I'm a believer in those finer things, and I have always found poetry wherever I walked. And though the New Yorker didn't publish it, I figured that cool poetry had to exist in Manhattan, and so I'd invited them to dinner.
Well the next day I met with the publisher/editor I'd been flown up to meet, and it kinda felt funny, as she was about my age, but she seemed so much older, so much more corporate, professional, tired, and out of it--she hadn't even looked at my website yet--and yet she wanted to talk to me about a jollyroger.com manuscript, even though the website was where all the renaissance action had been going on for the past five years. The Good Ship had already left port, and she was sitting there on her MFA throne, like she was going to decide if my words were seaworthy enough for the good people of this country--it was bit too much for a poet or a pirate to tolerate, or anyone who had tasted the wild, wondrous freedom afforded by technological innovation. And then when she started talking about some David Foster Wallace reading she'd been at the night before, where with all her great clients like Maria Shriver and Magic Johnson and John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, I kinda stopped listening. I'll do that a lot--I'll smile and nod, but meanwhile I'm thinking about if Caroline and Susan are really going to show. "One time, in my creative workshop, David Foster Wallace wrote a sentence that didn't mean anything, and it was really cool, and subversive too." The editor totally reminded me of this one girl who'd been on the yearbook staff in high school who was always trying to get me to write stuff for it--I know it was rude, but I started looking out the window--any kind of a renaissance was going to be a long, hard road with these guys driving. "One time, at band camp…"
Meeting publishers explained a lot about why a lot of them kept going under and getting bought out by the huge conglomerates, and I didn't exactly get a huge buzz going when I thought about working with them. I'm sure there were cool editors out there, but that week I was pretty much down on my luck. They didn't seem very entrepreneurial--it seemed they'd rather listen to Jedediah Purdy preaching about the dark evils of Wired than learn some linux. And it seemed a lot of them didn't love classic literature all that much either--at least not enough to defend it to the death, which is what it usually takes. They didn't write Great Books, they didn't read Great Books, and they didn't publish Great Books--it was kinda hard to figure out exactly what they did. They didn't want to sign their souls aboard The Jolly Roger--they wanted a three day cruise in the Bahamas. It's like they scorned both the classics and the cutting-edge technology, and now they were stranded on a small island of postmodern pomp and circumstance, with Oprah's book club and powerpoint presentations from their marketing departments.
Showing up in New York after reaching the world on the WWW kind of reminded me of that scene from the Odyssey, where Odysseus returns home from his arduous adventures to find everyone partying in his house, trying to score with his wife. That's what the literary industry is these days--everyone's partying with Madonna and Maria Shriver, trying to score with a Great Book, where those who really own them are out there on the road writing them, battling the Cyclops and one-eyed giant bureaucrats and everything. And if you've ever read the Odyssey, you'll know that none of the guests ever scored with Penelope--she was faithful to Odysseus the whole way through--she waited for him until he returned, and that much hasn't changed over the past five thousand years. But postmodernists are always trying to subvert romance's rules.
At first Greg didn't believe me when I told him two Southern Belles were coming over for dinner--back in Ohio we were always kidding about things like this, like the one time Greg spent a few weeks calling this one girl Marsha Wagner and pretending he was me, and all of a sudden she showed up at my house for a party one Friday night--my mom'd answered the door, and when she'd called me down, that was the first time I'd ever talked to Marsha. We actually headed out to see one of the Lethal Weapon movies, as soon as we figured out what was up. My mom thought she was a very nice girl, and she thought it was very rude that I'd told her I was having a party just to get her to come over.
But Greg started believing me about our dinner date when I offered to buy the supplies, under his tutelage of course, unless he wanted Grapenuts. So we headed out and walked about twenty blocks to get some salmon, and then we grabbed a taxi to another place to get the salad stuff, and then we grabbed another cab and stopped by a Starbucks to get some of their new Mocha Moby Mint coffee ice cream for desert, and then we caught another cab on home--that's how you get food for dinner in New York--you hire a travel agent.
(Excerpt) Read more at jollyroger.com ...
P.S.: Marron--Not surprised to see you posting here!
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