Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
-- W.H. Auden
The Holiday Lounge sits on the north side of St. Mark's Place near the corner of First Avenue in New York's East Village, under a maroon awning and down a few wide concrete steps from the sidewalk. It is a hardcore old man bar and, for as long as anyone can remember, it's been run by a hardcore old man from the Ukraine named Stefan.
Stefan was old the first time I went in there back in the '70s, and he was older still when the Redhead and I lived a few blocks away on Avenue A during the early '90s. When I went there last week, it mostly to see whether the place still existed and, if it did, fully expecting to hear the particulars of Stefan's passing.
So I was surprised when I walked through the door and saw him there, weighing a lot less and not even bothering to put in his lower dentures anymore, but still standing behind his bar and still irritable.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The Redhead ordered a bottle of Heineken. At one end of the weathered old bar was a young drunk from Green Bay who said he was studying to be a chef, and at the other end was an older drunk wearing a jacket and tie who, like the Redhead and me, had known the Holiday for a long time.
Little has changed there over those years, the darkened interior for the most part illuminated by strings of small Christmas lights, the great jukebox largely dependent on Sinatra and the Stones, the ancient wooden phone booth on which who knows how many felony crimes were arranged and carried out.
Despite the fact that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg imposed his draconian anti-smoking ordinance nearly seven years ago, so much tobacco had been burned inside the Holiday for so many decades that everything still retains a yellowed amber hue and the faint aromas of a hundred thousand cigarettes and cigars and pipe bowls remain in the air like vague remembrance.
The place wasn't overtly literary in the sense of the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas suffered his killing seizure after a drinking bout, or the Lion's Head, where Mailer, Hamill, McCourt and Kennedy drank and fought and preened in front of barmaid Jessica Lange, but like many Manhattan dives the Holiday Lounge had its writers.
For years Allan Ginsberg had a large apartment in a building almost directly across the street, and he and other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke spent considerable time with the bookies, dope dealers, working girls and alcoholics for whom the Holiday was a second home.
When I mentioned them, Stefan cheered a bit.
"Ginsberg, Kerouac, yes. But Auden, Auden always sat right there, under the window. He lived in the house next door. And when the war was ended, after that, he came in one afternoon and said he was going to Vienna. He had a villa in Vienna."
The old man drank, and not for dramatic effect. He looked through time out the small window, Auden's window, remembering the light, and seeing it as it was that afternoon so long ago.
"W.H. Auden?" I asked.
It was the only time in all the time I spent there that I'd heard the name of the second or third most important poet of the 20th century spoken at the Holiday, though thinking about it later, I don't know that I'd ever mentioned having done a little bit of writing myself, and it is entirely possible that Stefan didn't know whether I could even read.
"He never came back from Vienna," he nodded, his voice choking slightly.
It would have been easy to get lost in the old man's reverie, to imagine the great poet, his craggy features and rumpled brown suit and tie, sitting beneath his window sipping a whiskey neat as the afternoon sun shone through, illuminating his face and shoulders from above and looking for all the world like some crooked saint with a golden halo.
But night had fallen, and outside it was as dark as it gets amid the bright lights of Manhattan. Out on the street, kids from the suburbs milled noisily about, having come to St. Mark's Place to have their tongues pierced or to add to the collections of bad tattoos decorating their young bodies.
Up the block, in a building erected during the late '30s as the national headquarters of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, they shopped for the latest in rock star fashion at some trendy boutique.
"He died in Vienna, see," the young drunk said. "He never came back from Vienna."
"Auden. He was a beautiful man," Stefan said to no one in particular. "Auden ..."
It was quiet for a moment inside the bar, and then the older drunk pushed his glass forward.
"I think I'll have one more, Stefan," he said for the second time in the 20 minutes we'd been there.
The East Village isn't what it used to be, not 60 years ago or even 10. The writers and artists and musicians are gone, replaced by young Wall Street brokers, trust fund babies and Manhattan real estate speculators as rents have skyrocketed.
Likewise gone, and to who knows where, are the bums, and what was once the most wonderfully diverse neighborhood in the city has now become predictably and boringly white and middle class.
Cell phones glued to their ears, they walk their stupid dogs or ride bicycles on the sidewalk. Inside the living organism that is New York, art takes a back seat to commerce, no matter what they tell you.
We paid up and left, shaking Stefan's hand and wishing him well.
When we got outside, the Redhead showed me the building where Trotsky lived during his time in the city. I wondered who was living there now.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 13 2008 |