50’s Soliloquy
Asked often: what do you miss most about the city? It’s the bite of the apple that never leaves you. That, along with the bars of Manhattan. Faithful to lounges, taverns, joints, dives, Coffee houses, Figaro’s Café, Café Reggio (1st expresso in NYC), whether uptown or downtown, life was never short on watering holes or stay-awake-coffee houses. Happy hour would slide into shooting tequila and eight-ball pool with poets, poets, and hipsters and hipsters, bikers et al. Then there was The White Horse Tavern where writers and actors would sit among history’s Dylan Thomas vibrations, swap stories, tales, audition regrets, snippets of a scene being rehearsed for Actor’s Studio audition or Stella Adler’s Workshop. White Horse was where an aspiring writer or actor migrated, knowing there would be no lack of stimulation, or plenty of escape from the labors of being a starving this and a starving that, providing you could find a pal who would treat you to a shot or two. Of course, a night couldn’t pass without coming across the chicks clad in all black haunting the Avenue B and C streets catering to our every whim, given we usually arrived loaded and needing someone to argue with. They knew well the drill, they did. Some got their night’s work paid for, others didn’t. But, they knew we’d be back the next night, or the next and the next.
There was always that hour of 4 or 5 in the morning when the wind was nowhere for our sails and we’d stagger the streets for breakfast at a diner or maybe if we were far enough gone, we’d find ourselves several miles north stumbling into an all-night Automat. There we’d end up, hunkered over some coffee and donuts, or for the ones with still a few coins left, eggs and bacon (Automat version nothing to write home about).
Snow would fall eventually, steaming up windows and eye glasses, blurring out the blurs we encountered on those many nights bar and coffee house hopping.
About that bite of apple. Ever wonder why such an iconic image has remained without change? Might it be one can never get all the bites one wants?
The pandemic drove a lot of us into nostalgia as a substitute for the real thing. Now it's pretty much over, it's easy to get thirsty again.
In this short remembrance you covered a lot of territory and something that I did little of, pulling all nighters with buddies. Pretty much a loner, I often went alone to SF, the City, to soak up the ambience of the sexual revolution, hippie paradise, and late-night fare in the equivalence of a Denny's over cheesecake and coffee. Never drag myself silly while driving.
Ron