A model, the wife of my favorite bartender, used to show up at our jazz dance classes at Joy of Movement, Dennis Wayne's old studio on Lafayette Avenue. Madonna amongst other rock stars hung out there for aerobics and dance. The model was quite awkward, enough so to cause dancers to roll eyeballs as to why she was even in the class although it was advertised as a “mixed-level” class because that suited the studio’s need to fill up classes in order to pay the rising rents that had run many dance studios out of the city. On the other hand, she was incredibly beautiful. The female dancers were even more struck by her beauty than the male dancers, who were predominantly gay.
The model and her ballerina friend were walking in front of their husbands one evening when a car jumped the curb and ran over the both of them. I found out about the accident when I stopped by the newsstand to look at the headlines one morning. The photo at the top of the front page of the New York Post caught my eye. Depicted there was my favorite bartender beside the window of a sports car. He had pulled the head of the driver out of the window and had a strangle hold on him. A cop was nearby with gun drawn and pointing at him. I forget the headline, but I remember the story well enough.
The driver had reportedly veered his car onto the sidewalk near Houston Avenue and West Broadway, running over the women. One was a model, a bartender's wife, the other a ballerina on pregnancy leave from the city ballet, wife to the bartender's friend. The men were out for the evening, strolling behind their wives, when the incident occurred. The driver was identified as an affluent man, a so-called trust fund baby, reportedly dead drunk. The bartender was about to choke the driver to death, but he desisted when the police threatened to shoot him. The ballerina's baby was delivered on the sidewalk. Both women were still alive, the bartender's wife with multiple fractures of one leg. They were taken to the hospital.
The ballerina was paralyzed for life, the bartender told me later. She refused to accept her baby because she did not want it to have a paraplegic for a mother. She asked her husband for a divorce for everyone's good and got it.
The bartender taught karate and was quite capable of strangling the driver who had run over and paralyzed the ballerina and crippled his wife. I first met him when I walked into the bar where he worked. I was tempted to turn around and leave instead of having a drink, but he engaged me in conversation.
“You know I am a killer, don't you? You have a sixth sense, right?”
“I do have a feeling. I don't know why.”
“You are street smart. First drink is on me. Sit down, you won't regret it. I buy the fruits every day, make the best drinks in the city. Try my strawberry daiquiri.”
He was right. The drink was delicious. I could not taste the alcohol, so I had a second one, and then a third, and I was soon in my cups, during which time he filled me in on his background in Vietnam, telling me the usual story some vets tell, about how he enjoyed the killing so much that he would sneak away from the base at night on his own to kill a few Viet Cong. One never knows if there is any truth to the story unless trophies, such as severed penises, are produced.
He said he founded a veteran's organization in California after the war and eventually made his way to New York and took up bartending.
“I never steal enough to get fired, and I bring in lots of business,” he said, as he produced a drink for a customer with a flourish.
“I think that guy is a faggot, we have lots of them around here,” he noted as another man came into the bar.
I would soon learn that he had a habit of worrying out loud about “faggots,” that is, until I said, “men who worry a lot about that are usually latent homosexuals who subconsciously want to take it up the ass.” He never brought up the subject again.
He was proud of his drink-mixing art. After a customer told him he did not know how to make a proper drink, he reached over the bar, grabbed him behind the neck and gave him a head butt that broke the man’s nose. He was suspended for a week—the assault charge was dropped.
But his pride and joy was the model he had married. She was half his age and exceedingly beautiful. They lived on the fourth floor above the bar. There was no elevator, so, after the accident, he carried her in his arms up and down the stairs.
Her right leg had been broken in so many places that the doctors recommended amputation, but he persuaded his wife against it in hopes the bones would heal with the right treatment. They did heal after many months. She regained use of her right leg with his help, including getting her to the gym and back twice a week.
She returned to modeling.
They divorced.
“When something like that happens, a relationship changes. I let her go without a fight because I wanted her to have a future that she can't have with the likes of me.”
I like how you quelled your bartender friend's obsession with faggots. And yes, a dramatic change in life like those two women experienced, usually leads to a breakup of marriage. I experienced that kind of change, even though I came out rather functional than disabled, so many couldn't tolerate me being disabled in their minds.
In counseling, my wife of three years told the minister counseling us that she had, "bad dreams of putting my socks on in the morning." I made my own breakfast, and drove off 20 miles on a busy freeway to work, while she stayed in bed another hour before getting up and driving off to her retail store job. We basically worked in different worlds. But it was my creeping disability that split us up.
Ron