Modern Antiquity: The Corner Bistro

The Corner Bistro (“The Bistro,” “Corner B.,” but seldom, almost never “Corner Bistro”) sits on the corner of West 4^th street and Jane, recondite and well-worn bricked, just where the relative structure of Chelsea’s Eighth Avenue disperses into the maze of the West Village. It is easy to miss—a simple building flagged with an unassuming neon sign glowing the words Corner Bistro— but it is always busy, always packed with locals and tourists looking for an old bar, one that embraces them with its old-time ale house ambience, one that serves really good really cheap burgers and beer ($2.50/12oz McSorley’s light or dark, $6.50 for a Bistro bacon cheeseburger), one with soul.

On weekends Corner B. turns into a zoo of college kids crowding into the narrow front room and lining up along the side wall waiting for tables in the back. The best time for a Bistro Burger is weekday afternoons, around 3 p.m., when the bar is relatively quiet and the kitchen is fast: at this hour you’re more likely to find business men loosening their ties and watching a Mets game, or a few local retirees reading the Post at the large, plate glass windows and reminiscing. Outside the window the late afternoon light stretches shadows across the sidewalk. A male couple walks by holding hands. A dog walker has trouble with his Rottweiler, wrestles it across the street against the light. A man in a blue cap opposite the Bistro pounds something out of a paper bag, then chucks it into a trash can. He hides his face in his hands, then turns to the light post and starts an animated conversation with it. Inside, with the window-light setting the air sparkling with visible dust, men (almost always mostly men) gather around their burgers and beers, this their watering hole, still intimate like an old shoe, and just as welcoming.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, Jeffrey Sheehan paces behind the wood-warm bar like a bear. His long black hair, ear-tucked, curls around his shoulders, and silver strands creep their way up his thick beard. His hazel eyes spark. He has been pacing behind this bar these ten years.

“There’s an aspect of being on stage,” says Jeff of bartending. “You’re constantly under demand. The place is really loud. And bartenders are blank screens to people. They can project whatever they want onto you.” And they do. When I first met Jeff at the Corner Bistro, I thought his stony face and brusque bar manner revealed a jaded New Yorker, someone who hated his job and hated the people drinking at his bar, and wished he were anywhere else. In reality, he is a sweet, intelligent man prone to cheek-kissing and hugs, a true conversationalist who cares deeply about his regular customers, people who show him a respect unusual in the service industry. He, like another Bistro bartender Tom (a white-haired old saint with a bouncy step, who expertly slides your mug of McSorley’s down the bar at you with a wink), sings along to the surprisingly modern Jukebox at the top of his lungs as he paces: At every occasion I’ll be ready for a funeral,/ at every occasion once more is called a funeral. Or: And I was standing on the side of the road/ rain fallin’ on my shoes/ Heading out for the East Coast/ Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through. Most of the bartenders keep a pencil behind their ears, because at the Bistro your tab is marked out on receipt paper, by hand, and then punched into old-style cash registers which might “look older than they actually are.” Most times, a third or forth beer is placed before you without your asking and free of charge. The Bistro is the kind of bar that builds a loyal following by staying the same, decade after decade after decade.

It’s early on a Saturday night, and the Bistro is busy. Burgers come flying out of the kitchen, and all along the bar sit paper plates piled high with fries and the little Belgian-style forks that accompany them. Stool hawks pack tightly behind the row of patrons drinking at the counter, ready to throw a hand down to claim a stool when someone stands to leave. A man pushes up to the bar and orders three McSorley’s, one dark and two light. He sticks a credit card between two men’s shoulders. “We don’t take cards,” gruffs Harold, who works the afternoon shift on Saturdays. “You don’t take cards?” The tone of bewilderment is familiar to Harold, who points the man at the ATM located near the Jukebox. Another woman stands on her tiptoes to get a better look at the back room, jam-packed with diners. “Is this the line?” she whines. “I can’t tell if this is the line.” Somebody has put Miles Davis on the jukebox, “ Kind of Blue,” and its soothing riffs help to mute the increasing frenzy of a weekend night’s commencement. Three different football games glow on separate television screens. Ohio State, undefeated, is being upset by Illinois, unranked. There is a raucous vibe in the Bistro. Outside the late fall temperature has dropped below forty, and passers-by hurry with collars upturned, faces in a cold wind. Inside, the bar smells like grease and beer and meat, and the jinglingly pretty notes of the old-fashioned cash registers constantly sound.

Harold stands solid in front of the requisite rows of bottles and mirrored back wall behind the bar, larger than life with a well-defined paunch and a wide, easy grin. His laugh is rocky and quick to bubble out from his kind face. He started working in the Bistro in 1967, and left it in 1975 to “pursue other careers,” optometry among them. He came back to the Bistro in 1991 because, he says, “it seemed like a more honest transaction.” It was he who hired Jeff. Harold himself started working at the Bistro under Jeff’s father and alongside Jeff’s uncle. (Jeff’s grandfather used to go to the Bistro to drink, and before that, his great grandfather did too. For good or ill, the Bistro is in Jeff’s blood.)

Saturday’s pace quickens. The energy inside the Bistro, as more and more people shove their way in, trips toward chaos. I’m outside with Jeff, who is taking a cigarette break, when a woman is hauled outside by her friends and placed on the sidewalk. She immediately falls face-forward into the street. “That’s what I call a mess in a dress,” Jeff jokes. Eventually her friends manage to hail a cab and stuff her inside before returning to the Bistro. Sheehan’s eyes glint as he puts out his cigarette. “At any other place, it would have cost her one hundred and fifty dollars to get that drunk. We did it for twenty-three.”

Jeff may not consider himself an artist, or a photographer (“I have an aversion to titles, or roles, and I’m not good at self-promoting”) but his most recent show, called “Refuge: Portraits of the Corner Bistro,” which was on view at 2/20 Gallery in Chelsea in late October, effectively evoked the atmosphere of the Corner B.

He started the project in 2001, pointing his converted Polaroid land camera at patrons who seemed steeped in old-world bar mystique. He was looking for people who “didn’t give away the time.” Shot in black and white and filled with a ghostly graininess, all the images reveal the prospective of a bartender: in the foreground one can see the bar corners, bottles and glasses half-emptied, dollar bills filling the photo edges. Most of the photos were taken before the city’s smoking ban, and the carnage of ashtrays, the smoky haze surrounding the subjects’ faces, gives an even more antiquated feel to the images. A black man sits in a suit and hat, smiling faintly into the camera. One of his eyes looks rather busted. It could be a photo from 1943. In another, a young blonde woman stares fiercely into the lens, looking trapped. In some of the images, the subjects are caught in movement: they seem to be laughing, lunging away from the camera, and their inclusion in the show gave gallery goers on opening night the distinct feeling of actually being in the Corner Bistro (a feeling exponentially increased by the number of free McSorley’s one drank). The mix of viewers was admittedly more female-heavy than most nights at the Bistro but, like the bar, the gallery was filled with laughter and easy mingling. A general buzz of goodwill and camaraderie flowed through the room. Jeff’s father smoked cigars outside under the doorframe, where a crowd of people had spilled out onto the sidewalk into the glow of a streetlamp.

Monday night, around 10:30 p.m., all’s quiet at the Bistro. I’ve claimed the best seat in the house: a stool at the short end of the bar closest to Jane Street. From here, you can see all the goings-on in the front room, including a decent view of all three televisions showing sports and a muted black and white film. Next to me, a collection of books is shoved up under a shelf along with the daily newspapers—The New Colombia Encyclopedia, the Baseball Encyclopedia, a dictionary. On the side wall a large, reddish head (made of wood? ceramic? plastic? nobody seems to know) presides over the four small tables that share a common bench, smooth with use. “Pure speculation,” says Jeff, “but if you ask me, someone gave us the head to settle a debt.” Small streetlamp-styled lights mounted on the walls give the Bistro its dim, warm-orange glow.

From the best seat in the house you look straight down the back of the bar and into the tiny square kitchen beyond, where two men in paper hats work back to back grilling burgers and frying fries. Above them on a wire rack are stacked hundreds of hamburger buns. Jeff paces towards you, then away, then back again as he works the bar. Tonight he wears his hair twisted up and held with pencils, and chews constantly on a red stirring stick. Someone he knows comes up to the bar. As they chat Jeff reaches his foot up to rest on an ice bucket at thigh level, his boot toeing a chilling Heineken bottle. His grey long-sleeved shirt is pushed back to the elbows, revealing a lotus flower tattoo on the wrist of his right arm. Every now and again, when someone tips him with coins, Jeff stands at the end of the bar and chucks each one into a metal can near the register. Those sitting at the bar collectively groan or smile when his coins miss or clink into place loudly.

The only other woman in the bar (there are twenty-plus men in the room) sits with two men at the plate glass window. “Oh bloody hell,” she quips in her British accent. The two men lean in closer. Immediately next to me Dave hunches over his ginger ale. Jeff ambles over. “Bistro Burger?” Dave shakes his head no. This comes as a shock. Dave, a robust fellow with a round face and buzzed hair who hails from New Jersey and speaks gruffly, once ate five and a half Bistro Burgers (eight ounces of beef, plus bacon and cheese in each) in one sitting. He says that Jeff taught him the trick of a “slider,” a Bistro Burger wrapped in lettuce and slid down the throat for easy consumption.

“Not today, Jeff,” says Dave. “Have to avoid the beef.” He eyes the menu hanging above the kitchen door. “Chili sounds good, though. Fuck, a bowl of chili sounds good. No. Wait. No, just give me the damn B.L.T.” Dave works in photography as well, although he calls himself the paparazzi. He shoots promos, and deals with celebrities on a regular basis. He had been at Jeff’s opening. “It was real nice, Jeff. There were real people there. It was real art. Not like the shit I have to deal with daily.” Dave efficiently works on his sandwich as he explains his past. He got his photography start in Los Angeles, working at the cheese department of a place called Mrs. Gucci’s and shooting photos on pornography sets on the side.

His sandwich gone, Dave returns his gaze to the menu. Jeff refills his ginger ale. “On the 19^th, I find out if I’m gonna die, or if I have a hemorrhoid. If it’s a hemorrhoid, I’ll be back for my Bistro Burger.” The bar back wanders over to the sink to wash dishes, and gives Dave a weird look.

“Whatsa matter?” he asks Dave, because Dave did not order a burger.

“Ah, you’re just mad I didn’t beat the record—” says Dave. (The record is six Bistro Burgers in one sitting.) Dave pauses in mid-sentence, then makes a large circle with his arms. “Hey. I saw the world’s largest burger on the Internet the other day. Thing musta been this big. Cost $125, gotta be eight, nine pounds of beef. Hey Jeff. You guys make chili cheese fries? Gimmie an order of those.”

A younger man named Junior sits down next to Dave, kitty-corner to the best seat in the house. A would-be screenwriter, he works shifts at the Trader Joe’s wine shop. A conversation about cheese fries ensues, followed by a conversation about famous people, Mailer, Dylan, Vonnegut. “Bruce Willis is kinda my hero,” Junior says at one point.

“Bruce Willis is a notorious dick,” retorts Dave. Junior points out Kristen Johnston, an actress from the television show “3rd Rock from the Sun.” She is a huge woman with a huge mouth and a pile of blonde hair. Kristen puts her hands to her eyes, making a pair of binoculars, and peers out of the window at her friends, snorting and bending over.

“She’s totally trashed,” says Junior. Later, after Dave is gone and the clock pushes toward midnight, we go out to smoke. A steady drizzle requires us to clump under the small awning. Kristen says she has a lighter in a husky tenor and offers it to Jeff before lumbering away with her friends to another bar. Jeff returns inside to finish up his shift. “By the way, Junior’s not my real name,” says Junior. “It’s Justin.” Another man named Douglas steps outside. He’s dressed in a trim black coat and black turtleneck, and is the manager of Ye Waverly Inn, which has in the past few years become a celebrity hotspot. He also happens to be Jeff’s brother, and works the odd Bistro shift when necessary.

I want to know what it is about the Bistro that keeps Jeff and his family coming back, that keeps all of us coming back. “What do you mean?” asks Douglas. “Just look at the place.” We all turn and peer into the large window at the room beyond. Our breath comes out in little steam puffs, fogging the glass—through this mist a warm glow emanates, and through the spit of rain on the awning above us, the clinking of glasses can be heard. A wet wind wraps itself around the corner of the building and we shiver, put out our cigarettes, and open the door.

nightmare

You kicked me in sleeping
late last night, I
cried out, dashed from dreams
so suddenly I forgot them
your touch ice.

I lay curled away
watching your shoulders heave,
your grunting efforts under sheets
at sanity.

I hoped the kick a sign
of triumph over those clutching fingers,
those deep dragging demons.

I hoped you'd wake and turn,
and your eyes would be yours
again, and I could touch
you without the shiver of god.

I hoped, and then I heard it that
train from my childhood
pulsing across dark waters
bearing down like screaming
its whistle a nightmare.

Then I was eight, and you were
not yet crazy, not yet you.

my room

The walls of my room are covered with words-- poems written by myself with big, black marker, poems written by others with intent. There are polaroids of sea stars, leafy sea dragons, Van Gogh's fishing boats. The walls are papered with vintage photos of Paris, circa 1938, Brassai. The walls are bare, white. The walls are translucent. There are no walls. The walls are floor-to-ceiling windows, two-way mirrors. There are no windows in my room. The walls curve-- my room is a red-veined sphere turning in on itself. My room houses grey matter.
Copper wires hang from the high ceiling of my room; I stick my index-card thoughts to them with wax. I create an internal hanging garden of essays in development-- my room is an essay garden!
Ten typewriters sit expectantly in ten corners of my room. There is a mint green one for when I feel like a girl, and a black one with spider buttons for when I feel like a boy. The broken one's for dreams, the electric one for wit, one to learn Hebrew, one to learn Dutch, one for gathering dust, one for the dispensing of cobwebs, one for tossing dramatically out windows. One has no ink and makes no noise but writes all day long all by itself and sometimes keeps me awake at night.
Music is constantly pipped into my room from invisible sources. I can hear whatever I want when I want it for free, no, even before I want it, before I think it, it plays. There is a special channel that only plays Danny Elfman, Rachmaninoff, and Saint-Saens. There is no music in my room, only the songs of birds, and the crashing of beach break. In my room I can hear the music made by the heavenly spheres as they move about.
Children run freely through my room; they pull my hair and dance through my hanging garden. I am a child with them. Sometimes I am their teacher. Sometimes I cry in my room, but not often. There is no sex, in my room.
Wrought-iron candelabras hang from my ceiling, spraying mysterious shadows into every corner. I like my corners dark and mysterious. My room supplies me with endless coffee (French-pressed Kenya, triple ristretto espresso), endless beer (oatmeal stout in winter, Highland Gaelic Ale in summer), endless cancer-free cigarettes, endless clarity of thought.
I have a closet in my room. I fold up my friends and put them in the closet, only to shake them out and wear them from time to time. In my room, I can consume those I admire. In my room, you see, I don't miss him or want her. The spaces between people are not allowed entry into my room. Do not enter! Do not exist! Here, in my darkness, I am everyone, everyone is me and I am a god, and only I exist. Here, I talk in my sleep.

WARNING

I am NOT a poet. But I like this thing, life...

It's midnight

It’s midnight and I’m out!
craving chips so I’m heading down Washington Avenue
barefoot drawing up night’s heat
it’s these that sketch San Diego’s contours
not palms and Pacific mansions with vistas
and tight packed hot poor
or the sweaty Tijuana River PB throbbing
coined hills of La Jolla
but these little white alleys running between streets
concrete paved with cracks all through and grass
wire lines against orange glow sky

Once when I woke the sun was a little
fire ball and the sky all grim like tornados
Sky full of smoke and ashes it felt like a
Holocaust, my lover rolling next to me but the
sky made me feel all foreign
an alien alone alive
and for weeks the city’s old, walking around masked
more fragile than bearable and the ashes
sounded on the tin roof of Home Depot

when I went to buy spring flowers

Labor Day

I no longer hold needles like sapphires or
truths—this city has become
my bone box; worsted
cement heat twist-wringing, you know the
heap and spill of labor day street rot.
I was slipping, I slid, I sluiced, I shot into
her and I couldn’t know how curved,
I didn’t know and I didn’t know her,
this city has become my bone
box; locked

lines on the Guggenheim, those
scaffolds steel webs, just
try and contain her she oozes she
sluts she stinks and as they
chip away she only more inward
turns, you know she’s not afraid
to be cold, to be hard, to burn yes
this city has become my bone
box; walked

down Canal street drunk-spinning
tried to run but she encompasses, you know
she’s swift in consuming I woke
naked and sitting her head in my lap
oh god! her lips moving! And I
no longer hold truth like a smooth-plated
spoon, my bone box is breaking,
Manhattan is reeling—

On Winter

Winter is the time to collect one’s spiritual skirts about oneself, stamp summer’s vigor off one’s boots (add it to that dirty pile by the door there, where others have tossed their cigarette butts, empty bottles, and impractical dreams of escaping to Florida) and huff up the stairs to one’s innermost rooms. Now is the time for roosting and ruminating. Collect, collect. Close the curtains against the flat grey sky.

Winter makes such inward turning instinctive, natural. One constantly hears of the “stillness” of snow; it is “like a blanket” which carpets the world in the depth of night, eerily yet sweetly silent. Its muffling qualities absorb both the sounds of the world at large and the pulsing nonstop sounds of our inner selves. It is hard, on encountering a freshly snow-capped world in winter’s early morning light, to think anything other than “Oh! How beautiful!” This moment is simply a moment, in bright-edged relief, with oneself. Yet even winter’s worst weather—dramatic ice storms, cold wet winds whipping around buildings, freezing rain—turn us toward ourselves. For although we bundle up in outward layers to protect our fragile bodies, the chill of such natural violence penetrates deeply. With these icy lashings we become aware (in a way nearly impossible in summer) of our own precarious mortality. What is this flesh? We wrap our coats more tightly about our bodies as we hurry along, our minds howling lonely with the wind.

Why is this season of solitude so abused? Stores decorate their windows with ghastly displays of lights and moving toys in an attempt to kill the early dark nights with flashing bulbs. People walk hand in hand down snow-softened streets, kissing under tree fungi and laughing into steaming mugs of hot cocoa or cider or whiskeys. They should be alone, and cold, and thinking of death! Have they not seen the trees? We should follow their example, and turn inward against the world. Winter is the season for building fortresses.

It is easy to make romance out of winter. Easier, especially, than looking seriously into oneself. Cold nights beg for one to turn in early, crawl into a cocoon of thought; sitting silently at a window in the dark as snow falls is appropriate winter behavior. Drink alone, if you must drink, and ponder the dregs of your cup. How sacrilegious that citizens run madly through the streets, filling up bars with their rosy-cheeked joviality so forced upon this season’s stillness. They frisk from lover to lover in order to “stay warm” in bed, in order to share the glow of a fire. All of these things attempt to disguise winter, to make it into a kind of darker, more intimate summer.

Everything romantic about winter is a farce. Ice skating! The very image of a perfect date—holding the hand of a lusty man in rough denim, falling together onto the ice. You’ll stare above into the pale winter sky, and he’ll look down at you with delicious eyes, and kiss the snow off your lashes. Ice skating! Nothing more than waiting in line for hours behind screaming children high on peppermint candies, paying money for skates which pull your ankles in impossible directions, paying more money to have a safe place to put your boots, and paying finally more money to enter the arena. Then, once on the ice, the realization that there is hardly room enough to breathe let alone skate, that the music is wretchedly loud and jarring, and more importantly that the ice is much harder and keener to make your acquaintance than you ever realized. By the time the adventure has worn itself out, you have nothing but ten minutes of gripping the sidewall and aching calves to show for it.

And parties, the endless holiday parties. Everyone gets together to eat sweet food, drink themselves into conviviality, and chatter the night away. Afterwards, once the party has disbanded and the last blinking Rudolph pin has trailed away out the door, the hostess cannot explain why the sight of so many half eaten cakes and empty glasses depresses her. She crawls into bed weeping. Winter is the season for eating spartanly. We must fill ourselves with Irish oatmeal, root vegetables, substance, substance. This constant sweet and empty noshing does little to nourish the true emptiness in us, which calls us to confront it directly. Instead, we hide behind a wall of fruitcake and small talk. Come spring, one is surprised to find that, on shedding one’s coat and scarves and sweaters, there is a stranger’s body beneath. Most unwelcome. If instead we had taken care to properly nourish— to honestly evaluate ourselves— we would, by the first tree’s budding, know our naked true selves intimately.

I can hardly write at all about winter sports, such as skiing. What disrespectful nonsense! To take a majestic mountain covered in snow and sleeping deeply, and to run about creating little crisscrossing paths down its slope like children romping over the stomach of their dozing father. Sit and look—paint the mountain, write of the mountain. Don not humiliate the mountain. Mountains know almost better than trees the necessity of winter’s depth. And the sight of winter runners, huffing out in steamy little breaths their exertions. One’s quiet, lonely walk through Prospect Park should not have to be interrupted by the thumping of joggers who must spit and hawk in the cold. Moving so constantly is yet another way to ignore winter’s demands on our psyche. Why not move to California, where winter is so mild? It almost does not exist. There is a reason Hollywood sits glittering there on the Pacific’s steep-cliff’d shores. There, one is never forced to sit still and think. One can drift. Please do: take your surfboard and drift all the way to Japan.

Winter is not, as they say, the season for giving. Winter is the season for selfishness! Enough has been said about the unapologetic materialism of the “holiday season,” but let me reiterate: shopping is a form of self-denial. It is a form of unthinkingly thrusting out into the world, blindly, arms outstretched. The glitter! The price tags! The abominable holiday music drowning out any desire for a structured thought! Don’t think they don’t know what they are doing—since pagan times, organizations have attempted to keep the masses “happy” during the long, dark months. They have every right to feel threatened by the idea of each human in society spending time getting to know himself and, consequently, knowing his true desires. Subvert! How much more appropriate, how much more meaningful, if one’s friends were to find inside their glittering, bow-topped boxes not underwear or hand towels but a letter! Writing letters is a sneaky way to give in winter, because although they may be addressed to friends and lovers, letters are truthfully written for the author himself. They are a form of self-discovery. Yet I do not know one person who is not delighted to receive a thoughtful letter. In this way, one can appear to give during the holiday seasons while actually pushing winter’s proper agenda. Upon receiving such a letter, one’s friend may very well take to the typewriter herself.

The changing of the seasons can be seen from my fire escape. Last summer I spent with a glass of red wine perched on the metal structure lightly like the wrens that played about the bushes near my window. I liked to listen to a woman across the way sing opera, sustaining one high, long note over and over to perfection. I breathed her in, and in autumn I bought a bird feeder. I planted seeds in it, preparing for winter, harvesting, harvesting. It is winter now, and ice freezes the rails and dusts the bush in fierce white and all is quiet.

I live my summers in youthful abandon. I fall in love often, with everyone. I burn. I skip from party to concert to bar to event. I wear swinging skirts and dainty shoes and cut my hair short. Summer is the season to grow lusty and brandish yourself about like a god. Tanning is only appropriate in summer (how I hate the sight of a crispy woman, burnt from the table, in the dead of winter! Give me white, pale flesh!) Spring is a childhood, but in summer we come into our sex. So it should be, as in autumn our souls age slowly in romance and friendship.

I once tried to return to a summer passion in the dead of winter. There was snow on the ground, but I flew South hoping to trick the seasons, flick the clock back a tick to an easier time. I took him in my arms, but it was like holding a child. He had twigs in his hair, and wore orange sweaters; the hair on his legs shone copper in late autumn’s sun. But I was from the North, and there was snow on the ground. I was pale and dry and my lips cracked under his kisses; I had started my metamorphosis and the cocoon was half complete. He tried to fit inside with me, but it was too late. I was nearly sealed in with myself.

My cocoon is made of glass, and all winter long I stare at my reflection from the inside, which stares right back. Even when I look further out, past the reflection, the greater world is still seen through my reflection. I coolly and quietly judge myself and the world from the inside out, internalizing, becoming heavy, becoming a vacuum, a doppelganger, gravity. In summer, I throw myself out like buckshot, scattered. In winter, I cull and I cull.