Once More in the Tempus Fugit.

Not too long ago, Dave Trott, one of England's finest creatives, sent a note in my direction. Though Dave and I have never met, and never talked, we send a lot of notes to each other. 

We share a few interests, like advertising, World War II, boxing and stories about the left-handed side of the world. We learned advertising from some of the same luminaries, share some of the same "no-bs" approach and also have nearly 300 LinkedIn connections in common. 

What's more, Dave created some of my favorite commercials ever, including the best beer commercials ever made. That alone puts him in a vaunted place in my personal Pantheon.

Dave posted the above about a week ago. Since that point, I've felt bad. I don't have enough readers to disappoint a single one. Especially one as luminous as Dave. So, while I spend most of my time up on the Gingham Coast, far away from the labyrinth byways of the Tempus Fugit, I decided to take the train down to the city on Sunday night and spend the next couple of evenings at the old bar.

To be honest, going back to the Tempus Fugit wasn't just for Dave. Like Melville's Ishmael--and with apologies--

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet... then, I account it high time to get to the Tempus Fugit as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to a Pike's Ale--"the ALE that won for YALE!" There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards bars like the Tempus Fugit as I do."

And so, with Sparkle, my 22-month-old golden retriever in tow, I walked the melted asphalt streets from my paid-for-apartment in the east eighties to the benighted ware-house-lined street just a mile north. There in the back of a nearly empty Verizon repair center and switching station, down three corridors, up two flights of steps, down four more, through five slam-handle emergency doors and down an unlit passage of sticky linoleum, I found the Tempus Fugit just as I left it in March, 2020 as Covid lowered itself on New York. Then anyone with the means to escape the too-crowded city left the apple for places less rotten to the core.

The same blear greeted me, the effect of pushing into the incandescence of the old place from a nearly pitch hallway, and there, just as I left him, was the keeper of the precinct, the un-aging bartender, wiping clean the immaculate and well-polished mahogany with his well-worn and still just ever-so-damp terry rag.

The Tempus Fugit opened as a speakeasy in 1924, during Prohibition. The place, under the same management, has been open ever since. It never closes, and the man who mans the bar never leaves.

The bartender, like Najinsky, balleted from behind his rampart, with a small wooden bowl of cold Catskill's water for my pup, and then in practically the same motion, like Rizzuto, the great Yankee shortstop, he was back behind the bar and pulling me a six-ounce juice glass of the divine nectar called Pike's Ale, "The ALE that won for YALE!"

When the Pike's brewery went belly up in the early 1960s, when consolidation closed hundreds of local breweries and the beer market became dominated by pisswater like Bud and Coors and Miller, the Tempus Fugit bought their remaining wares. They've kept untold Hoover Dam's-worth of the liquid somehow still fresh and vibrant in their Stygian cellars where tempus does the opposite of fugit.

The place was empty, as usual, and I took my stool one in from the end. Sparkle, like Whiskey before her, formed into a "C" around her water bowl, and closed her limpid eyes, the crackle of ancient neon beer signs driving her into the welcoming arms of Morpheus.

"A long time," he paused, "you have been away."

I had almost forgotten the odd locutions of the bartender, who seems to start sentences in a Yiddish manner, with their most important element first, followed by the necessary collateral damage. A simple sentence like, "Do you want another beer?" He would transmogrify into something like "Another beer, would you in a glass, like?" It took a small bit of linguistic Simone Byles to make sense of it all. It's all a little "throw mama from the train, a kiss," or "open wide your mouth," but it works and the patois came back to me like acid reflux after a Katz's pastrami.

I tapped twice on the rim of my empty glass and he pulled me, expertly, another Pike's, with just the right amount of froth, and without any of the modren-day pretense that goes today with contemporary beer-sommelier-ing.

I drank that one down in two spasms of my Adam's Apple and he pulled me a third. As he brought it to the damped coaster in front of me I twitched my head to my left. About four stools over--eight feet away, sat an old woman wearing what looked like to me was a funereal shroud.

"Who's the Minx?" I noired.

With that the Minx rose like a helium balloon at the start of a circus before helium had escaped. She fairly floated over to me and sat, without deepening the leather, on a stool just to my left. She was weightless.

"I swept," she said "down from Olympus' craggy peaks, and at this gate, tall I stand, at the threshold, looking like a stranger, alone but for my spear of bronze."

The bartender wiped clean the mahogany in front of her. And brought us a small wooden bowl of salted Spanish nuts. I pushed them away with my usual admonition.

"A pound in every nut."

The woman met my rejection with an almost imperceptible nod.

"I foreshadowed your return to these rock-and-gunk-strewn shores," she said.

The bartender pulled me a fourth Pike's. Like Sgt. Friday on the old Dragnet television show he clarified it all with just one sentence.

"Grey-eyed," he said, "whose shield is thunder, third-born of the gods, Athena, it is."

I looked into her grey eyes. And froze. Athena.

Words, none, could I get out. Long-suffering, and cataracted, I silented.

"Go silver-haired and silver-footed homeward bound from this place of away and ale." It wasn't conversation but a command, as if I were immoderate Achilles sent by her to avenge Patroclus. She could not be denied.

I pushed three twenties across the woodwork to the bartender. He pushed them back, silently.

"From the gods," was all he said. 

"From the gods," I agreed.

She imperceptibly also agreed.

Sparkle and I Scylla and Charybdis'd away, making it home before the milkman pulled awake rosy-fingered dawn.