After I left my agency Christmas party last
night, I was in the mood for some quiet conversation. I'll admit, that's not a
mood I often find myself in. Most often I find, like Wordsworth, that the world
is too much with us, that there's too much noise in our world, too many demands
on our time, too many things we simply must do.
But last night, after the hellish din of a too
big party in a too small space, I wanted some quiet talk. Talk that's fewer
words and more consideration. Talk that like Claude Debussy said about music,
is more about the 'space between the notes,' than the notes themselves.
With that in mind, I boarded a cab and headed
uptown to an address only I know, that of the Tempus Fugit.
My driver found the old Verizon warehouse on
East 91st Street that houses the Tempus Fugit and in short order, I was
climbing up flights, down hallways, through doorways, then down flights and up
hallways. Soon, I had meandered my way into the ancient incandescence and had
assumed my position, slumped, in my favorite stool, one in from the end.
“Let me tell you,” the bartender said, by way of
hello. “Let me tell you about the place I worked before I opened up the Tempus
Fugit.”
“OK,” I returned and I hunched forward, elbows
on the mahogany, to hear a good story.
“The bar, the speakeasy, actually, because this
was the depths of Prohibition—the Noble Experiment—was in mid-town, where
speakeasies were as plentiful as trash as a horse-track.”
He pulled from behind the hardwood a well-worn
white terry towel, slightly damp by my reckoning, and began polishing the
well-polished bar.
“The speakeasy I tended was the most-popular in
the city,” he continued. “The most-popular of the gin joints. Moreso than Tex
Guinan’s places, or the Bathtub, or the even the Redhead, down on Minetta
Lane.”
I finished my second Pike’s (the ALE that won
for YALE!) He filled my glass with a third and continued his tale.
“The Redhead was quite a place,” I offered.
“Nothing like where I worked. My speakeasy was
called ‘The Dark Place.’”
“A good name,” I said.
“Not a good name at all. It was, in fact, the
only thing we could call it.”
He continued polishing the polish and slid over
to me a small wooded bowl of salted Spanish peanuts. I pushed them, as I always
do away, and uttered my usual line.
“A pound in every nut.”
He continued.
“Like the Tempus Fugit, The Dark Place was a bar
hidden deep inside a building. To enter you had to go down about six hallways,
up a few flights, down a few more hallways, and then, voila, there you were.
“We had no windows to the street. And to be totally
clear, the Dark Place was a dark place.”
“You mean it was dimly lit?”
“No,” he said. “It was completely dark.
Completely without any light at all. It was as dark as a Hasid’s closet at
midnight. And that’s what made the Dark Place so popular.
“No
light, no sight. No pretense, no judgments, no prejudice. Just a place where
everything taken was taken at face value. Lit only by magnetic forces and the invisible glow of god. The
pressure was off in the Dark Place. You talked to whomever, not worrying about
what they looked liked, what they were drinking, whatever."
“The Dark Place,” I said stupidly.
“The people who could see it could
see it. And those that couldn’t stayed away in droves. But those that saw it
fit right in.”
“Saw
through the complete dark?” I asked.
“What other way of seeing is there?”
Pondering that, I pushed myself away from the
mahogany and pushed two twenties his way.
He volleyed them back.
“On me,” he said.
And as the light came up on another day in New
York, I walked home.
