In Gotham City, A Bar Only Pushes You Toward Another Bar...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor-In-Shorts

NEW YORK, N.Y. - A part of me wanted to start this by using a lyric from a song one of my friends in Brownsville knows well. It is from country & western music that begins with this, "From a phone booth in Cheyenne..." Perhaps I had one too many drinks last night. Or it could be the movement of those moons on Jupiter that keep messing with my celestial balance. Yeah, the universal tugging we hear so much about on the History Channel - my second, well, third, addiction behind drinking and, absolutely, that. I come to you this morning full of verve, as they say in bachelorhood. Me, ready cash and verve generally have a good time.

But see, life is no competition for booze.

And when you fall into the world of alcohol in New York, you're dancing with the mistress of the Devil himself. One of the women I met here in the 1990s used to like to go to bed and then to a place called The Jukebox on the southern fringes of the ritzy Upper East Side, where, she would say between kisses, it was okay to pick up other couples. I went. And when we picked out the appropriate couple, well, I was asked if I was a Democrat. "No," I recall saying to the raven-haired beauty with the freckled chest, "I'm worse than that; I'm a Scorpio..."

A guy'll say anydamnedthing when drinking.

In any case, there's a bar here that will knock your Texas off. In a New York minute, as they say in lawsuits and rock 'n' roll. The joint is The White Horse Tavern at the corner of 11th Street and Hudson, there in the Village. The alcoholic poet Dylan Thomas drank there, not Gene Novogrodsky of El Rocinante fame. So did Bob Dylan, Mary Travers, Jim Morrison, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Seymour Krim, Delmore Schwartz, Richard Fariña, Jane Jacobs, and Hunter S. Thompson. Another notable was Edgar Allan Poe, a poet I like solely because he wrote The Raven.

The place has been modernized since it was discovered by Bohemians in the 1950s. It is now air-conditioned and features a shitty outdoor seating patio that, really, looks sad. The ancient bar inside alone is worth a visit, although the chicks you see there help the scene. Locals hate the place because it is so popular with tourists. They decry the crowds and blame the ambivalent service on visitors from passive Norway and Denmark and Japan and China. The rowdiness, then, is gone. You are more likely now to see a gang of four tourists, all bearing cameras, pull-up in cabs than to see them stumbling-in in wrinkled suits and dusty fedoras. Still, the booze flows.

You can spend a month hitting bars in Manhattan and never really decide which one is the best. I used to like a place no longer there. That would be The Lion's Head near Madison Square Garden, where the NY press liked to lift a few. You'd walk in with a pretty dame and even that lionized scribe Jimmy Breslin would walk up and say hell-o. Pete Hamill, the NY Post columnist and editor, liked to flash his company credit card when springing for drinks. My petite friend Laura Castro of Newsday and a former business writer for The San Antonio Express-News would drink herself silly and then ask to share a cab uptown. Laura had the loveliest...futon in her smallish apartment on E. 86th Street.

A guy saves his biggest mental documents file for those magical moments to do with booze. I knew Laura Castro well, and I know she'd wrap a huge hug around me if we ever saw each other again. But then she'd kick my ass for leaving her that one night, when I met this other, yeah, prettier woman.

I think I could write a damned good poem about The White Horse Tavern and drinking in Gotham City. I do. And I would do it, except that I'd want to use the word "raven" in it, but, dang it, that world-class drunk and Literary God's already done it...

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