A Pint of One's Own

Sitting at the bar at Deacon Brodie’s which is mostly empty, I have nowhere to be and I have a rare moment to myself as I watch the world go by for just a bit before someone finds me, or it’s time for life to begin again in some way that I will not remember as well as I will remember this particular feeling.

Ask anyone who haunts the streets and avenues of Times Square, and they will have a place like this. There is very little that is aesthetically special about Deacon Brodie’s; a dark room with lots of exposed brick and very few flourishes. I feel like I might be one of the only people who knows it is here, but of course that can’t be true. A few seats away from me, a man and a woman talk expansively about her last photography session. They know all the same people, and I can tell they have known each other for a long time. I make up a story that they used to be lovers and are now old friends with nothing left to hold back. To my right, sits a young woman intent on being left quite alone. She checks her phone anxiously and I imagine she is certain that she is about to be stood up. 

The bartender puts a few candles on the bar. It must be getting dark.

We are in a mostly empty room in the middle of one of the busiest most relentless places on earth, and no one else can find us.

Naturally this is an illusion like most things around Broadway. But we come here for the illusion. To witness it; or to become part of the parlor trick. What’s real and what’s not real is up to you around here and I have found that to be the case in other places too. 

Make this your home and it will be just that. 

Courtesy: Unsplash

Yes, it’s jammed with lunatics from far off places who are caught up in their own vacation explorations. People from other corners of the world DO walk slow and there is a cluelessness there that is real but hard to pinpoint. But they are easy targets, let them be. Because without them Broadway stops. And then everything stops. We know that now.

Amongst the rabble are those of us who perplexingly call this area home. Who know this little spot, and that place over there, and I remember when that was Rachel’s where I learned to love escargot.  And so it goes. On my very first trip to New York City, musical theatre nerds that we were, we stood at the stage door to the Shubert Theatre where A Chorus Line was still running. It looked like it was made of gold and we could just make out the music coming through the wall. One of the kids in our group walked up and tentatively touched it, like it might even be a holy thing.

Broadway, or whatever you want to call it, is yours if you want it, in whatever degrees you can get it, but you will also learn that it was only yours in your mind and it belongs to no one and even the biggest name on the marquee has to go home at last call and one day they too will be a memory – a torch carried by some devout groupie.

The leaves will fall from the trees and winter will come, and one day you will amble up this block and this place may be gone because some evil vampire of a landlord doesn’t care about neighborhoods or culture (but they didn’t invent that schtick either,) and you will think my God I was just there, what..? Can it have been five years? More? 

Then it will be spring again and there is always something else, something new coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk outside your old apartment which looks different now, and we will all be here and the music will play again and the beer will flow.

A guy walks into the bar who is good looking enough and greets the woman who was checking her phone with a kiss and I smile to myself and raise my glass to no one in particular.

Courtesy: Pexels