The above-described Van show came amid a day otherwise spent at the most splendid of New York dive bars – a hallway of a bar off Ninth avenue near 39th Street called the Holland.
It was an agreed meeting place after we couldn’t quite agree on a muscum show to see. Jack dismissed the salute to Helvetica at MoMA (he called the typeface fascist, while I had ascribed no particular ideology to it). A Picasso show at the Met would have been pretty crowded its first weekend.
Oh, face it. An afternoon of drinking was the solution. And Jack, a fellow fan of the Old New York, suggested the Holland.
Imagine shunning a sparkling spring afternoon to duck into this place, where immediately to my right a three-piece jazz band is playing and the bar is lined with the kind of lined, bulbous and exaggerated faces you’d see in a Drew Friedman cartoon.
A couple of McSorley’s were drawn. It was almost too perfect a scene.
It was somebody’s birthday. Which meant the Happy Birthday banner behind the bar wasn’t like the one at, say, the Power House in Hollywood (also in my top five dive bars of all time), which was apparently there year-round (because every day is somebody’s birthday).
It was, we learned, Gary’s birthday, and not only did he hate jazz, he said when the band was finished; he loved Elvis. So the jukebox was immediately fed for a litany of hits from the King. Like a bar in Dublin, this was a bar that made way for instant singalong, especially when the songs started to include those of Frank or Tony.
It could have been a subsequent round of McSorley’s that made the moment stand alone – a barroom of strangers (or one with strangers anyway, us), singing “That’s Life” and “It was a Very Good Year” or “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” at the top of our throats.
I thought Jack was taking it a little close to the line by playing Sinatra’s version of “Send in the Clown,” complete with spoken introduction. Yet there was nothing too maudlin, too self deprecating to undercut this audience. By then we were invited to have a bit of their trays of ziti provided for the event. We could tell the guy next to us was drunk when he called us “two handsome men.” (He was eventually refused further service). We seemed by now part of the Holland brotherhood and didn’t bother to go anywhere else – even for dinner -- before our concert around the corner.
And when the show was over, it was back to the bar, where we were astonished to find some of the earlier customers were still warming their bar stools – some seven hours later. A new bartender was on duty, though, the place was generally cleared out, it being Sunday night after all, and we talked about subjects from the Summer of Love to the war on terror until it was time to dash for the bus.
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