There were no other cars on the road, no house lights, nothing to tell me I was hurtling to possible destruction. My concentration was on the speedometer and stomping the foot on the accelerator and of course the thought of the soon-to-be ex-wife took over as it generally did in the small hours, spurring me to more teeth-grinding, jaw-clenching, screaming efforts to outrun the demons.
All that tumult being in my head, it took me a while to become aware of the sound of the tires on the road, a sound that seemed to form the words: Stop it now. Stop it now. Stop it now. And as I slowly touched the brake, I became aware of the high speed I’d been hitting and suddenly shuddered with the understanding of what this attempted suicide might have done to my children, Siobhan and Malachy, and then I stopped the car.
My friend Steve Epstein had little to do those days so he, as they say, hung out with me. I owed Epstein for letting me stay at his digs back in the city, and there were times in the Watermill when I didn’t present a bill to my pal. I would just add his bill to some nonparticular well-to-do type, or forget it altogether.
The summer was moving along slowly toward its end when my tenure at the restaurant suffered a similar fate. One night, Epstein arrived from the city with a girlfriend. I served them dinner and drinks for free, whilst neglecting to make out a tab. The boss, David Eaton, in a fit of sudden efficiency asked to see the tab I was keeping on Epstein. I said, “’Tis in my head.”
“Oh yeah,” sez Dave, “you write everyone else’s down but not Epstein’s?”
“Right,” sez I, thinking rapidly. “He drinks so little it’s easy to remember.”
“What about the lobster dinner he had with that broad, and the bottle of wine and the cognacs they had after dinner?”
“All in the noggin,” sez I, tapping the side of the head.
“I’m going to have you both arrested,” sez Dave. “You for stealing and Epstein for trespassing, as I know he slept on the couch in the accommodations we supplied strictly for your personal use. I’m calling the state police right now, and I know them well.”
I slithered over to Epstein and, speaking out of the side of my mouth as I’d seen Humphrey Bogart do in convict films, informed him that if we didn’t get our asses on the highway we were likely to be guests of the county.
I was trying to speak in an understandable code yet not give the game away to the man’s dinner companion. He was irritated, as he was making great progress with this young thing, and she had already indicated her readiness to have a mutual exploration of the nether regions of their respective bodies, but after I had pulled him into the kitchen and explained the situation the lust left him and fear of being stuck behind immovable bars took over.
What to do with the lust object? Give her money for the taxi and tell her your uncle is at death’s door and ’tis necessary to get to New York City to open it for him. I handed over to him my paltry tips to pass along as cab fare, then nipped out the back door and dashed up to the hovel on the roof to pick up the few belongings. I met Epstein in the parking lot, where he was waiting for me as the getaway drivers do in movies. We dropped the young bird off at a gas station where there was a telephone, and then began the flight from justice toward the forgiving arms of New York City. I kept the sharp eye out for the flashing lights of the law while he gunned the engine and got the car up to about ninety-five mph, which was stupid, as it would only draw the police’s attention.
It’s amazing what the imagination can do when you’ve had a few drinks and have a voluble tongue to convince the other person of the imminence of a frightful incarceration. I was convinced that the entire police fraternity of Long Island was being mobilized to get us heinous criminals who had cheated a restaurant, and had Epstein believing the same. We were bedeviled, too, by the sight of the gas tank needle doing its delicate dance and gently touching empty, with no gas stations open at that time of the morning. We stopped at every closed gas station and practically sucked out the gas remaining in the hoses. At one of them, we discovered a jerry can half full of blessed petrol, which we stole without so much as a “Sorry to have to do this.” I would have stolen it from an old-age pensioner to avoid another night of durance vile. ’Twas that plus faith plus talking nicely to the car, now named Matilda, that got Epstein and myself to civilization and safety.
I deposited the odd bits of clothing in a room in Epstein’s digs in Astoria, Queens, New York. The building was owned by the uncle and Epstein’s mother, and the lad was living rent-free. There’s nothing like a rent-free bed in a reasonably comfortable flat with a roommate who thinks you are the wittiest, wisest Hibernian he has ever encountered, and when I realized that the FBI was not coming after me for an unpaid dinner tab of $19.27 plus tax, I relaxed and circulated once more.
The atmosphere in the apartment was ripeish, to say the least, which I attributed to deficiencies in the housekeeping department, but upon inspection it seemed clean enough for a bachelor’s digs. The smell seemed to get worse, though, and finally my nose led me to the epicenter of this horrendous stink. Under the place of my repose, my bed, I discovered a dead crow decomposing and giving nourishment to a full complement of maggots and other guardians of the environment. That foul of the air took its last flight out my window, accompanied by larvae, worms, maggots, and other bosom buddies taking their first and last flight, startling a gossip of elderly women exchanging dark forebodings in front of the building, and giving them fodder for even darker words about the world of dead carrion that flies.
Great barmen, like great hairdressers, are reputed to have what are known as followings; that is, they attract coteries of bods who like the way a bartender talks about sports, or mixes a martini, or in the case of the lasses, the bit of flattery and name recognition. ’Twas said that I had such a following. I wasn’t being unduly modest when I said I didn’t believe it, as I honestly wondered who in the name of Allah would follow me anywhere. But if Epstein believed this, as apparently he did, and if his uncle was going to finance my reentry into the bar biz, as apparently he would, who was I to say nay, and the search for a suitable premises began.
We found an out-of-the-way spot at 118 East Eighty-eighth Street called the Dublin Bay Café, apparently owned by a Dublin man name Larry Luby. We broached the idea of purchasing the joint but the man did not seem able to say yes or say no. He mumbled something about having to consult with somebody or other, that he didn’t really own the place.
The real, but concealed, owners were a couple of shadowy speculators, a husband-and-wife team, smallish stout people named Joey and Tessie who, despite appearances, were brilliant at deal-making in real estate, saloons, diners, jukeboxes, and cigarette machines. Tessie did a wonderful good-kindly-mother act, whereas Joey did a lot of growling and talked about cutting people’s balls off and other sporting events of that nature. Because of some legal difficulty with the SLA (that would be the State Liquor Authority, and not the Symbionese Liberation Army, though the one often seems no more reasonable to deal with than the other), they were prohibited from being licensees in any premi wherein liquor was vended.
So we negotiated with them, and settled upon an agreeable price, and all that was needed was the check from Steve Epstein’s uncle, which we were assured was a routine matter and would be taken care of as soon as said uncle returned from whatever trip he was off on. But the weeks began to pile up and so did the pressure from the stout people to conclude this deal. I never did figure out whether Epstein was in a fantasy world about raising the money for the purchase of the place all along, or if his uncle just changed his mind in the end. Finally, though, Epstein confessed that his uncle had no intention of financing a saloon for his dopey nephew and his drunken Irish pal.
’Twas left to me to inform the other folk that there was no money in the coffers and the deal was off. They weren’t too perturbed, as they immediately had an idea for me. They would shift Mr. Luby to another location, and put me on the Dublin Bay license. I would move into one of the three studio flats in the building. Fine with me, and I immediately took over