Today’s soundtrack: he still insists he sees a ghost
Today at 12:02pm: crawling back into bed



It’s shortly before midnight in Manhattan and I’m standing on a Second Avenue sidewalk. Feeling the booze in my system, watching the cars go by. I’m having a cigarette and this girl comes up to me.

“Are you open?” she says. I look at her blankly.

(Nightlife History Lesson)

Trends often start in Manhattan. Used to be the only thing inside a New York bar was stools and drunk people who paid too much rent. Then came the early ‘90s, and two bars changed everything: Merc Bar over in SoHo, and a bar called “bOb” on the Lower East Side.

I happened to know the owner of bOb, his name was “D” and he was a helluva nice guy. D’s innovation was to fill his Eldridge Street haunt not with stools but with comfortable, low-slung couches. Merc Bar did the same thing around the same time, and within months the lounge revival was in full swing, with bars from Brooklyn to Jersey pulling out wall counters and putting in banquettes. I spent a fair amount of time over on Eldridge Street, helping D pay for his mortgage like I was in some kind of alcohol-infused telethon with a hip hop soundtrack.

The lounge thing eventually cooled off but left a legacy; you can still get a cocktail on a couch at a million places on either side of the Hudson.

The next bar trend was Speakeasys. For those of you unfamiliar with (what little there is of) U.S. history, in the 1930s alcohol was made illegal. Secret bars popped up all over the city, their entrances obscured by long alleyways, underground passages and peephole doors manned by password-demanding gorillas. After booze became legal again, the speakeasys disappeared.

In the mid-‘90s two guys opened up Lansky Lounge on the Lower East Side, the first honest-to-god speakeasy I’d heard of in my short adult life. You couldn’t find the signage-lacking back-alley entrance unless it had been previously pointed out to you. Lansky Lounge wa s a hit with the hip.

Although Lansky ran its course and closed its doors a while ago, speakeasys are still all the rage. The most popular is probably this taco stand on Kenmare with a high-end bar/restaurant hidden underneath it. But this being the internet age, no secret bar remains secret for long, which takes the piss out of the system.

The Blue Owl on 2nd Avenue is billed as a speakeasy, but it’s far from the real deal. It’s true that the entrance is difficult to find--it’s below sidewalk level and lacks a proper sign, demarcated only by a neon blue owl--but with only one little “secret room” in the back, it’s decidedly lame. I found the place and went downstairs anyway to have a drink.

Halfway through my drink I come up the stairs to have a smoke, and that’s when the girl approaches me.

“Are you open?” she says. I look at her blankly. The bar isn’t visible from the street, so I know she ain’t talking about that.

“Are you guys still open,” she says, slower this time, as if I can’t speak English. I look behind me to see what she might be referring to. Above the bar is a storefront window that says CHINESE MASSAGE.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say. You want a massage? It’s a hunnert bucks, now lie down on the sidewalk.

The next morning I’m coming out of the diner, which is on the edge of Chinatown. This big, fat tourist hick in a green shirt approaches me. “You sell purses?” he asks.

“What?” I say.

“Purses, you sell them, right?” he says, in a thick Southern accent. (For those that don’t know, mainland Chinese immigrants are known to sell counterfeit purses on the streets of Chinatown.)

Sure, I sell purses. You sell tractors, or farm pigs?

Trade you a Louis Vuitton for a fucking John Deere.