Happy Hour

Back in the Eighties I used to work at an insurance company on Park Avenue South in New York.

Today that area has plenty of restaurants and clubs, but back then it was mostly gray office buildings that emptied out at 5 p.m. and turned the area into a ghost town. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

I became friends with my supervisor—we’ll call him Harry--and he used to hang out a local watering hole on E. 18th Street called the Old Town.

One Friday night after work he introduced me to the place and for that I will be forever in his debt.

Walking into the Old Town is liking traveling through time. The place has been operating continuously since 1892, back when Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and Hugh John Grant was the Mayor of New York.

The Old Town has preserved many of its original 19th Century fixtures. The bar is 55 feet long and made of marble and mahogany and the 16-foot high ceiling is made of pressed steel tiles.

Other original furnishings include large-beveled mirrors, antique cash registers, wooden booths, and New York's oldest dumbwaiter. Even the bathroom is a museum piece with old-style full-length urinals in the first floor Men's room, dating back to 1910.

The place has been a location for countless movies, TV shows and rock videos. For a while, the opening credits of David Letterman's show featured a shot of the Old Town.

Harry and I began going there every Friday to unwind after work and to complain about or mock our boss—usually we’d do both.

And we drank, boy, did we drink.

I know I was young, but today both I’m amazed and appalled at how much beer I put away and how plastered I was going home on the subway. It's a wonder I wasn't mugged or injured.

After a while whenever I planned to meet up with Harry—an experienced drinker, to put it mildly—my father would say, “have a good time and watch the drinking!”

Changing Times

At the time, of course, I thought he was nagging, but I’ve to come to realize that he was looking out for me.

We got to know Jerry, the bartender, who was a great guy with a low tolerance for noise. One afternoon, a bunch guys from a nearby electricians’ local stopped by the Old Town following one of their meetings.

They were just hanging out and talking—the place had no juke box back then—but Jerry had decided they were making too much noise. Whereupon he let out an earsplitting whistle that silence the entire bar.

“Keep it down!” Jerry shouted. “I can’t hear myself think!”

The electricians were dumbstruck. The idea of being quiet in a bar was completely illogical to them. You keep the volume down in a library, not a saloon.

“Well, excuse me,” one of them said very softly.

I left a short time later and when I saw Harry the following Monday, he told me that Jerry had chased the union guys out and shut the bar down—at 5:30 P.M.

And we were there the night that Jerry died. He hadn’t been feeling well for most of the week and he’d gone upstairs to lay down.

The next thing we knew people were calling for an ambulance and one of the patrons who’d gone up to check to check on Jerry came down and told us he couldn’t get find a pulse.

“Jerry works too fucking hard,” one young man said to me. “He’s on his feet all day.”

The EMTs arrived and they made it official: Jerry had indeed left this world. And we all raised our glasses in his memory.

I have not been to the Old Town in ages. I’ve cut down on my drinking considerably and when I do drink, it's only wine.

I can’t go near anywhere near bar food—the stuff I’d only eat when I was wasted--thanks to my high cholesterol and, frankly, I’m too old to hang around bars now.

I lost contact with Harry in the early 2000s.

He had struggled with the twin addictions of alcohol and smoking and managed to quit them both. The last I heard, he was living in a lake community in New Jersey, far away from New York. I hope he’s doing well.

And I’ve taken my father’s warning and amended it slightly. Instead of “watch the drinking”, I tell myself to “watch the thinking.”

Negativity, anger, despair, and regret are also dangerous and addictive, and I’ve been having trouble with the whole bunch lately.

I think I’ll pay a visit to the Old Town. I could only have a diet Coke and a salad, but it would be nice to go back and see how the place has changed.