The Great American Saloon Series/The Whee! Generation
Mysak, Joe
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES W here once halibut and striped bass cast baleful eyes toward morning shoppers, there now exists the Serengeti Plain for the youthful sybarites of what the Celtic...
...They talk of their jobs and the "bennies" that go along with them, the price of real estate, nose candy, sexual exploits, their careers, how HOT they are, and doing everything In a Big Time Way, which is why the Whee...
...not ham and cheese on rye, but Treaty of Westphalia Ham and Black Forest Muensteron a pita...
...There, in a two-block stretch beginning at the corner of Pearl and Fulton streets in lower Manhattan, against a backdrop of superannuated ships that would really be better off on a scrap heap, the gorgeous darlings of the age descend on Thursday and Friday nights, all white teeth and even tans and indestructible bodies, decked out in Brooks's finest and awash with cash...
...For the rest of us, creaking dinosaurs in the video age, the long stroll to the tarpits beckons...
...Well, there's not much to top that in this crowd, which is not quite composed entirely of young financial wizards and what Jim Rourke, late of the New Orleans Saints, once called "plastic women...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 37...
...You can go look at the ships, or walk along Pier 17 with its pricey shops, or sample the chow inside the main Fulton Market pavilion, but the Big Show is right out on the street...
...H ere then are the Men in Yellow Ties and the ineffably sad women in suits and sneakers, talking M&A, public finance, collateralized mortgage obligations, Treasury rulings, insider trading, and the Long Guy...
...Accountants, lawyers, traders, investment bankers, bond salesmen, and cashiers, the young crew of Wall Street's engine room, stoking for the day they take the bridge and the high iron, here at the South Street Seaport slake their thirsts after days done doing deals, staring bleary-eyed at Telerate screens, hawking securities, pounding the keys of CRTs...
...But that may, after all, be just as well, because this crowd is notorious for taking something good and true and worthwhile and killing it with instant camp, things like Rolling Rock beer and professional wrestling and such reassuring models of domestic behavior as "Leave It to Beaver" and "My Three Sons...
...Generation...
...And what did she do in it...
...Everything is Oh, excellent when it is not downright fabu...
...I was the Teen Dream," she explained...
...The same guzzling and hysteria goes on, in closer quarters, and although Roebling's is an otherwise well-appointed saloon—considering it is, after all, located in a mall—whatever ornaments of civilization that remain in the atmosphere are quickly heaved overboard in the crush...
...No, just pull up one of those big pails of beer sold at the North Star Pub, and Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the Bond Buyer...
...The Seaport, in sum, is not the place for great drinking and the dialogues steeped in nobility and wonder that go along with it...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES W here once halibut and striped bass cast baleful eyes toward morning shoppers, there now exists the Serengeti Plain for the youthful sybarites of what the Celtic poet McCorry has termed the Whee...
...There is a lot of noise at the Seaport, then, all signifying nothing...
...The whole mess moves indoors come winter, mainly to Roebling's, which is in the Fulton Market pavilion, but it does not change appreciably in any of its particulars...
...Drinking at the Seaport is sloppy and frenzied...
...Even experts like myself grope for comprehension of the phenomenon...
...Then again, at the corner of Pearl and Fulton, you can always charter a limo: $30 for fifteen blocks...
...These are the same people who do not buy stereos, but sound systems...
...The scene, and especially its cast, are Important, and hence News, featured right up there along with the doings of Madonna and Sean Penn, the phenomenon of colored zinc oxide for beach wear, the crisis in movies, the bravery of Bette Midler...
...dive into a scene comprising about equal parts Newsweek, New York, Esquire, and USA Today articles...
...After they get through with it, and give it to Cyndi Lauper or MTV, you realize that it can never be good for you again...
...This is a profane crowd, the same one present at the Sack of Rome, and while I was not expecting talk of Milton, Muggeridge, or Mother Teresa, it might have been nice to chew over whether Ted Simmons will make the Hall of Fame, whether Fred Lynn is done, the novel Sometimes a Great Notion, or why "Put out the fire, will you, Chief," is the best line in the movie Jaws...
...It is everything, and at the same time, it is nothing...
...It is too much to expect them to be content with Pabst or Budweiser and the occasional depth charge of Jack Daniel's...
...And the drinking itself is not of the industrial Alaskan variety, wherein cheap philosophy is paid for dearly and we all become full of ourselves...
...This is a sad business...
...Only Nazis and How To Find Your Mate fare better among today's newshounds...
...In summer they mass right out on the cobblestones, downing big plastic tubs of beer at the weekly titanic keg party known as the Seaport Experience...
...no, only Foster's Lager, or Harp on tap, or New Amsterdam, the most recent New York City brew, will do...
...There happen to be hundreds of girls in their summer dresses, blondes with brown tans named Kerry, and Tammy, and Colleen, lasses to make a man weep and conclude that Norman Mailer was right when he observed that "it didn't matter how good you were, you were never good enough...
...The Teen Dream," she replied...
...I asked which one...
...You need not travel to Jeremy's, near the Brooklyn Bridge, or Flutie's, on the pier, although both are interesting and barbaric by turns, with reports coming in that last call at the one is 10 o'clock, and that prices start at $4 at the other...
...not sneakers, but running shoes...
...This is not the place to discuss last week's bowling score, the words to the "Bonanza" theme song, or the fact that it's not Lifestyles of the Saints—among the greater discourses...
...MTV, in fact, provided the only actual conversation I have ever had there, this brief by Joe Mysak exchange with a sweet young thing whose eyes betrayed a hard edge: "Oh, yeah, I was in a video," she said...
...The situation was well described by one usually suave Greek of my acquaintance, who said in a state of obvious confusion, "I don't know about this...
...Not in this crowd...
Vol. 20 • January 1987 • No. 1
