The Great American Saloon Series/Puffy's Tavern
Roberts, Rex
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES Puffy's Tavern by Rex Roberts 0 n Park Avenue one December evening, I found myself standing next to an Upper East Side habitude. I was new in town, and she seemed...
...It opened at eight in the morning then, just when the produce truck drivers were getting off work...
...I remember the smell of cardamom on the warm morning air, the spice scent leaking out from one of the last of the working warehouses...
...But Puffy's has stayed the same...
...But Puffy's is that kind of place—you really do never know who's going to show up...
...The cash register is a 1943 National...
...They lived on a cruiser docked in Jersey, and when cabin fever struck, they unplugged the electricity and water and shoved off across the Hudson, tying up at a pier where New York stows illegally parked cars...
...We were waiting for a break in traffic, and she noticed my admiration...
...B y the time I had paid my dues in the city, I could luxuriate in self-pity at Puffy's, slumped over the bar, my cigarette a study in insouciance, dreaming of golden-haired beauties and listening to Sinatra and Billie Holiday as the traffic lights flashed off the wet cobblestones outside...
...My crowd would gather for the graveyard shift...
...My life in New York had begun...
...But of all the pubs I passed through during those carefree years, Puffy's Tavern was the oddest...
...She accepted my criticism cheerfully and insisted I was the man to do the job...
...I think I did a fair job, having no training in the art...
...Puffy's is a place in which one feels emboldened to order a Sidecar...
...Our eyes met—the blonde's and mine—and she pushed her way to a spot at the bar next to me: "Whaddya gotta do"—hic—"ta get a drink around here, anyway...
...I was not always lost in thought, though—raucous nights sometimes forced me to seize the moment...
...One night Willem arrived in his captain's regalia, a merchant marine uniform he had acquired in his travels...
...We stopped to kiss, and she leaned back against a greasy loading dock, oblivious to the effect it was having on her white jeans...
...The holiday season is especially festive...
...I'll see you in Central Park this morning at five o'clock...
...I reeled backwards off my stool and would have hit the floor had the bar been less crowded...
...I wonder if the fellow ever showed up...
...He didn't know...
...Forrest, an itinerant toy salesman, appears around midnight, coming in from the cold like a soot-covered Santa, bundle slung over his shoulder...
...You may choose your weapon...
...At Elaine's, and Fanelli's, and the Lion's Head, I guzzled through a second childhood while searching for the equal—even a vague approximation—of my Park Avenue vision...
...I made sure my jaw worked—her ring had done some damage but otherwise I was fine—and then made certain she had fled the premises...
...Who the hell was that...
...Her pearls peeked out beneath her sable, and her golden hair glowed brighter than the holiday lights in the trees...
...Someone made a smart remark about his stripes, which Willem wouldn't brook...
...Often we would be joined by another Dutchman, Willem van Es, and his wife, Terrie...
...Instead, I bounced off the man to my right and sprung back into the madwoman's waiting hands, which locked around my throat in a chokehold...
...CI The American Spectator December 1995 67...
...And then, almost as quickly, all was calm...
...Chairs scraped across the tiles...
...A German couple named Weiss opened the place in 1945—this year has marked Puffy's golden anniversary...
...An obliging night watchman would open the gate to Walker Street, and the van Eses took a short stroll to what we came to call the Puff-o-Mat...
...For by then, the neighborhood had changed...
...p uffy's sits on the corner of Hudson and Harrison in lower Manhattan, an old luncheonette in the heart of what used to be New York's food-and-produce district...
...She wore a full-length fox coat and a swathe of blue eye-shadow...
...at any rate, my new 66 The American Spectator December 1995 friend seemed happy with the result...
...We ordered more drinks, Susan dug up some rusty scissors, and my trusting Delilah led me to the women's room, where I might work before a mirror...
...The jukebox plays vinyl 45s, and a good set—a quarter a song—might include "Take the A Train," Patsy Cline's "Crazy," "Love Shack" by the B-52s, and "It's a Man's World" by James Brown...
...I knew that place, too...
...place is encased in plate glass, reminiscent of the café in Hopper's Nighthawks...
...The Rex Roberts is deputy managing editor of Insight magazine...
...Everything was in motion...
...Hilaire Dubourcq, a struggling Dutch painter in the Mondrian mode, liked to quote Wilde: "It's better to be employed than to be fabulous...
...Susan leapt over the bar...
...He sets out mechanical monkeys and boxing harlequins—the kind of tchotchkes found on Canal Street—on one of the tables...
...It was a night full of misjudgments...
...One evening, neither late nor early, I was brooding especially heavily when a formidable—that is to say, platinum—blonde swept into the place...
...She opened my coat, padded me down—no concealed weapons—and coldcocked me with a roundhouse to the jaw...
...She had indeed stopped convulsing, but her spasming diaphragm had apparently strained her patience...
...I was new in town, and she seemed to me one of the wonders of the world...
...It was decorated with mounted heads, though not all the wildlife was nailed to the wall...
...Sir, since I haven't a glove, I'll slap your face with a five-dollar bill...
...They'd met just an hour before, he said, at Sir Harry's in the Waldorf uptown...
...The produce market had moved to the Bronx, and artists were converting the abandoned warehouses into lofts...
...Just before starting off for the Carlyle, or Le Cirque, or maybe her penthouse overlooking the park, she turned back and smiled at me...
...A dowdy fellow in a raincoat trailed behind her...
...Other women have been known to dance on the tables...
...We left Puffy's and walked east along Leonard Street in search of a taxi...
...And he did...
...Dolores Hagerty from Dublin might show up in her cat suit, looking fabulous...
...There's room for twenty-five at the bar and another twenty-five at the tables, with standing room for a third twenty-five in between...
...It was not the first time at Puffy's that a couple had used the facilities ensemble...
...I feared gun play...
...I asked her companion, who had stayed behind and seemed indifferent to the proceedings...
...I lived in the city during the eighties and my thirties—and got to know some terrific saloons...
...His sales technique is limited to an occasional smile, and he seems eternally amused by the sparks, bells, and whistles emanating from the tin creations before him...
...The management now sells a wheat beer, accepts credit cards, and repainted the place—the same deep green, thankfully—but rehung the old decorations: a poster of the Michelin man and a portrait of Che Guevara, Republican revolution be damned...
...Not sure how or why her goat had been gotten, I replied, "That may be the case, but I cured your hiccoughs...
...Dancing is encouraged, and if Susan, the bartender, likes the music, she'll leave the taps to take a turn on the tiles herself...
...the vintage phone booth has swinging wooden doors...
...I must have spoken tartly with her, because she turned to her escort, whispered into his ear, then stepped back and declared, nodding toward me, "This guy gets my goat...
...Once I boorishly and boozily suggested to a woman I had just met that she consider a more stylish coiffure...
...The current owners started opening at eight at night instead, after they took over in 1977...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
