TERMINAL BOOZING
Back to the Beginning	by Bob Hall	Next Story

The Terminal Bar stank of stale beer, vomit and ruined humanity; it was easily the most notorious drinking establishment on the West Side.

I first thought the name referred to the customers, who were on a down-bound ride with this bar as the last stop. In fact, it was simply across 8th Avenue from Port Authority Bus Terminal. The only time I entered this legendary gin mill was a result of my so-called career in the NY theatre. A very broke producer had hired a very damp rehearsal hall on the third floor above the bar. To get upstairs you had to be admitted through a door barred by a couple of ex-prize fighters who protected the gambling establishment on floor two.

These mugs were pretty nice and after several days they figured I was harmless and showed me around the games. I felt very "in". Then I stopped down at the Terminal bar for a beer. I was very "out". The clientele were big and tough and mean and spoke in an impenetrable New York brogue. The few eyes visible through thick blue smoke were wondering how easily they could take me and for what, while the intimidating bartender surveyed me with hostile indifference until I ordered the requisite Bud. After a decent interval I left the beer unfinished.

I was too chickenshit to become a regular customer. Nevertheless it was the roughest bar in town and I'm proud to say that I went there at least once.

This was early in the Seventies. I'd just arrived and at least half the NY characters I met were boozers. They hung out in McSorely's or Rudy's or Teacher's, which are still there, and in hundreds of other neighborhood joints that have been priced out of existence. McSorley's fixtures displayed a proud patina of hundred-year-old dust. Rudy's was where actors could mingle with the Westies over cheap whiskey. Teacher's, my favorite local, had a waitress named Oko who was still beautiful when I was there in 1995. For the desperate, ancient gin mills lined Forty-Second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. As late as 1980, you could swill watery beer for a quarter while baseball played on fourteen-inch, black-and-white sets. Then Ed Koch gutted that block so that rich theatre jocks from Yale and Julliard could "practice their craft" in a dainty row of brick front drama mills.

None of the actors and playwrights I knew were from these venerable institutions and seldom if ever practiced much of anything. Sometimes we'd hang out with unpublished novelists at places like the Lion's Head (Woman to bartender: Don't you have a lot of writers here with drinking problems? Bartender to woman: No, Ma'am, we have a lot of drinkers with writing problems.) When your tab got too long at the "Head" you were kicked next door into bar "55" -- a beer and shot joint that could have been a holding tank for the DT ward at St. Vincent's Hospital.

To me, the rituals of inebriation held a perverse romance. I had just arrived from Nebraska and was trying my best to sabotage a burgeoning career as an unpaid theatre director. Now it wasn't that no one drank in Nebraska but, hell, the bars closed at one AM and never opened at all on Sundays. You couldn't even buy liquor by-the-drink until the late sixties, so a beer joint was by law exactly what the name implied. "Blue laws" they called them -- many dating from the twenties when evangelist Billy Sunday barnstormed the Midwest, threatening to punch the devil in the eye and staging mock burials for John Barleycorn.

Blue laws did not exist in New York bars. Well, that's not quite true. Some antiquated statute demanded daily closing for one hour. So at 4 in the AM, doors were locked and floors swept and any customers who could sit their stools would nurse their stale beer until the establishment opened again at five.

Even in 1972, though, I was no use as a boozer. It requires stamina to become a bona fide drunk and I threw up too soon and too much. I was what the shrinks now call a "responsible enabler." When the guy playing Macduff in my production of Macbeth tried running down the patrolmen who had stopped him on the Jersey Turnpike, I was the one who had to try getting him out of jail. When a chronically depressed actor decided he wanted to be talked off his window sill, he called me. When I tried to seduce Beth the elegant alcoholic actress, it was me buying the Chablis. I got no closer to her than the length of a bottle. Then there was my writing partner, David.

Dave and I had a collaboration that was more of a marriage than my marriage. I gave the bastard money and a place to live while watching his boozy charm garner him additional support from all the other suckers he met. He was everything a man who chose Peter O'Toole as a life model ought to be: a true wit, when not falling off his bar stool; a gourmet chef, if he could finish cooking before the wine finished him; and a womanizer par excellence, bedding all the beautiful women either of us met. He introduced me to his pals, Victor and Peter, authentic wits in their own alcoholic rights, and I still feel privileged to have known them. Dave was the most astonishing, outrageous character I ever met. And he was killing himself. As the years passed and the booze consumed him, he lost all his charm and half his looks. What's worse, his wit deserted him. It seemed impossible for the man to survive.

That I was less drunk less often than Dave does not imply I was a better person or even a sober person -- although the more boozers I came to know, the more sobriety seemed necessary. I was just one of those guys who watched more than I participated. My game was that I could always remember last night the next morning, which is essential if you justify your existence by claiming to be a story teller.

Maybe I was lucky because eventually the Eighties became less fun. Peter burned himself up in a cheap hotel room. Victor stepped drunkenly from the curb to hail a cab and was run over by a garbage truck. (I imagine him in his Brooks Brothers suit squashed like a "Tom and Jerry" road kill with umbrella still held in "Taxi!" position.) Beth the actress approached me on the street one day and asked for a light. She smelled of the gutter and I didn't recognize her past the homelessness and the missing tooth until she'd come much too close for comfort.

On the other hand, "Macduff" got sober in 1983. He's one of the kindest men I know. And after hitting bottom, David too managed to get off the booze--without AA, but with the help of a good woman. He now lives a healthy farm life of fresh air and playwrighting. Maddeningly, in what I take as a conscious effort to pervert popular wisdom, he even seems able to drink in moderation without falling off the cliff. There are exceptions and exceptions.

The old bars aren't the same. Teacher's and Rudy's now cater to whatever they're calling yuppies these days. McSorely's, its entrance strangled by a velvet rope, is free of both dirt and atmosphere.

The Terminal Bar is long gone. A death knell sounded when New York Magazine proclaimed it "The Toughest Bar in New York." After that kind of publicity, there were only two ways out: the velvet rope or closure. This most sacred of gin mills shut down in the mid-eighties, its passing unnoticed and unmourned once the liver of the last wino on the last bar stool finally gave up the ghost.

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from Armed and Dangerous Issue 5
published by Acclaim Comics, Inc.