Chapter Eight
It was a rainy Wednesday night in New York and the bar business was slow.
Upstairs in his office, Adrian smoked some Lebanese hashish in his old rosewood pipe while reading ads in the boating pages of the previous Sunday’s New York Times. Downstairs, alone behind the bar, Johnny Mash poured a Vodka Collins into a tall frosted glass for a luscious redhead who smiled sexily at him.
A few blocks away on West Fourth Street in the French restaurant called L’Aiglon, Teddy Holmes stood alone in a corner cutting carrots into perfectly uniform slices. Uptown at Bartholomew’s Pumpkin, Leo Anussewitz was working his last week as a bartender and anticipating Monday, when he’d begin training as a salesman for the dress manufacturer in Brooklyn to whom he’d been introduced by Rabbi Gelberman.
On the Bowery at the Reno, Jake hadn’t seen Melinda since the night she smooched it up with her black boyfriend, and he’d pushed his memories of the kitten deep into his unconscious. In the Oak Room at the Plaza, John Houlihan served Jack Daniels on the rocks to his friend Douglas Wilson, who was quite drunk, as usual.
And Johnny Mash set the Vodka Collins down before the redhead. “You look good enough to eat,” he told her.
“So do you.”
“We oughta get together.”
She made her eyes sultry. “I was just thinking the same thing myself.”
“You live around here?”
“No—uptown on Central Park West. My bedroom overlooks the park.”
Johnny Mash winked. “I guess it’s nice to have a view from your bedroom. When you’re foolin’ around you can look at the sky.”
She ran her tongue over her upper lip. “Exactly.”
So intent was Johnny Mash with the redhead that he didn’t notice the front door open and the three Puerto Ricans enter with pistols in their hands. They wore rubber Halloween masks, dark suits, and fedoras, and when the patrons near the door saw the pistols they shouted and scattered out of the way. The redhead looked at the Puerto Ricans and screeched, and Johnny Mash froze in stark terror, his hand on the open collar of a new shirt.
The Puerto Ricans rushed forward and opened fire on Johnny Mash, pulling triggers as fast as they could at point-blank range. Johnny Mash’s face and chest became peppered with red dots and the force of the bullets threw him back against the rows of bottles. The last thing he saw was the face of a clown over a muzzle blast. Blood poured from his neck; his head shattered as large-bore bullets ripped into it, and he collapsed on the raised floorboards behind the bar.
One of the Puerto Ricans leapt onto the bar, kneeled over, took aim, and emptied his remaining three bullets into Johnny Mash’s corpse, which twitched as the slugs slammed in. Then the Puerto Rican turned to the others and yelled: “Vámonos!”
He jumped down from the bar and ran with the others outside to a waiting black Cadillac limousine. When they were all inside they pulled shut the doors and accelerated downtown into the night.
Afterword
I wrote “The Bar Studs” because I liked to go to bars when I lived in NYC. And I was drawn to bars not because I liked to drink, but because that’s where the action was, and where I could meet single women interested in romance—the female counterparts of myself.
During my 42 years in New York City, I went to all kinds of New York bars, from the Oak Room at the Plaza, to singles bars on the East Side, to Village hangouts, to Bowery dives, to gay men’s bars in the Village out of curiosity, and even one jaunt to a lesbian bar called “The Duchess” off Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village.
I guess I should amend what I wrote above, because ultimately I didn’t go to bars just for romance. I also went because I met many interesting people of all types who were great storytellers.
I especially enjoyed a Village bar called Bradley’s that featured live jazz. I’d give almost anything for another musical night at Bradley’s, but Bradley now is dead and the bar no longer exists, as far as I know (I no longer reside in NYC).
Since my writer’s mind was (and is always) tossing up stories, a novel about bars coalesced in my mind as I sat on those bar stools around 1972. I conceived it as the varieties of bar experience, about all the different kinds of New York bars I went to, and the different people I met there.
Before arriving in NYC, I worked as a bartender at various joints in Lansing, Michigan, when I was a student at Michigan State University. So I knew what it was like on the other side, rushing back and forth on the floorboards, mixing, pouring, collecting money, making change, becoming embroiled in conversations, and learning that inebriated people often spill their secrets to bartenders, while certain women, after a few drinks, tend to flirt with the bartender.
My working title was “The Bartenders,” and the developing novel told the stories of six bartenders. Adrian and Johnny worked in a bar similar to Bradley’s in the Village, Leo in an East Side singles bar similar to Maxwell’s Plum, Teddy in a Village gay bar similar to Ty’s on Christopher Street, Jake was a Bowery bartender, and Houlihan served martinis and other libations to the upscale crowd at the Oak Room at the Plaza.
Actually, the novel was about more than bar life. Like all my novels, it also was about love, hate, violence, anger, crime, frustration, and the pornography of everyday life.
Fawcett bought publication rights, changed the title to The Bar Studs, and gave it what I considered a great cover. It became my best-selling novel, around 95,000 copies. I hope it gave readers a good ride. It certainly was a great ride for me. I love that book and always will. It’s about a New York City that’s gone forever, but never forgotten by people who were there.
Of course, the novel includes examples here and there of my occasional egregious bad taste. But I was a sleazy character myself in those days, and couldn’t help myself. Now I’m trying to be a dignified elderly gentlemen—without much success, I’m sorry to say.
— Len Levinson
About the Author
Len Levinson
LEN LEVINSON is the author of 83 novels written under 22 pseudonyms, published originally by Bantam, Dell, Fawcett, Harper, Jove, Charter Diamond, Zebra, Belmont-Tower, and Signet, among others. He has been acclaimed a “Trash Genius” by Paperback Fanatic magazine, and his books have sold an estimated two-and-one-half million copies.
Born 1935 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he served on active duty in the U.S. Army 1954–1957, graduated from Michigan State University class of 1961, and relocated to New York City where he worked in advertising and public relations for ten years before becoming a full-time writer of novels.
He left NYC in 2003, residing first in Aurora, Illinois, and since 2004 in a small town (population 3,100) in rural northwest Illinois, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, way out on the Great American Prairie.
He has married twice but presently lives alone with his MacBook Pro and a library of approximately three thousand books, which he studies assiduously in his never-ending effort to understand the meaning of life itself.
He has three novels and one non-fiction book in the pipeline.
Painting of Len Levinson (1) by Ari Roussimoff
Painting of Len Levinson (2) by Ari Roussimoff
For more information:
www.destroyerbooks.com
[email protected]
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