The Life and Death of a Seaside Bar

I used to work and live above an old three story seaside bar on the coast of Rhode Island, which was a famous whorehouse during WW II.  During my tenure there, it was owned and managed by Bob Gunny and Sterling Smith.  Gunny was a handsome, ex-surfer-turned-successful-businessman with a georgous wife and great demeanor.  Sterling Smith was a retired train engineer who looked like the Cheshire Cat, after he ate the Cheshire Canary.  He had a sly grin, and usually perched high up on a corner staircase, where he could survey the second level club area, looking over heads all the way to the front entrance.  Howie Smith was the bartender/bar manager, who could juggle bottles and glasses with insane speed and dexterity, years before Tom Cruise tried his luck in the movie Cocktail.

It was the early nineties; you could still smoke in a bar, and there was a massive exhaust fan up behind Sterling, set high in the wall where the stairwell turned upward to a third floor office and boarding rooms, one of which was mine, for sixty bucks a week.  I lived next to an old sleight-of-hand artist named Joe Hirsch, and his wife Genie, who pulled rabbits out of hats and assisted him with other stage props, back in the day.  He had turned to lobster fishing for a living, and Genie cleaned rooms at the Old Dutch Inn on Point Judith, near the Block Island Ferry.

During busy hours, there could be six-hundred people jammed into the main club and downstairs tavern, which opened out into a parking lot that bordered waters of the Atlantic Ocean.  Between checking bouncers all around and keeping bars stocked, I would be perched just below Sterling on the stairs, watching for trouble or a signal from the bartenders for beer cases or specific spirits.  That big honkin' exhaust fan behind us would pull all the cigarette smoke into our lungs, so Sterling and I would be inhaling the equivalent of several packs of cigarettes.  I would be spitting black when the night was through, after a complimentary open bar that often went to sunrise.

One night, in a twist of genius and sick humor, Sterling and Howie handed out brand new, bright pink tee shirts to all the bouncers.

Huge football and rugby players with mohawks, tattoos, and more piercings than a busy pub dartboard were suddenly wearing bright pink tee shirts, which was funny, creepy, and smart.  They could spot each other in a heartbeat, and even the most hardened Grand Banks fisherman didn't want to be tossed out by a man in pink.  It was just plain wrong . . . and yet, so right.

It could be a brutal place, and I remember some crazy ass fights.  There's a long scar where some guy I knocked down grabbed a broken bottle and carved deep into my calf, while I was fighting someone else.  Without health insurance, I poured whiskey into the wound, wrapped it tight, and propped my foot up on the dashboard of my old monster Buick Electra, elevating so it wouldn't bleed. 

I drank myself to sleep, listening to the ocean surf, and the next morning, I suffered more from a hangover than the cut, but I was good to go.

Another night, some fisherman pinned Howie's hand to the bar with a knife.

Wearing bright pink was our sick little payback, and it was funny in court, when lawyers referred to "assailants" as the "large gentlemen wearing pink."

We had our moments, and like any old adventure where your selective memory edits for content, we really did have some great times.

Howie bought the place and changed it into a nice seafood restaurant, and my room is now an intimate seating area.  Sterling Smith suffered a serious stroke years ago, and may not still be alive.  Bob Gunney is missing in action, and everyone else went with the tides.  Joe Hirsch died years ago, rest his soul.  I never could learn his incredible sleight-of-hand tricks, like pulling a napkin from over a whiskey glass, to see that it had disappeared.

There were two different kinds of education, fer sure . . .