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In an exclusive excerpt, Elissa Schappell reminisces about her favorite New York watering hole, Downtown Beirut. The upcoming book Come Here Often?: 53 Writers Raise a Glass to Their Favorite Bar collects Schappell's essay and 52 more, taking readers on an intoxicating tour of bars around the world, from Antarctica (seriously, there's a bar there) to Minnesota. Of course, our favorite stories are about bars in NYC, and you can explore all of the featured joints on the publisher's interactive website. Think the best bar in the world is missing? Submit your favorite through the site for a chance to win a book bundle, including a signed copy of Come Here Often?.
In the meantime, take a trip to the East Village and Elissa Schappell's first date with her now-husband.
*
My future husband might have suggested we meet at another bar. There were lots of other places downtown that were, well, a lot more welcoming. At the Blue & Gold, the Polish bartender who could pass for Pope John Paul II’s disgraced brother greeted you with a wave of his grimy bar rag. At King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, a tattooed art student with a yellow beehive and tangerine lipstick shook her hips to the B-52s and every third drink was on the house. The Holiday had red leather banquettes, Sinatra and the Smiths on the jukebox, and a pool table. Instead, he picked Downtown Beirut for our first date.
It was a Monday night. I’d met him the previous Friday, on the Amtrak to D.C. He was going to a party in Baltimore. I was going to visit my college roommate and hook up with an ex. But the train broke down, and by the time I arrived in D.C., six hours later, I was so smitten I canceled my booty call.
At the time I was living on the Upper East Side with two other girls in an illegal sublet where we couldn’t even get mail. Before that I’d lived in Hoboken. So most of my experience with New York bars was in places like Maxwell’s, the Surf Club, and Pedro’s. I’d gone downtown to Danceteria and Area but Downtown Beirut— located on First Avenue between 10th and 11th streets—wasn’t even on my radar.
He’d said to meet him there at 7:00, so I showed up at 7:15—only he wasn’t there. I ordered a beer and began to wait, getting increasingly anxious and pissed off. Nobody puts baby in a corner! Finally it dawned on me that I was in the wrong bar. I wasn’t in Downtown Beirut but—quel irony—next door at the The Village Idiot.
It was an understandable mistake: Aptly named, Downtown Beirut looked as though it might have sustained a mortar blast and brazenly risen from the ashes. “Beirut” appeared in big white block letters, “Downtown” seemingly added later, in a box set at a jaunty angle. On the black awning, the name appeared once again, the lettering cockeyed and off-kilter, as if the bar had been buried in rubble and some thoughtful soul had scrawled the name on it so the faithful could find it. In the front window a ragged string of Christmas lights burned like the embers of Candy Land.
Inside, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finally I spotted him by the jukebox, blasting the Beastie Boys. He was wearing a Flipper T-shirt, black pants, and looked like he cut his own hair. And he’d brought a friend.
I could blame it on the beer I’d just chugged or nerves, but I believe it was more a sense of freedom and lawlessness that the bar sparked in me: so that when he introduced me to his friend, I kissed him—the friend, not my future husband.
He showed no outward reaction. Neither of them did. Downtown Beirut was the kind of bar where you kiss your future husband’s friend on the mouth, and nobody raises an eyebrow. It was no mistake that a sign behind the bar announced: Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere.
*
How can I romanticize a bar with the aura of a war zone, a place psychically wrapped in barbed wire?
In the ’80s I felt that every block on the Lower East Side had the potential to change my life. After all, there was Allen Ginsberg heading home to East 12th Street with a bag of groceries; Joey and Marky Ramone, in black leather jackets, striding down St. Mark’s Place like kings; Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon flipping through art magazines at Gem Spa. Every day new art galleries were literally bursting out of holes in the wall. Keith Haring was alive, Jeff Koons was revving up his shell game, and Julian Schnabel was smashing plates. The streets were alive with the sound of punk and hip-hop, every wall tagged in graffiti, the sidewalks glittering with crack vials. Tompkins Square Park had become the squalid Tent City and the scene of a riot. Half the tenement buildings on the Lower East Side looked burned out, and seemingly held together only by the CBGB Sunday matinee posters plastered to the bricks.
Downtown Beirut flaunted a similarly appealing squalidness. The bar always felt sticky; with what, it was hard to tell, as it was perpetually dark—in the daytime, defiantly so. The bathroom was plastered in band stickers, the walls magic- markered with proclamations of love and hate, philosophical rantings and explicit hieroglyphics depicting human genitalia. Unlike the bathrooms at CBGB, this one-seater was a poor altar for debauchery...but it would do.
Happy Hour was from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. They never carded and no drink was over $5. There were dollar drafts for the day drinkers, and three-buck Rolling Rocks and PBRs at night. I can’t remember ever seeing Downtown Beirut empty; at all times of the day, under the persistent heavy cloud cover of cigarette smoke, there was someone lodged at the bar either drinking or passed out.
It was a diverse crowd of regulars. There was the gray-bearded, pot-bellied biker who kept his motorcycle helmet on at the bar, and the two women who might have been secretaries who stared as though sightless into the crowd, their pupils so dilated their eyes appeared full of ink. Near the back were the girl and the guy both with hair the color and texture of straw who could’ve been brother and sister and who by night’s end would either be licking each other’s faces or screaming obscenities in the street. There were of course the punks: the girls in cat’s eye glasses and black band T-shirts, their hair dyed or fried black, white, or bright blue; the guys with matching piercings in their ears and lips and eyebrows, decked out in studded leather jackets, their shredded T-shirts and jeans suggesting that they’d been mauled by tigers on the PATH train.
Then there were the girls and guys like myself who hadn’t grown up in New York City, but after only a few months called it home. Guys in Buddy Holly glasses. Girls in black tights and minis, who did their eyes like Sophia Loren and their mouths in MAC Russian Red and carried copies of I-d in their bags.
I stepped out of my life when I entered Downtown Beirut. There was a kind of anonymity that came when I slipped into the low light and smoke, my voice distorted by the pounding jukebox. I wasn’t the girl from a small town in Delaware, who was working as the junior books editor at a woman’s magazine, whose first job in the city was selling diamond earrings at Tiffany’s. I was a writer. I was the girl with the white buzz cut, in a black leather jacket and Doc Martens I’d bought from Jimmy at Trash and Vaudeville, with the last of my paycheck. I was in love with a boy I’d met on a train, a boy who’d moved to NYC with a suitcase full of books and $150 in the pocket of his Harris Tweed coat (all the money he had in the world). A boy whose favorite bar was Downtown Beirut.
Eventually we were going there two or three nights a week. Even so it took a while for us to be acknowledged as regulars. No one at Downtown Beirut was going to throw open their arms and welcome you in. Certainly not the bartenders, and not just because no one was getting rich off tips for dirt cheap beer and $5 shots of Jack. The female bartender with a green bob who played in a hardcore band took particularly perverse delight in waiting on as few customers as possible; waiting until they were clawing their way over the bar to reach the taps before she deigned to serve them. She had a taste for torturing the newbies in particular, those suspected of slumming. It was a point of pride when after months and months she finally served us without making us wait.
The jukebox could be just as intimidating, like a fearsome mythological beast hunkered down, blasting punk and hardcore: Throbbing Gristle, Dead Kennedys, the Misfits. Fortunately this was the music I loved, and Downtown Beirut was the only place outside of the shitty apartment my future husband was sharing with three other people on Staten Island that I heard it.
*
After a few years, ironically after we moved into a place on 8th Street between B and C, the bar’s exoticism faded. We went out less and less. The crowd, like the neighborhood itself, began to change. Our friend Eddie was beaten up by a fucked-up frat boy—an act more unsettling for all of us than the night a drunken ex-Marine, lamenting the death of his girlfriend from an overdose, stabbed a bowie knife into the bar where we were sitting.
The evil forces of gentrification had begun closing in. We couldn’t feel all that aggrieved. After all, we had been a part of that early invasion, fallen prey to a bait and switch on the starving artists drawn to the art and music scene on the Lower East Side and cheap rents, which a few years later would be jacked up so high no one, save for the bankers and trust-fund babies, could afford to live there.
But for a time I had my place, a place where I felt myself being transformed, bounced around and elbowed at the bar while Glenn Danzig screamed in the background, arguing about whether Bret Easton Ellis was a genius or just a brilliant bullshit artist, holding hands with my boy, feeling alive and a part of something exciting and slightly dangerous, feeling that anything could happen and everything was about to happen. That I was about to happen.
Today, there’s a back- and foot-rub parlor on that spot. And I’ve become one of my least favorite kinds of people: that superior bitch who, hearing some younger person going on about how cool the Lower East Side is, feels compelled to shit on their experience. You have no idea, fetus. Have you ever even heard of a bar called Downtown Beirut?
Excerpt from Come Here Often edited by Sean Manning, courtesy of Black Balloon Publishing