Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream

Bernard Boyce Bennington

& The American Dream

Peter Crowther

Introduction by Elizabeth Hand

Introduction

CERTAIN PROFOUND SPIRITUAL and emotional needs can’t be met by lovers, religious institutions, psychiatrists or English cocker spaniels; even—especially—in a place like New York City. That’s why God invented bars.

Yet even God has Her ‘off days’. How else to account for the loss of places like the Cedar Tavern and Lion’s Head, hangouts for earlier generations of bohemian New Yorkers? How else to account for the loss of Bohemia itself (but that’s another story)?

And that’s why Pete Crowther invented ‘The Land at the End of the Working Day’.

“…a small way station situated at Civilization’s End, a final resting place before plunging off into who knows what, the huge sea of uncertainty that stretches, sweeping across time zones, to infinity in any direction,” Crowther’s imaginary bar is less a place where everybody knows your name, than one where everyone intuits your soul. From bartender Jack Fedogan to Edgar Nornhoevan, both of them members of the Greek chorus of regulars who preside over “Bernard Boyce Bennington and the American Dream,” the inhabitants of Crowther’s two-story walk-down on the corner of Twenty-Third and Fifth recognize their spiritual brethren as soon as they walk in the door.

Or maybe that door only opens to those who’ve already partaken of a Mystery. In B.B. Bennington’s case, that mystery is a Beckoning Fair One whose siren song is powerful enough to echo through Manhattan traffic and penetrate Jack Fedogan’s watering hole. This succubus’s aria ends on a high note that pierces B.B’s heart, and then some.

Yet the greatest mystery evoked here isn’t sexual desire, but something far more evanescent and compelling in its hold upon mortal men (and women): the
frisson
of ecstasy that attends the handling of a pristine comic book. For some of us—me, for one, B.B. Bennington for another and, I must surmise, Peter Crowther himself—this constitutes a pure moment of being. Virginia Woolf’s marigolds wither before the experience of holding my first issue of
Famous
Monsters of Filmland
magazine (#56, July 1969, the one with Boris Karloff’s ‘Frankenstein’ on the cover; I was twelve); or, a few years earlier, the trance I’d go into as I stood before the racks of comics at Ralph’s soda fountain on Lockwood Avenue in Yonkers—the same rapture evoked by B.B. Bennington as he recalls “the smell of the primitive ink mixes and the feel of the resilient paper stocks used in the old Sparta, Illinois printing plants coupled with the almost primal feeling of holding a genuine artifact.”

That’s the
real
Beckoning Fair One. The dark American Dream summoned from the pages of EC Comics has her way with Bernard Boyce Bennington, as she did for countless others in the decades before the internet offered up new demons to feast on the young. Bless Peter Crowther for opening that door at Twenty-Third and Fifth and clearing a place at the bar for those of us who, like the regulars there, need a place to prolong the reverie.

—Elizabeth Hand

Bernard Boyce Bennington &

The American Dream

In a seemingly ever-changing and uncertain life that constantly veers dangerously close to the cliffside of loneliness, we cherish those few things that remain constant. And one of those is the neighborhood bar.

You always know where you are with a neighborhood bar, even when that neighborhood is the sprawling metropolis of New York City.

Chairs are for relaxing, beds for sleeping but there’s no place better than a bar for dreaming. And the best of them all is Jack Fedogan’s place, a two-flight walk-down on the corner of 23rd and Fifth.

The Land at the End of the Working Day—for that’s what it’s called, this bar—could just as easily have been called the Land at the
Beginning
of the Working Day, but it wasn’t. The truth is, apart from the Great Unknown, Jack Fedogan’s bar—for a lot of folks—is all there is outside of the working day…like a small way station situated at Civilization’s End, a final resting place before plunging off into who knows what, the huge sea of uncertainty that stretches, sweeping across time zones, to infinity in any direction.

The clientele of The Working Day stand or sit on that island, on the welcoming boards and stools beneath the pleasantly calming lighting, listening to the music wafting from Jack’s CD player beneath the counter, catching sound-glimpses of the sea of humanity that roils outside the doorway upstairs, kind of like listening to the sound of the real sea caught in a shell washed up on a lonely beach, thinking every so often of its mystery, the never-ending swells and the currents, sometimes playful, sometimes harmful, wondering whether their course at the end of this night or the next night or some night soon should be straight on out, beyond the lights and on into the shadows. But they rarely choose that course.

Mostly they go back, these folks, back into that which they know, at least secure in the knowledge that they can return another night and face the same decision, with a glass of beer in their hand or a malt or a highball, and maybe a cigarette in the other, or a stogie, with maybe Chet Baker singing a soft refrain from the speakers, thinking that maybe—just maybe—maybe tonight they’ll head off to something new, something different. Because the opportunity is there and that’s all that’s really needed: the thought that the situation can be changed and so it’s not so bad.

A few of those almost-intrepid adventurers are here now, not exactly considering their options—at least, not consciously—but they’re here and they wouldn’t know how to answer a question that asked why. They’re just here. And though they don’t know it, they’re dreaming.

These are the chosen few, these patrons momentarily lost on the long road of life. These are the few who have the potential to question. Some—though not many in
this
establishment—question too deeply when they get around to biting the bullet, and find they’ve submerged themselves and lost the way…find that the asking, so
much
asking, has left no room for answers. They only know, these terminally lost souls, that they took a drink, or maybe a couple of drinks, over maybe a couple of nights, maybe more, to get here…so maybe taking a few more drinks might help them to get back. And if it doesn’t work tonight then maybe it’ll work tomorrow night. Or the night after that one. Then the trick is getting through the long parched wildernesses that exist between those nights.

And that’s when the dreaming becomes a nightmare.

But the people in The Working Day know the ropes, know how to read the liquor…how to make it work
for
them and not
against
them. These people are the healthy ones; they still have questions, sure, but they keep a tight rein on them, keep them from building up so much strength that the questions turn on them and consume them until all there is is the liquor. And still more liquor. Liquor that they don’t use to work up the strength to ask any more…now they use it to drown out the noise of their asking.

For as we all know, no sound ever truly dies—particularly the sound of an unanswered question; it just keeps on getting softer, drifting up with the smoke around the top of a room or amidst the branches of the trees in the park or nestled with the pigeons on the narrow ledges a couple of stories up above the city, looking down on the streets and whispering its insistent refrain to you time and again…because that’s all it knows how to do.

And then, all there
is
is the streets…and most everyone knows that, for most folks other than the hardened store-doorway-dwellers and the troglodytes that live in the labyrinthine tunnels that criss-cross beneath the city, there are precious few answers to anything out there.

For the people gathered tonight in the Working Day, some answers have been found and the questions still remaining don’t have quite the same degree of urgency any more.

There will be a half-dozen people here for the little drama that will unfold tonight, and that’s counting Jack who’s always here, tending bar and playing music and passing the time of day—or night—with folks who want a few words with their liquor. Four of the half-dozen are regulars and two of them new folks. One of the new faces is still to arrive.

Over in one of the booths along the back wall, a tall man sits with his coat collar pulled up around his neck. He’s the one new face that’s already here in Jack Fedogan’s bar—one of those faces that blow in off the streets, sometimes just the once and sometimes on a few more occasions—and so Jack and the other regulars have paid maybe a little more attention to watching him than they might do otherwise.

They’ve noticed, for example, that the coat the man’s wearing is a thick coat, navy blue, in a heavy surge weave, with dark pants showing creases you could cut paper with, and heavy black shoes, laced up and double tied. Beneath the coat collar he sports a thick woolen scarf, still knotted, and on his head he wears a wide-brimmed hat, navy blue again—covering tufts of hair sticking out from beneath like sagebrush clumps—the hat’s brim snapped down rakishly over his eyes, even here inside the Working Day where Jack Fedogan keeps the atmosphere warm and cozy. And they’ve noticed the black hold-all bag on the floor next to his feet, a scuffed bag, one that has seen a lot of wear and tear, years of being carried or thrown in the bag of a car, in the trunk maybe, bouncing side to side as the car goes from here to there, or maybe many plane rides and numerous adventures on carts to and from airplanes and many trips along moving baggage claim lines, going round and round until its owner spotted it and retrieved it from the monotony. The bag looks full on this outing, though the eyes watching it can’t exactly figure out what it contains.

To the three regulars at the table in the center of the floor, their regular table, the man appears to be lost in thought, nursing a bottle of beer which he keeps on moving around from side to side, slouched back in his chair, apparently watching the condensation patterns it makes on the table. The watching doesn’t seem to contain much in the way of interest. The man looks sickly, the regulars have agreed in hushed conspiratorial tones, coming down with a head cold or maybe the flu…or maybe he’s got a more exotic ailment in these days of ailments so exotic that even their names are acronym codes of letters and symbols, because the implications of the words they hide are just too terrible to contemplate…wasting diseases that take away a man’s dignity as well as his strength and his looks and his mind.

They figure he’s here to forget something or to find it, looking for answers the way so many are. But most of all, he looks lonely.

In the small trio of regulars locked in a round of their customary joke-telling, Jim Leafman knows all about loneliness and about trying to find answers outside of The Working Day. Jim, who collects garbage for a living and carries the smell of carbolic soap with him wherever he goes, remembers sitting in his ‘74 Olds outside an apartment building on 23rd waiting for his wife to set off for home just a block away, watching her run-walk along the sidewalk, her hair newly tidied and her hose pulled up straight and the feel of another man’s hands still fresh in her body’s memory. He remembers watching her and trying to sense her shame, watching her until she isn’t there any more.

And he remembers coming back another night or maybe later that same one, the inside of the Olds an olfactory trinity of JD’s, betrayal and a red-tinged fury that licks at the insides of his eyes and makes them dry, makes his eye sockets hurt—though maybe that was just the JD’s—sitting there watching the door to the apartment building once more, this time with his old .38 cradled in his lap, with nothing making any sense at all in his life at all and so what does it matter what he does. This, Jim recalls now, must be how it starts for these folks who just walk out one day and blow people away in fast food outlets or movie house lines.

But now Jim sits at a table in The Working Day, nursing a glass of warm Bud instead of a cold automatic, listening to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock trade licks on ‘Little One’ from the Davis quintet’s ground-breaking ESP studio set from the mid sixties while he, Jim, trades similar licks, but conversational instead of instrumental, with his friends.

Jim’s wife has been moved out for almost a year now, living with the same guy—who says monogamy is a thing of the past?—a man who sells office furniture, living in the same apartment block that he watched all those months ago.

He sees them sometimes, one or the other of them—never the two of them together—and he pretends to himself that it’s just a coincidence that he should see them, neatly forgetting that he’s been driving or walking up and down 23rd for maybe an hour, even though he has no reason to be there, convincing himself that it’s just serendipity, ducking back into store doorways or turning quickly to stare at window displays so they don’t see him. He only does this when he’s feeling wistful, hankering for something he was hankering for back then, something in which he no longer sees any intrinsic value but something he feels cheated out of achieving.

And he’s feeling wistful tonight. Wistful and lonely, thinking about a movie he saw a couple nights ago on Cable, Al Pacino as a short order cook falling in love with some starlet—he doesn’t remember her name, maybe Michelle something…funny name?—and he wonders if he’ll ever share his life with another woman.

Then he hears the footsteps on the stairs leading down from the street and he turns around, eyebrows half raised like he’s being casual.

A younger man sitting at the same table, a man with a thick thatch of blond hair, a working man’s Robert Redford, also looks around while he nods to the music and glances aside at Jim. He leans forward and lifts the pitcher, pours beer into his glass and then shouts across to Jack Fedogan—Jack polishing glasses behind the long counter…always looking like he’s polishing glasses but in reality thinking about his wife Phyllis, which fact McCoy, like everyone who’s fortunate enough to be a regular imbiber in this Watering Hole Mecca for Dreamers, knows only too well—to bring another pitcher and this time make it one that doesn’t leak. And he turns to Jim and chuckles, takes a drink and chuckles some more when Jim’s face breaks open around the mouth and he too takes a drink through an easy but contrived smile, like they’re both acting…regulars here in this wonderful place, pretending loneliness is something other people suffer from while they carry on establishing and marking their territory against all newcomers.

And that particular catch-all could well have been written with one man in mind, the man who has just come down the stairs. For this man is a newcomer in every sense of the word, looking like he wouldn’t be much at home anywhere that would have him, an outsider, lost and alone in the night and the city it shrouds.

McCoy, who some folks call Mac—but only those folks he likes or who know him really well—feels his smile fade a little at that thought. He has just got himself a new job, his fourth since leaving Midtown & Western Trust & Loan around about the same time as Jim was coming to terms with his wife cheating on him, and McCoy feels it’s cause for some kind of celebration…so the fading smile is a little disconcerting, if not downright annoying.

But then it’s also cause for some kind of reflection, and right now, tonight in The Working Day, he’s thinking back to his time with the Saving & Loan company, still the only company in the city with two ampersands in its name, thinking back to wall-to-wall meetings where nothing ever seemed to get decided but where he felt whole, the way all men feel when they’re in regular work, work they feel counts for something even when they know it doesn’t, measuring achievement by their pay packet instead of by the inner glow that comes with a job well done, well appreciated and somehow meaningful.

So, McCoy’s job working at a Midtown agency as a copywriter on the annual accounts for company that produces some kind of ball bearings up in Schenectady seems like both a step forward and a step back, in that paradoxical way everything seems some nights, when the darkness seems a little deeper and a little longer than usual. But there’s a girl there that he likes and a couple days ago he built up the nerve to speak to her, over by the photocopier, asking her if maybe she’d like to do something sometime. The girl just looked at him like she was seeing him for the first time, wondering what rock did this guy crawl up from under, and she said to him that she was busy that night. Someone at one of the desks over by the water dispenser let out a snigger that sounded like a duck’s fart and the girl walked off away from the photocopier leaving McCoy standing there, feeling like he was buck naked in the middle of Grand Central at 8.30 in the morning. He took the response as a clear sign of disinterest on her part.

Coming home on the subway these past few nights, with the autumn turning into winter and people all around kind of snuggling up against each other, McCoy has been wondering where he can go to meet somebody, and that thought occurs to him again right now, with the entrance of the new arrival…McCoy wondering where in hell this guy would go to find someone he could be happy with.