{"id":75205,"date":"2014-08-11T15:41:11","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T19:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75205"},"modified":"2014-08-11T15:41:11","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T19:41:11","slug":"they-put-him-in-the-freezer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/11\/they-put-him-in-the-freezer\/","title":{"rendered":"They Put Him in the Freezer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Last call at the Blarney Cove.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_75209\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/2975156860_49c6d76482_o.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-75209\" class=\"wp-image-75209\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/2975156860_49c6d76482_o.jpg\" alt=\"2975156860_49c6d76482_o\" width=\"600\" height=\"704\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/2975156860_49c6d76482_o.jpg 2114w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/2975156860_49c6d76482_o-255x300.jpg 255w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/2975156860_49c6d76482_o-873x1024.jpg 873w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-75209\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Gabriel Herrera<\/p><\/div>\n<p>For a long time, when I came to the end of something\u2014a walk across the bridge, an absence from the city\u2014I would find myself inside the Blarney Cove, a hallway-sized Irish bar on Fourteenth Street between Avenues A and B. The place\u2019s gravity came from its total disregard for the passage of time. Its drywall ceiling was never finished. Its walls, wood paneled with patches of green-and-white striped wallpaper, likely hadn\u2019t been redone since the seventies. Outside, four or five customers perpetually gathered for a cigarette, tending to the drunken chain-smoker\u2019s belief that tomorrow will never arrive. Among this crowd, you could always spot a straggler with a folded dollar between his fingers. \u201cCan I buy a cigarette?\u201d he\u2019d ask the group, waving the bill he couldn\u2019t afford to give away. \u201cYou can just have one,\u201d someone would say. (As the straggler knew, at the Blarney Cove, no one ever took the dollar.) Once, I asked a regular from Harlem what it was about this odd and dreary bar that made him take the trip more than one hundred blocks downtown just for a drink. He paused, as if it had never before occurred to him to consider his commute, and then said, \u201cIt feels like home.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There was no more lonesome jukebox in the five boroughs than that of the Blarney Cove. Over the years, I watched all sorts of people haunt the bar\u2019s four square feet of danceable floor\u2014a grizzly man in a cowboy hat, a college girl with big hoop earrings\u2014each gyrating in solitary defiance of the sleepy night. Some nights, after the loafers took their positions along the bar, an older woman named Kiko would walk in and ask each of the men to dance with her, one by one; slumped over in thought and beer, they\u2019d always decline. I watched her once as she swayed her hips to Lucinda Williams\u2019s \u201cDrunken Angel,\u201d alone. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One dancer stands out above the others: In 2009, a white-haired woman named May asked me if I would do the jitterbug with her. I made an attempt. She moved like she was sixty but she looked older, as tended to be the condition of the Blarney Cove\u2019s jukebox regulars. I had never done the jitterbug and so we danced only briefly, until my ignorance became an issue. Then we talked instead about Elvis, the origins of the song \u201cThe House of the Rising Sun,\u201d and Junior Kimbrough, a Mississippi electric blues guitarist. She had never heard of Junior and suggested we listen to him back in her apartment across the street. \u201cWe can play the music as loud as we want,\u201d she said. I declined, but gave her my e-mail address. She walked over to the jukebox, put on a song I\u2019d never heard before, and danced by herself. The next morning, she sent me an e-mail telling me she had spent the evening listening to Junior\u2019s music. She explained, too, that her husband had just died: \u201cThe only advantage in him not being here anymore is I PLAY MY MUSIC LOUD \u2026 WHEN HE WOULD NOT LET ME! I know he is shaking his head in heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I last found myself at the Blarney Cove in June 2013, a few days before it closed. It was very late, and time, as always, was the unacknowledged enemy. Around the barroom, dusty artifacts loitered in dark crannies, unconcerned with their bygone utility: a graffitied pay phone hung on the wall; two dispensers in the back of the bar offered handfuls of dusty pistachios for twenty-five cents; an arcade machine carried a warning that its poker games were to be \u201cused for entertainment only\u201d; a pornographic seek-and-find video game on the end of the bar displayed no such warning; and, most puzzlingly, a piece of wrinkled, white paper taped to the wall advertised mini-burgers, knishes, slices of pizza, and quesadillas. On it, someone had scribbled \u201cZagat rated.\u201d In six years, I never saw anyone place an order.<\/p>\n<p>That night, four or five old men were sitting along the bar, nursing mugs of beer; one leaned back on his stool, his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned. (On particularly hot days, patrons enjoyed the bar\u2019s makeshift air-conditioning unit: a fan propped up on the back table by the pornographic seek-and-find, blowing directly at a dried-out air freshener cone.) Moving behind these men was a Nigerian priest I\u2019ll call Derrick\u2014he was passing out his business cards, promising to sacrifice a chicken at his next service. Like most of the men and women I\u2019d met at the Blarney Cove, Derrick had been a customer for decades. He started coming as a boy. His father was a merchant marine who would bring him along on his trips down from Harlem to pick up his paychecks.<\/p>\n<p>I introduced myself to a toothless old Irishman named George\u2014well on his way, whiskey-wise\u2014who interrupted me: \u201cYou don\u2019t have this bar,\u201d he insisted, punctuating each word, staccato style, with a tap of his finger. \u201cThis bar has a history, pal. You\u2019re still young.\u201d He\u2019d been coming to the Blarney Cove for more than thirty years. When it opened, in 1977, the neighborhood was one of the poorest in the city. Back then, he said, the Irish and Italians didn\u2019t get along. You\u2019d walk out of the bar after a night of hard, lazy drinking and \u201cno matter where you turned, somebody would try you on for size.\u201d In the eighties, he continued, the bar had a lot of trouble with the heroin addicts outside, but some regular named Sonny eventually set them straight. As George spoke, I noticed he was seated beneath a framed collage titled <em>The Mid-Day Gentlemen\u2019s Club<\/em>, which had sixteen portraits of customers taken a decade ago. Uncle Al, Billy B, Sonny, Paulie, Ray K, Angelo \u2026 \u201cFrom the beginning, these guys were here,\u201d George said. \u201cA lot of guys had wakes in this bar, a lot of memories. The good, the bad, the ugly. That\u2019s what they were.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I had never seen George here before, but I took it this was his regular seat. I asked him where he thought he\u2019d go when, in a few days, the Blarney Cove closed down. He sighed. \u201cHome, I guess.\u201d Shortly afterward, he pushed himself out from the bar, stood up, and wobbled away.<\/p>\n<p>When George was out of earshot, the bartender, who looked to be in her early thirties, turned to me, her eyes large with sadness. \u201cGeorge had mouth cancer,\u201d she said. She was afraid that, home alone in his house, he\u2019d drink himself to death. Behind her was a line of rum bottles, and above them a carved wooden sign that read, in ersatz German, <small>VE GET TOO SOON OLDT UNDT TOO LATE SCHMART<\/small>.<\/p>\n<p>Tommy, another regular, recounted an oft-told Blarney Cove legend. One evening, he said, a regular was sitting alone at the end of the bar, minding his business, enjoying his $1.50 mugs of beer with all the usual contentment of an old drinker on a young night. Suddenly, but without fuss, the man set down his mug, shut his eyes, slumped forward, and died right there in his chair. \u201cThey put him in the freezer,\u201d Tommy said. And the next day his body was gone.<\/p>\n<p>When Tommy finished the story, Derrick, the priest, turned to the bartender, as if to take stock of things. \u201cEvery real milestone, I\u2019ve come in here to deal with it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m happy this place is closing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She smiled. \u201cThank you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It occurred to me that nobody in a lifeboat is happy to be lost at sea.<\/p>\n<p>A moment later the jukebox kicked on. It was George. The bar paused to take in the soft, synthesized melody coming through the speakers. Old guys squinted, obliged by age-old custom to make some effort, no matter how hopeless, to come up with the title of the song. They gave up, of course, and slowly, their curiosities lifted and chatter resumed. New faces shuffled in. The bartender filled mug after mug. George, meanwhile, stayed in front of the machine, rocking back and forth in its green-and-yellow light. He was playing Bette Midler\u2019s \u201cWind Beneath My Wings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Blarney Cove closed a few days later. In the year since, all the signs that once marked its spot at 519 East Fourteenth Street have been carried off\u2014but even while it was open, the bar was easy to overlook. In daylight, its half-illuminated \u201cBlarney Cove\u201d sign never quite held its own against the Canal Jewelry awning looming next door. At night it was easier to see. For a long time, a neon sign that said <small>DRINK STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE<\/small> glowed in the window, sending a column of blue out to the street, through the smokers\u2019 vigil. When Canal Jewelry closed, though, this sign disappeared\u2014in its place was a more traditional neon Budweiser logo, hung perhaps to appease the block\u2019s new gentry, who insisted, in their usual way, that shops dress in their Sunday best.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the last trace of the bar\u2019s thirty-six-year stand on Fourteenth Street is a small \u201cR.I.P. Blarney Cove!\u201d scribbled in permanent marker on the metal security gate that seals the barroom off from the street. The smokers have moved on, but I have seen, now and then, wedged into the gate, a crushed beer can reflecting sunlight in the early hours of the morning.<\/p>\n<p><em>Joe Kloc is a reporter for <\/em>Newsweek<em>. He lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last call at the Blarney Cove. For a long time, when I came to the end of something\u2014a walk across the bridge, an absence from the city\u2014I would find myself inside the Blarney Cove, a hallway-sized Irish bar on Fourteenth Street between Avenues A and B. The place\u2019s gravity came from its total disregard for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":448,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[1803,14927,14928,14930,1328,4237,14929,124],"class_list":["post-75205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-bars","tag-blarney-cove","tag-closures","tag-dive-bars","tag-drinking","tag-east-village","tag-jukeboxes","tag-new-york"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>They Put Him in the Freezer by Joe Kloc<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 11, 2014 \u2013 Last call at the Blarney Cove. 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