The Holiday Cocktail Lounge
An excerpt from NEW YORK CITY JUNKY DAYS
The Holiday was known as being an unfriendly bar, but most dives in the East Village shared this reputation. This didn’t deter the outsiders, mostly NYU students from the nearby dorms, who knew that it served up strong drinks for a cheap price. They put up with some mild abuse and used the bar as a launching pad to get primed up before going to much friendlier yet more expensive watering holes. Thankfully this was mostly on Friday and Saturday nights, leaving the bar during the week to us locals. Much like Steve, I felt that the bar was my personal space, and strangers weren’t exactly welcomed with open, loving arms. Sure, people I didn’t know did come in to drink and a large portion of them never returned. In the late eighties, it was not only the cheapest drink in town but also the strongest. For a mere $2.75 your mixed drink had four-and-a-half shots of booze and was topped off with your favorite mixer. The booze was never poured into a shotglass. Steve swore that he could accurately pour four and a half shots into a glass without measuring it. Quite a few times he’d prove to us how accurate he was by pouring a generous amount into a glass with ice and then pouring it out into a shot glass four and a half times. Every single time he was right on the money. His talent was unmatched. We all laughed on more than one occasion when a newbie ordered a mixed drink only to take a sip, recoil in shock, and place it back on the well-weathered bar. “Excuse me,” they’d politely ask, “Could you add more soda to this? It’s way too strong.” Steve would slam their payment back down on the bar, grab their glass, and angrily dump its contents into the sink. He’d point to the door with an evil sneer and yell, “Get out! You come here to drink? Get out!” He took drinking seriously. If you didn’t, you weren’t welcome.
The cheapest and strongest drinks in the city came with a price. Although mixed drinks were $2.75, sometimes you’d pay more, and sometimes you’d pay less. It was a rare occasion when Steve got your change right. Sometimes he owed you more while other times he gave you back too much. Behind the bar was an old cash register, the old ones where you had to push down hard on large buttons and put in the price. The entire device was mechanical and didn’t require electricity. Even at this time, it would have looked more natural in a museum than here in the bar. This was his only way of keeping track of sales even though there was much easier and more efficient technology available, even in the eighties. Everything about this place was old-school, even its accounting system.
On more than one occasion, I’d stop in for a quick drink and tell Steve I wasn’t staying long and popped a ten-dollar bill on the counter, letting him know there was no need to run a tab. The correct change would be $7.25, not the $5.75 he put down next to my drink. I’d politely point this out to which he’d growled, “You think I no do math?” He’d sit back down and pick up his newspaper and would proceed to ignore me. But things always balance out. There were times when my bar tab was $6.75 and I paid with a ten and got fifteen back in change. He did this to all of us, not just me. We quickly learned never to argue with him. We figured that over time things balanced out and it was best to not argue. Steve’s math was not to be challenged, and all things being equal, it was still the cheapest drink in town. It was never the fact that he couldn’t do basic math, it was more that alcohol clouded his ability to do it properly.
The Holiday did not serve beer on tap despite having several on full display. Written on a weathered piece of cardboard and taped to the shelves that housed the liquor was a crudely written sign stating “No tap! Bottles only!” I have no idea why they didn’t serve draft beer and I never asked. I rarely drank beer in the bar anyway, so it didn’t apply to me, plus when I did I drank Budweiser, one of the two available beers they sold. I’d witnessed on more than one occasion a newbie enter the bar, look at the taps, and then directly at the sign and ask, “What beers do you have on tap?” Half of us regulars would quietly chuckle and wait to see what Steve’s or his son’s response would be, depending on who was tending the bar. The father usually just grumbled, “Bottles only, Budweiser and Heineken.” But the sons used this opportunity to release some of that pent-up anger they both had, kind of using it as a much-needed release valve. “What are you stupid,” Greek would growl. “Can’t you read?”
One of the stranger business practices here was their hours of operation. Steve opened the bar seven days a week. With no set schedule, he’d usually roll up the security gate and unlock the bar sometime between ten and eleven in the morning. I’d always guessed that he simply opened it when he woke up in the morning. On rare occasions when the bar wasn’t open by eleven in the morning, one of the regular morning-drinking drunks would ring Steve’s apartment buzzer, hopefully waking him up so he would come and open the bar. If he were feeling more hungover than usual or just didn’t feel like working, he would toss the keys down from his living room window, telling them to go in and pour themselves a drink, saying he’d be down soon.
However, closing time, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when Steve’s sons were in charge, was at 1 am sharp. This was quite early compared to all the other bars in the city that stayed open until four, the time all establishments serving alcohol had to close by law. Technically they didn’t have to close, they just had to stop serving alcohol at four. They could stay open twenty-four hours if they chose to, however, it wasn’t legal to serve booze between the hours of 4 am and 8 am.
Weekend nights at 12:30 sharp, whichever son was tending the bar would yell out over the deafening crowd of outsiders “Last call!” with a mighty roar. Immediately after doing so, he would cut the power to the jukebox mid-song to the dismay of the young partiers. Every time this happened, the response was the same. There’d be a loud, collective moan of confused drinkers who wanted to continue the party. They would rush to the bar in a mass mob to order their last cheap, strong cocktail. Not their last one for the night, but their last one here. They would certainly be paying much more for a much weaker drink elsewhere and they knew it. Some would moan and groan saying how the bar could make so much more money if they stayed open longer. Gerry and Greek ignored their pleas and suggestions and simply rolled their eyes every time they heard these complaints, which was every weekend night at closing time. “Last call,” they’d say. “But you gotta finish ’em by 1 am. What do you want?” They had heard the complaints and suggestions a thousand times over and had stopped listening years ago. Jaded and weary, they just wanted to close the bar for the night and go home. Neither one of them touched alcohol and hadn’t for years. They loathed drunks and they made it known with how they treated them.
NEW YORK CITY JUNKY DAYS was published in October 2022. If you like what you’ve read, you can read Michael’s first book, MY ADVENTURES IN TUVA, available at Lulu.com. Both books are also available as digital downloads. He survives on book sales, generous Medium tips, and ghostwriting freelance articles.
