The Bitter End

Part One

The bar was called the BITTER END.

I’d drunk there more than a few times, many years before when I was living down the street with my first wife. In the days I was still drinking. Almost four years sober now.

The name of the place caught my attention as soon as I glimpsed it and if you’re a music fan or from NYC maybe it caught your attention too. Anyway, the place was a small, simple two-story building. Bar on the first floor. One room apartment on the second. It was on the corner of a side street next to a derelict florist and a dirty looking ramen shop. A little different to the hundreds of other bars dotted around the suburbs. Unique. See, it wasn’t just a bar. It was also a record and vintage store. You could go in there for a few drinks on a Friday night and come out a few hours later half cut with a Cal-Neva Hotel and Casino ashtray and a couple of Beatles LPs. The place was quite literally — Down My Street. (The ashtray is still on my coffee table.)

The owner was an old guy, in his seventies, I guessed. He wore English-style tailored jackets and a black beret. Smoked cigarillos that stank of damp hay and spoke English in a series of clipped catchphrases that I found endearing. He told me his name was Takeru but to call him ‘John’. Bad at names. I don’t think I called him either in the handful of occasions I drank there.

The place was empty most evenings and I would wave to Takeru as I passed by on my way home from the subway station. He was always perched behind the bar reading a newspaper, one of those foul-smelling cigarillos constantly clenched between his teeth. The melodies of Chet Baker’s trumpet drifting out into the night. He would hold his hand up in a kind of indifferent salutation as I passed. His eyes darting back to the newspaper.

On the nights I did stop in to have a beer or five and peruse the overpriced LPs and vintage items, Takeru would take music requests and no matter what random music I asked for, if it was before the 1980’s, he would have it. Frantically rummaging through shelves of records until he found it. Or something like it. He was the person who first introduced me to The Ink Spots. Trippy as hell to be sat at a bar in the Japanese suburbs listening to music that was at its heyday in America over sixty years before with a bartender that is dressed as an English gentlemen from the same time period talking about how he went to London in the Swinging Sixties. It was like a bar at the end of the world.

Sometimes his wife would be in there too. She was around the same age as him, but had kept the beauty and playfulness I imagine had broken a hundred hearts in her youth. She certainly would’ve broken mine. Her name was Naomi and she berated her husband in a teasing way they both seemed to get a kick out of.

A little while later, my first wife got pregnant and we decided to move away from that neighborhood, across the city, to the richer side of town because she wanted to be closer to her parents when the baby came. Besides we needed a larger apartment than the one room apartment we were living in above a laundromat at the time.

I drank in the Bitter End one last time before we left.

Never mentioned I was leaving. I bought a vintage lamp shaped like a white goose for some drunken reason that escapes me now. Knocked it off the shelf a decade later and broke it. I broke too many things at that time in my life. Priceless things. My word. Promises. Things that can’t be stuck back together with Super Glue. Things that still bother me now. Many years later.

I left the Bitter End that last time much like I leave most events in my life. The Irish Way.

Over the years I often wondered about the bar and the old man who ran it. After seeing a lot of my favorite restaurants and bars not survive Covid I hoped they had made it and were doing well. Hell, I hoped the old guy was still alive. Always feeling a strange kind of nostalgia to go back there. I never did.

Fast forward fifteen years.

I moved back to the neighborhood with my second wife and a pet dog called Boo. That first night, surrounded by cardboard boxes and bubble wrap I clipped Boo’s lead to his collar and took him for a stroll down to where The Bitter End had been. Hoping it was still there. Dreading the idea that it had been made into yet another hair salon or dog groomers. What I saw there though broke my heart a little and haunted me for weeks but it did also give me an idea for the novel I’m attempting to write now…

The place was…

To be continued…