The punch line from yesterday’s story, which for some reason got truncated was this: The only thing I remember from looking her up was that public records showed one of her previous residences had a street address of 181. Whoosh.

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Funny idea for something that you would say to a newborn infant that will not stop crying: “Don’t worry kid, it’ll be over before you know it.”

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Long conversation, more of a litany really, with a 52-year-old native Astorian had me feeling inspired about this neighborhood. I often forget how big it is. From 1st Street in Two Coves south to the Queensbridge Houses then east to Woodside Boulevard and north to … can’t think of the street but it’s a couple of blocks past Hazen at 19th Boulevard. That’s AsLIC to me. Opinions about its boundaries vary but I don’t care. There is a distinct corner, which I’ve posted to this web site at least once, which I think is the end of Astoria. It’s past that Elmjack baseball field and the Rikers Island Bridge, and could be said to lie “officially” within Jackson Heights. It’s near LaGuardia, which is surprisingly walkable from most of AsLIC. I used to think Hazen was the end of Astoria, and by some estimates it probably should be. But there is something about that brassy turn in the road at that other intersection that signals, to me, an entrance and/or an exit, a beginning or an end.

Danny, who I met last night, made a few claims that he was happy to concede might have been in error. He said that Sunswick used to be an after hours bar in the 1980s. I don’t doubt that, since his memories of nights spent in that space were unassailable. But he claimed that the bar was called Yellowbird, and I have not been able to verify this, but I did not think to do that until just this moment when I sat down at the ghetto coffee shop. We were able to verify that there was another after hours bar on 36th Avenue called The Dolphin’s Den, at 33rd Street. And he said he worked at a bar on Broadway called Coretta’s, where none other than John Gotti Jr. trained him on how to run the cash register.  I think he said that was in the space now occupied by Gleason’s, which itself I remember as being briefly occupied by a place called Sofa or Couch or something like that. Before that I think it was an Irish place called something like Muldoon’s or McCaffrey’s.

I never understood how Gleason’s gets away with using all that Jackie Gleason branding and imagery, unless they have some arrangement with the Gleason estate. Maybe there is no estate.

We shared war stories about Veronica’s, a place and people of which Danny clearly knows very well. That place is such a story. An Astoria story. I know it to have been St. Mark’s, a notorious crack hole. Veronica used to work at McHale’s, which was in the space now taken by Key Food, which itself used to be Food World. A couple of years ago that place (Key Food) placed its banners and awnings over the doorways of a few neighboring businesses, small places like newsstands and such. It appeared that the Key Food was going to expand and take over those spaces but it has not happened in the 2 years since the banners were placed. I bought steaks there last night but ended up ordering pizza.

Veronica, Eddie, and Bobby (sp?) opened Veronica’s maybe 12 years ago, after amicably parting ways with McHale’s. I remember McHale’s being there, right at the 36th Avenue subway station, but I never entered the place. I was not much into bars back then, except as corporate relief.

In between the avalanches of stories and anecdotes from Danny I kept trying a little too hard to bring this beautifully cute woman into the conversation. There I go again, ignoring the sage advice from that random old guy at Veronica’s:

Beware, young man, of a woman who sits alone at the bar.

I think she thought I was a creep. Maybe she was right. She was cute but probably dangerous. I’ll see her again and work harder toward making a huge mistake.

Danny’s girlfriend is a tech bigshot at Sony. I actually used to know the head of IT at that company. He quit Time-Warner to take that job, and the company was immediately subsumed in a brazen hack of its network during his first week on the job. He took a lot of shit for that but seriously, it was almost his first day on the job. I don’t know the details but maybe the hackers knew about this change of regime and planned accordingly, to leverage the weakness.

As Danny corroborated, Sony pays its people shit unless they stay with the company for a very long time. I interviewed for a job there while I was still at Time-Warner. The interviewer’s jaw dropped when I told her what I was making at TWX. She politely indicated that no way would I get that kind of coin at Sony. I later heard through sources that that could change if you just stay there a long time. Danny was impressed that I knew Sony had moved from its Madison Avenue building to downtown.

Somewhere in the course of the conversation it seemed appropriate to mention that I almost died in the building where Danny was born, Mt. Sinai, née Astoria General. He almost started crying when I offered up a few details of the Gordon’s Vodka binge that could have killed me. I still have that bottle, filled with tchotchkes and identifying information. I intend to throw it into the East River some day. Danny was subsequently impressed in an almost fatherly way that I left Sunswick after only 3 beers.

Anyway… that was a fun night, unlike any in recent memory, even if the conversation was pretty one-sided. I really, and I mean really loved a picture he showed me of himself and his 17-year-old daughter.

An amusing aside: Someone came in to the bar and asked Chris, the bartender, if he had a lighter. He was told no, but he was free to use one of the many lit candles found throughout the place. He went to use a candle near the front door of the place, and both Chris and I looked at him and thought “Dude looks like he’s lighting a joint.” He was. He exited the place but not before the smell of pot smoke wafted freely, completely filling the air. Everyone noticed and turned to look but the weed wanter was gone. It made my stomach turn a bit, as pot smoke always does. It was funny how brazen the guy was. He might as well have said “I need to smoke a J., you got a light?”

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In other news, I don’t know how it took me this long to realize this but another annoyance that just dawned on me yesterday about the CBS piece was that they appear to have presented me as somebody who still collects pictures of payphones from anybody wants to send them to me. I have not actively solicited that stuff for at least 10 years. Here or there someone sends me one but in the wake of that CBS spot lots and lots of people are suddenly doing it again. I am happy to see all these images, I mean I really am, but processing them and posting them and offering pithy commentary is something I left behind years ago. Sorry to be such a sour spirit but that’s the deal, and that’s why I have not watched the CBS spot. I’d rather be on record as being who I really am, which is not a nostalgian and not a lover of phone booths. I do find booths to be singular in their form, but the sight of them brings back more bad memories than good.

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And in yet other news, which I guess I’ll post to the payphone site, I walked up the RFK/Triborough yesterday for the first time in a while. I noticed something. A sign which read “LIFE IS WORTH LIVING” is no longer there. It was addressed to those contemplating suicide. The sign stated there was an emergency telephone box up ahead, and also included a phone number you could call to talk to a crisis counselor. I don’t know if this means the Port Authority changed its mind about the value of life or if someone more important than I broke the news to them that there never was an emergency phone on the bridge, as promised by that misbegotten sign. At first it seemed o me like such a strange thing to pay attention to so I was somewhat surprised to find that almost anyone I knew who had been over that bridge had noticed too that this sign promising an emergency telephone box up ahead was in error, and that it just seemed like a needlessly cruel joke. I guess if you are going up there with thoughts of offing yourself you should make sure to bring your cell phone, although now there is no longer even a phone number up there for you to call.

The question is not so much why would they take it down but why did was that sign up in the first place? There was never an emergency Lifeline phone, as the sign claimed, and my correspondence with the Port Authority did nothing to clarify the matter. The response I received stated, simply, yes indeed, sir, there are Lifeline phones on all three spans of the RFK/Triborough.

No, there are not, and there never were, but far be it from me to argue with whatever spreadsheet dataset at which that Port Authority representative was looking.

How strange would it be if there actually was a phone up there now.

I did not walk all the way across that bridge, but I thought of doing that to see if there was a “LIFE IS WORTH LIVING” sign on the other end of the span. Sometimes I can sometimes I cannot but yesterday the waist-level fence that looks over the Hell Gate nauseated me. I was also playing an increasingly dangerous game of human dodgeball with the bicyclists, who are not supposed to be riding on most of that bridge’s walkway.

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I don’t know if it is the fancy new pillows or going back to the booze but I’ve sleeping like a conqueror the last 2 nights. Feels good but feels bad, too, to wake up to half the day gone. I’ve been doing that for years, of course, but of late I’ve been a little bit better about all that. That one night of sleep without aid of booze or pills was memorable, though, and felt like an achievement.

Going home for piano time.