Bill and Tony and their respective girlfriends were sharing a place out in Park Slope. One night I took the F train out there from Manhattan to see what was what.
Brooklyn was the land of ancestors and awkward family reunions throughout childhood. Didn’t imagine there’d be much action out there, but Bill and Tony took me barhopping along Seventh and we had a fine time, until our final stop, which was mayhem.
Every table in the joint was piled with toy instruments. A guy in a court jester’s hat pounded an upright piano, flopping his head, singing like an insane person. The harder he played, the crazier everyone in the bar pounded their toy instruments along with him.
My mouth hung slightly open. I wasn’t sure if this was an outpatient clinic or my new favorite bar.
“What is this place?”
Bill and Tony had saved it for last, they knew I’d like it.
“It’s the Toy Bar.”
When the guy in the jester’s hat took a break, Tony said to me,
“Don’t you play the piano?”
“No way.”
The redheaded woman tending bar encouraged me.
“Go on,” she said. She had a genuine smile, it didn’t feel like I was being set up for ridicule.
The stage was barely bigger than the piano. Probably I played a little 12-bar blues, the easiest thing when you don’t know what else to play. Luckily, the guy with the funny hat had worn everyone out, no one was pounding along.
Back at the bar, the bartender bought me a drink. Her name was Dorothy, she owned the place.
“You play nice. Why don’t you come back and play again?” she said. “We can pay you a little.”
I thanked her for the drink, crashed on Bill and Tony’s floor, headed back to Manhattan the next morning. There was overlap between the Toy Bar and my brain in some Venn diagram of the universe, but playing there again seemed unlikely.
But then, the verbal abuse at my restaurant job started outweighing the tips, so I was done with that. And playing clarinet in the Astor Place subway station had yielded zero loose change.
So a few days later, back out to Brooklyn. The F train does this thing after it passes Carroll Street, it takes to the sky. Literally, you feel like you’re in a plane, flying high over Brooklyn. At the time, I knew nothing of the Gowanus Canal far below, only that I felt like Orpheus crossing to another world.
Dorothy smiled when I walked in. She knew I’d be back.
Weeknights were different than weekends. Very sleepy. Three or four people at the bar. Worked for me. I started playing off the top of my head. The next night I’d be better prepared with a setlist. I still have one, the size of an index card. Gospel, country, ragtime, pop, all over the place.
Dorothy had two daughters who came with her to the bar every night. The older daughter waited tables. She was almost in high school and wanted to learn to play the piano, so I started coming earlier each night to teach her scales and whatnot.
The other daughter was maybe five. She amused herself watching a portable TV that they brought to the bar, obsessed with a show she called The Bundys. One night she was so fast asleep that I carried her two blocks to their house when I walked them home after the bar closed.
Every night, Dorothy shared with me whatever dinner she’d brought for herself and the girls. She always paid me something in a little envelope whether the place had been busy or not. And she kept giving me drinks.
Heading back to Manhattan alone late at night after drinking was sketchy. Sometimes I’d actually run along Seventh Avenue to the station at Ninth, which was echoey and deserted. Often I had the subway car to myself. One night, there was a single other passenger, sitting directly across from me.
“I like your beret,” he said.
Why was I wearing a beret?
“Thanks,” I said.
The guy had a scar dead-smack in the middle of his forehead that looked like a bullet hole. It was a major effort to keep from staring at it. The rest of the conversation was strangely friendly, but I was relieved to change trains at West 4th Street.
Undeterred, I kept returning to Brooklyn. One Saturday night, Bill and Tony and maybe one other friend joined in. We called our band Urban Kincade and played mostly cover songs. I’m not sure how we all fit on the little stage.
I continued playing most nights. It got a little crazy on weekends with people banging along and whatnot, but during the weeks remained mellow. I might’ve kept at it but I had to face the fact, I was starting to run low on funds. I got an exhausting temp job at a warehouse. And that was the end of my run at the Toy Bar.
The thing that comes back to me isn’t so much the quirkiness of the place, or that I’d made a tiny bit of cash playing music. It’s that in a city that seemed increasingly indifferent to my presence, this nice family sort of adopted me for a while that summer.
One afternoon years later, I found myself walking along Seventh Avenue. Park Slope had changed a lot, it was now filled with cafes and five-hundred dollar baby strollers.
When I got to the old Toy Bar, it looked boarded up, but outside a young woman was selling the most beautiful handmade hats. I realized it was the little girl I had carried home all those years before.
I asked her what she was up to, she told me she was going to fashion school, maybe she said F.I.T. She didn’t remember that I had played piano in the bar. That was fine, she didn’t need to. I could see she’d found something she loved to do, and she was doing it. That was the most important thing.
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That was unexpectedly heartbreaking for me. Loved the invisible beret and the homemade hats connection.
Kids that age rarely remember that kind of offhand kindness, which is beautiful in itself since it means they've internalized it so much that it's simply how they understand the world should be