Skunklove

Sonny's
In improvisational comedy they teach you a basic principle. It is called yes-and. Or, to put it more accurately, it is called “yes, and…”
It teaches this: when you are on stage with very little guidelines and you have a brilliant idea for how the scene should unfold - say you want to be a pirate, and your partner should be the parrot who only speaks French and a galleon full of angry Quebecois are on the horizon - if the person next to you trumps you by beginning the scene in a way that completely contradicts what you were intending to do, you say, “yes, and…”
You take what your friend gives you and you roll with it. It may not have been what you wanted, what you intended, or even what you think would have worked best, but you plod ahead.
There are principles inherent to this. One is that you trust the person next to you, which is to say, you trust yourself well enough to know that you would not have placed yourself onstage next to an imbecile. It also implies that when you are looking straight ahead and life takes you on a sharp right turn, you will still be able to navigate. Trust your inner GPS, I say.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that when my friend Adam invited me out for his birthday on Saturday night to the far reaches of New York City, even though I was sick and contemplating an early night, I went. I trust Adam. He’s got the air about him of a guy who knows where fun happens. But he didn’t make it easy. He invited me far. To Redhook. Past Columbia Street, which my friend Danielle claimed was Redhook but which Adam says is really the “Columbia Street District” on the outer edges of Carroll Gardens. Beyond all that.
On our cab ride out there, we passed the rundown brownstones of outer Carroll Gardens and made our way through vacant streets lined with derelict buildings. There were newspaper eddys on the sidewalk: urban tumbleweed. We saw warehouses that may or may not have been occupied and two-story satellite dishes that looked more like the American Southwest than Brooklyn. And then the streets became cobblestone and the air started to smell dank and wet and we were in the industrial waterfront. There were a few homes and empty lots and docks. And there was one building with neon. Just one: Sonny’s.
We had to give the cabbie directions back to Manhattan.
He was lost, but I was smiling.
The bar was dimly lit but warm, with wood walls and crap all over the place: fishnets, model boats, modern art, portrait photographs, mismatched furniture. The stereo in the front room was playing R&B, the same CD on repeat for all four hours that we were there. The back room was cozy, lit with nautical lanterns and with an arced wooden ceiling and rectangular skylights like the cabin of a wide New England catboat. Someone was smoking a cigar outside and we could see his face through a small, smudged window, but he sat so still we thought he was a bad painting or an out-of-focus photograph.
There was a bluegrass band back there. Or not so much a band as a group of people who seemed to know each other. They were circled up around an old wooden table, some in chairs, some standing, most playing but some not. And they ran through songs that most of them seemed to have memorized, but those who didn’t squinted patiently at the guitarists' fingers to see the chords explained.
The fiddler was only okay, but the guitar player could harmonize and there was a really beautiful woman who could sing like nobody’s business. I don’t care for Jesus but her voice sure did.
All of this would have been enough. More than enough – dayenu as they say in the Passover Seder – but on top of this the coup de grace was the pedal steel guitarist. There was a drag queen playing the pedal steel.
I want to write that sentence again, because it makes me smile, because it makes me smile wryly knowing full well that whatever it is I want from life – life will give me something better, something that I never could have imagined. There was a drag queen playing the pedal steel.
So there you have it. I just as easily could have been asleep for four hours by now. And it almost certainly would have shaved a whole day off my recuperation from this cold. But I never would have seen Sonny’s. And I never would have smiled like this.