Last Call at the Tin Palace

Paul Pines

At the risk of using a cliché, I would describe Paul Pines as the ultimate writer’s writer. Despite what might be seen as a modest output in terms of quantity, the quality is always superlative.

His last work was a memoir titled “My Brother’s Madness” that I reviewed in November 2007. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Growing up a few blocks from Ebbets Field, Paul Pines was a true child of the 1950s, which was much more about looking tough than sensitive. This was especially true when you had to fend off rival gangs of Irish or Italian youths. As a perpetual truant and an unsuccessful car thief, Paul fit right into the neighborhood, as this encounter with his high school principal would indicate:

We sit in straight back chairs. Bullethead [a nickname for the principal] tells us that he has been a cop and a trolley-car conductor and understands boys in motorcycle boots with ducks-ass hair welded in place by Dixie Peach. There are quite a few of us walking up Flatbush to Church Avenue every morning to the walled fortress spanning several blocks. Erasmus boils over with students in two overlapping sessions, out of which a small stream of elite students are siphoned off from the raging river of Irish Lords, Pig Town Tigers, Gremlins, and Chaplains into the top tier. I fall into the lower one, a Blackboard Jungle minus Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Three days a week I take in the triple-feature cowboy movies at the Majestic Theater on Fulton Street instead of going to school.

Paul thought of himself as a budding gangster, fed by fantasies inspired by the pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins. After his father sent him off to Cherry Lawn, a progressive private school in Connecticut, he still saw himself as a rebel without a cause, but one with roots in Lord Byron as well as the mean streets of Brooklyn. After reading Freud, he discovers that being able to use his mind fills him with elation. “I am a wet chick burst from its shell.”

Paul’s latest book is a collection of poetry titled “Last Call at the Tin Palace” (available from Marsh Hawk Press), a reference to the jazz club that he ran in the 1970s. Here’s some background on the club from an interview with Paul in Perfect Sound Forever:

The legend was that the place [Tin Palace] had been a speakeasy run by (mob figure) Meyer Lansky. When we excavated the basement, I found in the rubble a copy of the New York Post announcing the end of Prohibition. It had deteriorated from a working-class bar to a real bum’s bar, abandoned and full of trash. That whole corner was like a no man’s land.

We took everything down to the brick. We re-supported the building with steel. We built offices downstairs, our own booths, our own tables—I’d learned how to set up a kitchen. We worked for about five or six months. There was a piece of sculpture out front by Bobby Bowles, a third-tier Abstract Expressionist. He bolted the steel into the sidewalk in front of the bar.

The Tin Palace was pitched to the artists in SoHo. Everyone who worked in the place had their own following, including myself. So by the time we opened, everybody from Max’s Kansas City, from St. Adrian’s, from Phoebe’s, they all came to check out this new thing.

“Big Charlie” was a bartender from the old Stanley’s who played saxophone and had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz. He put together the Murray Shapinsky Quartet—it was named for some unsung Jewish jazzman that Charlie loved—and we started having live music by the end of the first year.

Some months later, a flute player named Lloyd McNeil asked me if he could play at the place. I’d heard him with the guitarist Allan Gittler, who’d built his own kind of space-age guitars—there’s one in the Smithsonian. Lloyd and Allan played duos for a while, then Lloyd asked if he could bring in a larger group. They were all Brazilians: [guitarist] Amaury Tristao, [pianist] Dom Salvador, some really fine players. People began to flock to hear the Brazilians.

The groups would play three or four nights per week for months at a time, as the house band—I loved the idea of having a house band. It built a wonderful following, and The Tin Palace began to get noticed. We built a real stage, and then an outdoor café on one side of the building. It was a very diverse crowd from the start, as many black patrons as white.

Paul read from his book last Thursday night at the Ceres Gallery in Chelsea. He was introduced as somebody who had absorbed the jazz idiom through a lifetime of involvement with jazz, both professionally and as a connoisseur of the art form. This has had the effect of giving his poetry both the improvisatory quality of jazz as well as a kind of timbre that evokes the soloist. As might be expected, a number of Paul’s poems deal with jazz and his days and evenings at the Tin Palace. Here is one of them titled “Last Call at the Tin Palace”, which is the name of the collection as well:

Granada falling
at my feet

a Mayan princeling
in the service of his conquerors

or the buried time
between time before I was young when I saw
my life to come what it held in store and decided I would live…

whoever I was
in other lives
it doesn’t matter to me now

as it does to Nat in the kitchen
placing layer on layer
of paper thin dough to make his spinach pies
that he was once a woman
and way back
an apprentice to a scribe sanding down stones

or to Jim
closing down the bar that as a Nez Perce
he watched his people dying in the Montana snow
and that he was in tears

He says his name was Looking Glass
that he knows where he was born
and where he’s buried
says he’s stood
and said a prayer before his own grave

Several of the poems allude to Paul’s late brother Claude who was one of my closest friends at Bard College. I learned about 5 years ago that Claude had been stricken with schizophrenia fairly late in life and I regret not having made contact with him before he died of leukemia about 3 years ago. One of the reasons I make a point of following Paul’s writings is that it is like communing with Claude’s spirit.

Paul Pines reading a selection from “My Brother’s Madness”

In reading through Paul’s poems, I found another personal connection. In his “The Ghost of Mother’s Day”, he communes with the spirit of his dead mother. As it turns out, my mother died on May 12, 2008 just one day after Mother’s Day. I had one phone conversation with her a day or two before in which she told me that the end was near and that I should not be sad at her passing. Unfortunately, I did not see her or speak to her after that. I feel bad about that and often find myself talking to her in my dreams. If I was a poet rather than a politician, I might have found the words that Paul Pines did in addressing his own late mother in the poem:

“Mama” I said
“what shall I do?
The ground keeps shifting under me
and I’ve left no tracks.
The women I touched I quickly left.
Those I loved I hardly knew.
As a father I withdrew
into my father’s sadness.

“Close your eyes” she told me.
“Where are you?”

“Miami.
I’m a child again.
The earth smells like chocolate
and the wind is peppermint.”
“And now?” she placed
her fingers on my forehead.

“I’m a young seaman
walking up a gangway in Mobile.”
Then she removed her hand
and I started to cry.

“Where are you?” she coaxed.
“Where are you now!
Saigon? Subic Bay?
Try and guess.
Guess!
Try!”