Mars & Micheline

With Mars Bar gone and vanished, replaced by the "Jupiter 21" luxury building and now a TD Bank, along with a new bar coming that will serve organic juices and quinoa, I've said what I had to say about its considerable significance in the neighborhood. On a more personal note, for me the place will also be indelibly linked to Beat poet Jack Micheline. He introduced me to it when I was young and still new to the East Village.

For what it's worth, I include here my journal entry about that night, my first time at Mars Bar--when I didn't even know the name of the place. It was exactly 20 years ago.


Jack at Mars, photo: Ellen Lynn

May 16, 1994

Last night I ran around the East Village with Jack Micheline. I met him up at Harris’ bookstore and we went out for coffee. We walked up and down the streets, stopping in bookshops and bars. He smoked Camels, unfiltered, one after the other, coughing and farting. We went into a bar somewhere around 1st Street.

We smoked and talked. He told me about Franz Kline, “Larry” Ferlinghetti, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, and an ex-girlfriend of his who was cruel and mean. Later he found out she’d been college roommates with the woman who shot Andy Warhol.

A song came on the jukebox by a woman Jack knows. Her band is called Nice Undies. He said he gave them a song he had written for Janis Joplin, but “Janis was into this heavy lesbian relationship at the time and it’s a real hetero song.” So Nice Undies got it.

Jack told me about the time he was "shit-drunk" with Bukowski. Jack pulled out a toilet plunger and kissed it. He said it blew Buk’s mind. Jack told him, “If you can’t kiss a toilet plunger, then you can’t be a great poet.”


Jack at Mars, photo: Ellen Lynn

Later, alone, I retraced our steps back to Mars Bar (which I now thought was spelled "Marz" because of the way the name was painted on the side at the time) and eventually took friends to the place. I also spent more time with Jack.

In my journal I wrote:

"Jack came in and sat on my couch and chain-smoked Navy Cuts. The cockroaches were crawling on the walls. He'd just been to his art show with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He told me more about his days with Janis Joplin, getting drunk with her. 'She was just a person,' he said, 'a regular person. She was a good kid.' He explained how uncomfortable she was offstage, with her low self-esteem, and about all her lovers. One woman, he told me, wrote a book called Going Down on Janis, which was all about what it says it's about and, according to Jack, 'terrible.' I lent him my harmonica for his show. He played a few tunes, then we went to Kiev."


my last drink at Mars Bar

In these journal entries and others, I was so young and excited to be in the East Village, hanging out with poets. There are all these scenes--being kissed by Allen Ginsberg, drinking beer at the Cedar Tavern with Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, and Joanne Kyger (who amazed me by eating sugar straight from the packet with her fingertip).

There are all these meals (at Kiev and the Jones Diner) and drinks (at the Telephone Bar and back at Mars Bar again) and trips to bookshops like Tompkins Square Books and Harris Books (does anyone remember Harris Books on the second floor?).

Twenty years later, all those places are gone. The East Village is no longer a bohemian space. Mars Bar just opened as a TD Bank. Jack's gone, too. He died in 1998, alone on the BART train out of San Francisco. I never did get my harmonica back, but it doesn't matter.


Previously:
The Loss of Mars
Blue & Cream on Mars
Before Mars Bar
Remembering Kiev

Slugger Ann

Reader Joe Preston writes in with photos of a vanished gem, "I thought you might find some interest in this photo of my Grandmother’s bar, Slugger Ann’s Bar & Grill, circa 1960 on the NW [correction: NE] corner of 12th Street & 2nd Avenue."


Slugger Ann's, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

Joe says, "She owned it from the early 50s until her death in 1980. She is also the grandmother of my first cousin and godfather, Jackie Curtis of the Warhol Factory. (Our Mothers were sisters.) Slugger Ann, as she is most famously known, was not only the super for this building, but the Village East Cinema diagonally across the street as well, where Jackie and Peter Hujar also lived. Jackie also lived in a small studio in this building, which has the address of 301 East 12th St. It was a first floor apartment."

He adds, "The Naked City TV series along with Kojak was filmed here many times."


shot from Naked City

After Slugger Ann's, the bar became Dick's, a gay dive that closed without warning in 2007. Now it's the fratty-looking 12th Street Ale House.

Melba LaRose recalled the bar to Warhol Stars, "It was a typical Lower East Side bar--this was before we called it the East Village. A lot of local characters hanging out, and Slugger was the biggest character of all. Jackie could often be found at the bar, in whichever gender. His doctor said it was amazing how his body survived going back and forth so many times with the hormones. I remember when he called and was on his way to visit me in LA, a friend said, 'Aren't you going to dress up?' I said, 'For Jackie? Are you kidding? I don't even know what sex he'll arrive in.'"

Jackie grew up with Slugger Ann, and often wore her clothes. Which made sense. Slugger was quite the glamorous lady.


Slugger Ann circa 1950, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

She was also tough as nails. Joe explained how his grandmother got the name Slugger:

"She worked as a taxi dancer in dance clubs, along with my mother and my aunt, in both the Times Square area and Union Square, and when the male customers got 'fresh' with putting their hands where they shouldn't have gone, she hauled off and let them have it. She also belted her female co-workers when they got out of hand. She continued this slug fame during the 50s and 60s, and even some of the 70s when she and my grandfather Joe would physically throw patrons out of the bar when they got drunk and disorderly. She was short in height, but made up for it with a tough Sicilian demeanor and fists like cured hams. Believe me, you didn't want to mess with her."


Slugger Ann circa 1955, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

Joe Preston produced and directed Jackie's play Glamour, Glory, and Gold at LaMaMa in 2003, and was the associate producer on the movie Superstar in a Housedress, directed by Craig Highberger, about the life of Jackie Curtis.

He hopes to make a film about his family, with their hundred-year history on the Lower East Side, his cousin and the Warhol scene, and his charismatic grandmother.


Slugger and husband Joe Verra, circa 1960, photo courtesy of Joe Preston

From Superstar, here's Leee Black Childers describing his first meeting with Slugger Ann, a tough "bleach-blonde woman with this marcelled hair" and "red, red lipstick and black, black mascara...with kindness and love in her eyes."




Update: Joe just sent in this article with Slugger Ann in boxing gloves:



Updated update: Here's Slugger Ann with her pet monkey, Rufus, circa 1970, in front of the bar. Writes Joe, "Notice that 2nd Avenue is still cobblestone. Every car you drove in rumbled over those bricks! Rufus was eventually confiscated by the ASPCA for biting someone. She never got over that, kind of heartbroken."