Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream

Free Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream by Peter Crowther

Book: Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream by Peter Crowther Read Free Book Online
Authors: Peter Crowther
Introduction
     
     
    CERTAIN PROFOUND SPIRITUAL and emotional needs can’t be met by lovers, religious institutions, psychiatrists or English cocker spaniels; even—especially—in a place like New York City. That’s why God invented bars.
    Yet even God has Her ‘off days’. How else to account for the loss of places like the Cedar Tavern and Lion’s Head, hangouts for earlier generations of bohemian New Yorkers? How else to account for the loss of Bohemia itself (but that’s another story)?
    And that’s why Pete Crowther invented ‘The Land at the End of the Working Day’.
    “…a small way station situated at Civilization’s End, a final resting place before plunging off into who knows what, the huge sea of uncertainty that stretches, sweeping across time zones, to infinity in any direction,” Crowther’s imaginary bar is less a place where everybody knows your name, than one where everyone intuits your soul. From bartender Jack Fedogan to Edgar Nornhoevan, both of them members of the Greek chorus of regulars who preside over “Bernard Boyce Bennington and the American Dream,” the inhabitants of Crowther’s two-story walk-down on the corner of Twenty-Third and Fifth recognize their spiritual brethren as soon as they walk in the door.
    Or maybe that door only opens to those who’ve already partaken of a Mystery. In B.B. Bennington’s case, that mystery is a Beckoning Fair One whose siren song is powerful enough to echo through Manhattan traffic and penetrate Jack Fedogan’s watering hole. This succubus’s aria ends on a high note that pierces B.B’s heart, and then some.
    Yet the greatest mystery evoked here isn’t sexual desire, but something far more evanescent and compelling in its hold upon mortal men (and women): the frisson of ecstasy that attends the handling of a pristine comic book. For some of us—me, for one, B.B. Bennington for another and, I must surmise, Peter Crowther himself—this constitutes a pure moment of being. Virginia Woolf’s marigolds wither before the experience of holding my first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (#56, July 1969, the one with Boris Karloff’s ‘Frankenstein’ on the cover; I was twelve); or, a few years earlier, the trance I’d go into as I stood before the racks of comics at Ralph’s soda fountain on Lockwood Avenue in Yonkers—the same rapture evoked by B.B. Bennington as he recalls “the smell of the primitive ink mixes and the feel of the resilient paper stocks used in the old Sparta, Illinois printing plants coupled with the almost primal feeling of holding a genuine artifact.”
    That’s the real Beckoning Fair One. The dark American Dream summoned from the pages of EC Comics has her way with Bernard Boyce Bennington, as she did for countless others in the decades before the internet offered up new demons to feast on the young. Bless Peter Crowther for opening that door at Twenty-Third and Fifth and clearing a place at the bar for those of us who, like the regulars there, need a place to prolong the reverie.
     
    —Elizabeth Hand
     

Bernard Boyce Bennington &
    The American Dream

    In a seemingly ever-changing and uncertain life that constantly veers dangerously close to the cliffside of loneliness, we cherish those few things that remain constant. And one of those is the neighborhood bar.
    You always know where you are with a neighborhood bar, even when that neighborhood is the sprawling metropolis of New York City.
    Chairs are for relaxing, beds for sleeping but there’s no place better than a bar for dreaming. And the best of them all is Jack Fedogan’s place, a two-flight walk-down on the corner of 23rd and Fifth.
    The Land at the End of the Working Day—for that’s what it’s called, this bar—could just as easily have been called the Land at the Beginning of the Working Day, but it wasn’t. The truth is, apart from the Great Unknown, Jack Fedogan’s bar—for a lot of folks—is all there is outside of the

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