I am a citizen of the Lion's Head

The Head, back in the day.

It’s dangerous to romanticize old times and places especially when they merge into one as a bar, but some things can’t be avoided, and this is one of them.  Saying the Lion’s Head was a bar in Greenwich Village is like saying the Grand Canyon is a big ditch in the desert.  Yes, it was a bar and it was in the Village, but it was way, way more than that.  For many of us who hung out there over the 30 years it stood at 59 Christopher Street, it was a way station in life, a place where you could walk in the door and down the few steps and you were simultaneously somewhere else and someone else.  You were, as we were often called in the many stories written about it, a denizen of the Lion’s Head.

Which meant of course you went there to drink.  It was, after all, a bar and that’s how the place paid its rent and stayed in business.  Narrow and dark with a back room where you could dine on burgers and other pub fare of the day, it was filled on any given night or day, for it was a fine place for a daylight beer or cocktail, with a bunch of regulars that included politicians, writers, artists, musicians, political operatives, cops, firemen, the owners of other village bars and businesses, a few “stock brokers” as they were then called, and a smattering of small-time criminals of one sort or another.

What got me thinking about my years hanging out in the Lion’s Head, the late-60’s, 70’s, and the early 80’s, was citizenship.  It’s a subject that comes up a lot these days.  More than a few readers of this Newsletter have discussed in the comments leaving the United States and taking up citizenship elsewhere for reasons that have to do with Trumpism and what many see as a change in the nature of our country.  Reading these comments got me to thinking about what it means to be a citizen, and I’ve written about exactly that several times recently in terms of the privileges citizenship grants and the duties involved in being one.

That was when I realized that while I have been since my birth – overseas in Japan, as it happens – a citizen of the United States, I have also maintained another kind of citizenship.  Part of my identity as a man and as a writer derives from my beginnings at the Village Voice and the years I spent as a denizen of the Lion’s Head.  I was a citizen of both places, and each was more than a place, it was an idea.  The Voice, which was called “a writer’s paper” back in the day, was an idea of what a newspaper could be if its writers were as much of its purpose and driving force as its editors.  The Lion’s Head was an idea of what a bar could be if by some mix of alchemy and era its patrons were as important as its purpose, which was the serving and consumption of alcohol. 

It is said that this country was founded on an idea of liberty and equality and justice.  That’s what the history books tell us anyway, and so citizenship of this country has always meant more than being entitled to maintain a physical presence within its borders.  It has meant believing in the idea of America.  The people I have heard from who are thinking of changing their citizenship seem to be a little like the Republicans who think they aren’t leaving their party, their party has left them.  I can certainly see why people believe they haven’t changed, the country has, and so they contemplate leaving.  The idea of the country they see around them isn’t the one they grew up with, and so, like un-Trumpian Republicans, they believe they belong somewhere else.

But there are places you can’t leave, and citizenship you can’t shed merely by changing a passport or getting on an airplane.  I was a citizen of the Army in the 20-plus years before I became a writer, and I’ll never be able to change that citizenship any more than I could change my citizenship of the Village Voice or the Lion’s Head.  They weren’t just places I grew up, although I did spend a good portion of my youth there.  They were places where I became.  The years passed, and so did the old me.  I walked down those steps into the Lion’s Head and I wrote words that appeared in the pages of the Village Voice, and my name was the same but I had become someone else, a citizen not of a place, but of the idea I could be whoever I wanted to be. 

Growing up as an Army Brat, I never had a hometown or even a home state.  I never felt I “came from” a place to which I could return and feel like I was home.  When I first contemplating writing what would become my first novel, I realized that growing up in the Army, I had never developed the sense of place I had been told was the elemental strength necessary to write fiction.  We were taught that novelists like Faulkner could carry you away with their words because of the sense of place their novels evoked.  And then I sat down in the summer of 1977 in Sag Harbor to write the pile of pages that became “Dress Gray” and I discovered that rather than a sense of place, I had grown up with a sense of people.  The people I knew growing up in the Army were what had formed me, the kids and the teachers and my parents, none of them had hometowns either, none of them had a state they could return to and call home. 

But we had each other, and that was true of the Lion’s Head and the Village Voice as well.  Both have groups to which many veterans belong.  There is an email group called “The Lion’s Head List” that goes out to a motley assemblage of the people who hung out there.  On Facebook there is a “Village Voice Group” where writers and editors and office managers and members of the ad sales force gather online to swap stories and notify each other if they have a piece or a book coming out, or they’re looking for someone or working on something new.

I remember one night years ago sitting in the Lion’s Head when a friend turned to me and asked what would happen when the place closed.  Where would we go?  My answer, tossed off in the ocean of alcohol and cigarette smoke in which we swam, was amazingly prescient as I look back on it.  I told him we already had a place where we gathered together and shared our sensibilities and who we were.  It was Saturday Night Live.  That was our new Lion’s Head every Saturday night.  We knew if we “went there” on our television screens, we would run into people who were like us, with attitudes and ideas we shared, even if we hated the band or thought the host was a schmuck.  Even if we didn’t work there or attend the shows in person, we were citizens of Saturday Night Live.

We are all citizens of cyberspace these days.  That’s where our friends are, where we compare the notes of our lives and share our sensibilities and express our opinions and get to know not only each other, but ourselves.  The Lion’s Head is gone, the Village Voice is now online and only occasionally in print and Saturday Night Live fills our screens with faces we don’t recognize doing skits we often don’t find funny and bands playing music that isn’t ours.  But I’m still a citizen of all three places.  I may fear for our country, but I am a citizen of times and ideas no one can touch.

You can help me keep writing journalism like this by subscribing for $5 a month or $60 a year.