MANNERS Fifth Avenue Cowboys

Five minutes ago I was sweating and swaying on the EE train, watching white tile subway stops flash into view outside the window. Now I am shivering and soaking, debating whether I should find a cab to get me out of the downpour that has already turned my new suit into a three-piece dishrag. Only in New York, I tell myself.

I am one of those people who do not like New York. There are millions of us. We live in Lima and Vladivostok, Sydney and Sharm el Sheik. We are Buddhist and Baptist; we follow every creed. And, with no exceptions, we do not like the culture shock of visiting New York. I happen to have 32 years’ experience at being a Texan. I put two syllables in words like “nail” and “train.” That never makes it any easier for me when necessity dictates that I spend time in Manhattan. I consider New York to be an unavoidable unpleasantness, like appendicitis or an afternoon at H.&R. Block.

Now I am standing on a curb on Fifth Avenue, consuming myself with schemes to get warm and dry. I have already dismissed the idea of running from doorway to doorway, in memory of a man I read about in the Daily News the day before. A nice, middle-class man, not unlike myself, he made the mistake of walking into a dark area on 53rd Street, just off Avenue of the Americas. A mugger summarily stabbed him to death before going through his pockets.

I decide to accept my fate in the rain, sloshing along, wondering how much my shoes will shrink but taking solace in the fact that I am as wet as I am going to get.

Finally my soggy sojourn is at end: I have reached the Lone Star Cafe. The Mecca of Texas chic. Home away from home. Especially on a rainy night.

1 never expected the Lone Star Cafe to be worth a 1300-mile voyage by plane, cab, and subway, but it certainly seemed like a place every Texan should try if he’s in New York anyway. After all, the place has been written about in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. If the press clippings and rumors can be believed, this is the hangout for every important Texas expatriate from Larry L. King to Ramsey Clark. Everybody knows the cast of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas practically lives at the Lone Star Cafe. This place is the self-declared, quintessential honky tonk, your bigger-than-life beer joint, more Texan than anything on the Jacksboro Highway in Fort Worth or Industrial Boulevard in Dallas. At least that’s how the budding legend goes.

That image had particular appeal for me, since like most young men who grew up in Texas, I spent my formative years in beer joints. Those were the days before Texas chic. When I was growing up in Waco, there was no such thing as a “Country and Western” bar. A place with an overabundance of Tammy Wynette records on the juke box, a crowd of truck drivers and cowboys at every table, and a small cadre of bleached blond barmaids with beehive hairdos was simply called a “bar.” You didn’t go there to soak up Texana, just beer. We hated those bars but went regularly because we were young enough to feel privileged to be allowed inside any place with a liquor license. We drank Lone Star beer not because it was the dietary staple of Willie Nelson (a man we’d not yet heard of), but because the only other choices were Pearl and Grand Prize. We knew that there were places where you could drink Budweiser and listen to rock ’n’ roll, but not in Waco. So we tolerated Tammy and sipped our Lone Star, satisfied that we were having as good a time as one could have in Central Texas in the mid-Sixties.

Funny how 10 or 15 years can create nostalgia for something you never liked in the first place. Now I’m as big a follower of Texas chic as anyone. When I look back at my boyhood, I picture myself sitting in those honky tonks, chewing a match and dipping snuff (which I’ve never tried), looking like an extra in the cast of Hud. Everyone likes the idea of being avant-garde by birthright.

And so, sight unseen, the Lone Star Cafe had special appeal for me: In the capital of Eastern snobbery thrives a club selling Texana by the bottle. This place must be either a haven for displaced Tex-ans, the Ellis Island of honky tonks, or else some strange sociological phenomenon has caused New Yorkers to start thinking fondly of Texas culture. Either way, I have to see for myself. It has to be worth walking a few blocks in the rain.

But there is a misunderstanding before I even get in the door. I’m not sure if it’s my misunderstanding or the Lone Star Cafe’s. On the roof of this small brownstone building – directly across from the New School for Social Research and the Parsons School of Design – is a 40-foot-long Styrofoam iguana. Wonder if they meant for that to be an armadillo? Already I’m getting picky. Just because the only iguanas found in Texas are inside zoos is no reason to prejudge the management.

As I go inside the cafe, the discrepancies start to add up. A sign proclaims the place to be the best honky tonk “north of Abilene.” (They probably mean Amaril-lo.) And there’s the matter of the $6 cover charge. The only time anyone had the audacity to levy a cover charge at one of my home-town honky tonks was when the traveling stripper came through town, and the sheriff broke that up. Someone in the small line that is queuing up in the rain tells me that the Lone Star Cafe has live entertainment – and a cover charge – every night.

Inside the door a woman in a burnt-orange “Lone Star Cafe” T-shirt is taking money and handing out tickets while talking into a telephone receiver lodged between her chin and shoulder.

“Look, mister,” she says in thick Brooklyn tones, “a reservation only means that we guarantee you a seat. It doesn’t guarantee you a table.”

I can see why. It’s 9 p.m., extremely early by New York standards, and the place is already packed with bodies. I am lucky. A waitress leads me to the back of the building, around a corner from the bandstand, where I will share a table with two other people. Not bad for Tuesday night, 1 learn later. The building looks designed to seat 200, and there are easily 400 people inside tonight.

The waitresses who are squeezing through the crowd dispensing $2 bottles of Lone Star and Shiner are not from the same mold as waitresses in Waco. They are not obese, nor do they have visible tatoos. These are size-9 women in size-7 Calvin Klein jeans, just like the barmaids on Greenville Avenue.

A lot of things at the Lone Star Cafe look more Greenville Avenue than honky tonk. The crowd is young and affluent-looking (a college campus is only a few blocks south). There is a scattering of men in “disco” shirts and an equal number of women in slitted designer dresses. A handful of women affect the Annie Hall look. Not your Texas beer-joint crowd. The only cowboy hat in sight is worn by a tall, slender black man who is also wearing a silver earring.

I share a table with two young students from Connecticut College, both of whom feel called upon to shake my hand.

“So who’s the headliner tonight?” I ask my companions. “Willie? Waylon?” (A drawing on the back of the menu shows Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings crowded into the cafe, along with Dolly Parton, Jerry Jeff Walker, Johnny Cash, Larry Mahan, and a cast of lesser country stars.)

The Lone Star Cafe, it turns out, does not book country entertainment every night. Tonight the headliner is Richie Havens, preceeded by a group called the Ravens. Two minutes into the Ravens’ first song, it becomes obvious the term “entertainment” has to be stretched quite a bit to include them. They are awful. Very few members of the crowd stop talking when the Ravens sing. This does not seem to bother the lead singer, who alternately moans and shouts into the microphone, occasionally clapping his hands in the futile hope that the audience will follow suit.

I content myself by reading the menu, which includes guacamole, tacos, barbecued ribs, and an assortment of drinks including something called a “Neiman Marcus,” a mixture of champagne and fruit juices. Lone Star, Pearl, and Shiner are available at $2 per longneck. There are a lot of things never found in a honky tonk. Aperitifs. Liqueurs. Chivas Regal. Bolla Valpolicella. If I had ever summoned the courage to ask one of the barmaids back in Waco for an aperitif, I’m certain she would have had the bouncer throw me out. I decide to try the Texas-style hamburger, which arrives on a Kosher-style bun and is not even greasy. What a disappointment.

“What’s it like when there’s a Country and Western band in here?” I ask my young companions.

“I dunno,” says one. “I’ve never been in here for anything except rock ’n’ roll or folk music.”

“I bet you expected this place to be overflowing with people from Texas,” says my other companion.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say rather defensively. “I guess I did expect not to be the only Texan in the place.”

“I’m sure you’re not,” says one of the Connecticut Yankees in an almost consoling tone. “You Figure there have to be three, four hundred people in here. Any time you get that many people together in New York, there’s gotta be at least two of everything.”

A tall young woman in skin-tight jeans, high-heeled shoes, and a sequined shirt that says “Boogie” across the bustline begins berating the man in the cowboy hat – a Lone Star Cafe employee – about the fact that she can’t see the stage.

“We paid $6 apiece,” she says. “We got here two hours early to get a front row table. Now all these bastards who came in late have crowded around the stage where we won’t be able to see Richie. We want our money back or else we want you to tell all those people to sit down.”

The man tries to appease her. “Look lady,” he says. “Everybody in this building paid $6 to get in here. Everybody’s got as much right to see as everybody else.”

She storms out, furious.

A group of newcomers arrives and squeezes into a table behind us. It’s located just beneath the Lone Star, Texas, city limits sign that a group of Texans stole and brought to New York.

“So what the hell is Lone Star Beer?” one customer asks. “Sucks,” his companion snaps. They order Rolling Rock. One of them wonders aloud what all this Texas bullshit is supposed to mean. I have similar thoughts.

But I resolve to come back and talk to the Lone Star Cafe’s head Texan, who turns out to be Mort Cooperman, native New Yorker and former public relations man. He is dark and fortyish. When we meet, he is wearing a two-day beard and a cowboy hat that looks like it might have been Preston Smith’s before somebody sat on it. He wears glasses so thick that it is difficult to see his eyes.

“I know this place is not a Texas bar,” Cooperman tells me as we sit at one of his tables. “Nobody is trying to say that this is just like Texas. If this were just like Texas, we’d never get any New Yorkers in here.”

The bar is intended to be a combination of New York and Texas, Cooperman tells me. But mainly, it is intended to be a successful bar. It is obviously that.

“How did you get the Texas idea?” I ask. “You’re not from Texas. Who’s from Texas around here?”

“Hey,” says Cooperman. “We have a lot of Texas people in here all the time. There are thousands of Texans in and around New York. This place helps them come out of the closet.”

In between telling me that people like Dan Rather and Hughes Rudd and Michael Murphy periodically show up, Cooperman tells me of his own Texas background: He was through Dallas once on business.

As our conversation evolves, I find that Cooperman and I have one thing in common. We both grew up hating country music.

“I guess the idea for this place snapped several years ago when I was driving out to Connecticut on business,” Cooperman says. “1 had a terrible hangover. My head was pounding. I wanted to create some other pain to get my mind off it. So I decided to turn on WHN [a country-oriented radio station]. I was shocked at what I heard. The music was really good. The lyrics really had something to say.”

That sounded as rational to me as anything else I’d heard in New York.

Cooperman contends that it was only a matter of time before he and partner Bill Dick, also a non-Texan, decided to open an Austin-sound country music bar in the heart of New York. They knew it would, at least, be different. They try to get country music when they can. (To their credit, they do book acts like Hank Williams Jr. and the Belamy Brothers.) But most of all they obviously try to be “in.”

“This is just a place where a lot of craziness happens,” Cooperman tells me. “Hey, we had Bette Midler and Delbert McClinton up on our stage the other night in a pie fight. The Blues Brothers tried out their act here before they decided to do it on ’Saturday Night Live.’ John Belushi comes in here from time to time. We had him on stage one time spitting beer on the audience. People in the balcony were pouring beer down on him. Everybody really loved it. You never know what is going to happen in here.”

What, I wonder, does all that have to do with a Texas honky tonk?

“All we’re trying to do in here is promote a loosey goosey type of atmosphere. . . like the type of atmosphere you find in Texas. This is a Texas movie, okay?”

Right.

Soon Cooperman is telling me that he plans to open an entire art museum, a sort of Styrofoam tribute to the Lone Star State, I guess. Too bad I won’t be there to see it.

Finally I am able to pry myself away from Cooperman’s sales pitch. I leave convinced of something I should have known before I came: You just can’t find a genuine honky tonk anymore. Especially in New York.