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I used to read about the soirees hosted by Gertrude Stein in her Paris home where the guests included Hemmingway, Picasso, and Fitzgerald and wonder what it must have been like. I need not have bothered, apparently. As it turns out, I did have a brush with literary greatness but never even knew.

Back in the 1980s, when I was working as a reporter in New York, I and other budding hacks had a habit of going to a dive bar called Monteros down on the Brooklyn waterfront to get stupid. The main appeal consisted of one immutable fact: the bar was an easy stumble home to my apartment, and by the time it closed at 4 am, as the law required, this feature played prominently in my mind, assuming I was thinking of anything at all.

All this comes back to me because one of those friends from back then sent me a New York Times obituary of Pilar Montero, the doyenne of her establishment. If my memory serves, she was just the sort of a person you would expect who ran a waterfront bar in Brooklyn starting in the 1940s when her main customers were merchant seamen: tough, cranky but probably with a a heart of gold. I don't know about the heart because I never talked to her that much. I did chat up her waitresses but that was more out of habit than desire. I couldn't then and can't now actually imagine dating any of them. Like their boss, they were tough, cranky and likely had a mean right hook if provoked. I never dared find out.

Pilar and what she called her throne

The literary greatness aspect of the seedy little bar comes from the fact it was a hang out for Frank McCourt. He lived in an apartment just upstairs and noted in his book "Teacher Man" that Montero's blinking red neon sign turned his living room from "scarlet to black to scarlet." Frank may have been sitting at a table when I walked in in the wee hours, but, of course, I wouldn't have known then I was in the presence of a writer who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize. I wouldn't have asked either. Brooklyn bars aren't a place where you strike up conversations with strangers unless you want more trouble than you had before you opened your silly mouth.

So there you have it. I did, at one point, manage to lurch into what could, with some imagination, be viewed as a literary salon of sorts but never even knew. Probably would have overlooked Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, too, if they, against all odds of mortality, had been there too.  

the obit

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/nyregion/pilar-montero-bar-owner-and-link-to-brooklyns-seafaring-past-dies-at-90.html?_r=1