"Buzz Bar, Pershing Square"

Buzz Bar, E. 42nd Street at Park Avenue

Midtown Manhattan, E. 42nd Street
Buzz Bar sits inside Pershing Square like a little glass box of tourists — a holding pen for people on their way to a show, a dinner, a night out. Cocktails start at twenty bucks, which means forty for those of us who can’t have just one. It’s not a neighborhood bar, not a place with lore, but I’ve been there enough that the bartenders know me. We joke about what it would be like if this place suddenly became a nightclub, or better yet a dive bar — something with neon rot and character, like Billymark’s West before it folded.

I sit there sometimes and think about the wildest bar I ever found — somewhere near the Bowery, Chinatown-adjacent, a place so chaotic I spilled my martini out of sheer nerves and knocked the whole glass to the floor. A crash so loud everyone turned to look at me like, Who the hell is he? They forgave me. Gave me another. But I was sweating because earlier that day I’d made the mistake of eating a gummy on Canal Street that tasted too much like candy.

That gummy carried me all the way onto a Chinese bus headed to Florence, South Carolina — the second-worst bus ride of my life, rivaled only by the one from LA to SC where the bathroom was so bad you held it until Phoenix or Atlanta. Louisiana was strange. Birmingham, Alabama, surprised me — rolling hills, a beautiful train station, a city far more graceful than I ever imagined. El Paso was the only station I actually enjoyed.

But that Canal Street gummy — it hit like a trapdoor. Suddenly I couldn’t feel my feet. I thought the bus was going too fast. I thought they were taking me to a mental institution. A man kept talking to me and I begged him to stop because something in my head insisted he was racist. And when he went to the restroom, my mind took another turn — I decided he was an assassin, that when he came back I’d be his first target because I was gay. The paranoia had teeth. It reminded me of the Buffalo shooting — how violence can come from nowhere, how a stranger’s silence or chatter can suddenly feel like a threat.

In the darkness, rolling down the highway, everyone’s phone screens looked like they were lit up with the most disgusting pornography. My mind was inventing horrors.

At some stop — North Carolina, maybe Virginia — the driver made us all get off. I begged him to let me stay because I couldn’t walk, but he said no. Somehow, I managed. Hours later, I finally slept, relieved I hadn’t been institutionalized after all.

All of us, people of color — Black, Latino — standing outside a restaurant full of white folks who went quiet at that stop when they saw us. Fear in their eyes. And when you’re stoned out of your mind, there’s nothing you can do but take it. Take it like a man. Don’t break. Don’t cry.

In Florence, I ditched the gummies. Days later, I lost my wallet — cards, cash, everything. That trip was a mess. A true mess.

And now, years later, I sit at Buzz Bar on 42nd Street, sipping a martini, watching tourists, and all of it comes back — the Chinatown bar crash, the Canal Street candy, the paranoia, the bus stations, the silence of that restaurant, the long ride into the South.
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Memory is wild. It doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives.