Ed Gavagan - Drowning on Sullivan Street

 

 

I came to New York with my architectural education and years of experience building houses and furniture and just enough money to open up a little wood shop in Brooklyn underneath the Manhattan Bridge. And I hired a couple of earnest wool hat wearing carpenters from Vermont and we made exquisite, one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture and we sold them one at a time for about a year until I realized that my business model wasn't really going to work. And I was actually funding a non-profit support group for Ernest Woodworkers. [audience laughter]

 

So, we used to drink at a couple of bars in the village. The first one was a run-down dive bar with black spray paint on the ceiling and a pool table. The other one was a little bit fancier, owned by an Irish guy, a firefighter, and it was a little bit nicer. And I made friends with both the guys and we'd go there and we'd drink. And one night, the owner of the dive bar was shooting pool and he's bellyaching about his lease is going to be up and he can't pay the higher rent and he's going to go out of business because none of us are going to pay more for the drinks and his life is going to be over. 

 

And a light bulb goes off in my head and I see my solution. I said to him, "You buy the wood, I will design it and build it and they will come. You will charge more money for drinks. We'll have cute chicks in here on a Friday and Saturday night. I'll work three nights a week, you work four nights a week. It's going to be a beautiful thing." He agreed, shook hands, did the deal. I built the bar. It was beautiful. Friday nights full of hot chicks, and on Sundays it was quiet. And Vinnie, the Chin, Gigante's guys would come in and sit at the end of the bar.  Very nice guys, they drank Glenfiddich in a champagne flute. [audience laughter] 

 

One of them took me aside one day and he goes, "Eddie, you know what you did here for us? You did a beautiful thing for the neighborhood. You took a cockroach and you turned it into a butterfly. You're all right." [audience laughter] I was in seventh heaven, right? I had everything I wanted. It was going great. I go to my buddy, the firefighter at his fancy bar, pick his brain, I question him on how to make my bar run well because I had never done anything like this. And my partner, he was used to running a dive bar with a pool table. So, I pick up tips from him.

 

And one night, I'm walking over to visit my friend. And I'm thinking, "I have cracked the code for New York. I've got it all figured out. As soon as the bar gets going, I'm going to have revenue stream. I'll carve my little mahogany pieces in Brooklyn. It's going to be great." So, I walked around the corner to head down to his bar. And I walked into an initiation for a gang called the Latin Kings. And they had three guys with their knives out like this and a lookout at either end of the block to move up into the upper echelons of the gang that they had this ritual they had to kill somebody. And I was the circumstantial guy coming down the block. So, I was walking and I stepped aside to let the three of them pass and they jumped on me and they started stabbing me as many times as they possibly could. And one guy had a 10-inch knife and it went in my side and up. The other guy was stabbing me on my back. And a little biographical note. When I went to college, I was at Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team. So, I did okay there. And I got one punch, one straight right to the guy in the middle. And he went down like a sack of potatoes. And the guy with the big knife was still stabbing me. And when I realized that I was being stabbed, I was a little disconcerted. I started to scream.

 

And the screaming, plus the fact that their middle guy was now down, they panicked, they started to pull him away and I started to run down the block. The problem was both my lungs were collapsed. And if you know anything about anatomy, my inferior vena cava was cut, which is basically a garden hose sized vein that brings all your blood back to your heart. So, I'm running down the block to Arturo's. This is on Thompson between Bleecker and Houston. I'm screaming my head off and all the little Italian ladies on Thompson Street, call 911. Arturo's waitresses come looking out and I go down to my knees and I start to crawl and my lungs are filling up with blood from my injuries.

 

And I roll over on my back and I think that things are going very badly for me at this time. And my vision goes down to little pinpoints and I had to move my head to see who was looking down at me. And everybody's just in complete panic. And I realize how bad it is and I just feel like there's no way anybody's going to be able to help me. I know that it's bad and I'm going. And this being New York City garbage truck pulls up. And off the back of the garbage truck jumps one of the guys who happens to be a Vietnam vet. He hears what's happened. He comes over. He stands over me, picks me up by the front of my shirt, and he starts to smack me. And he goes, "Don't you [beep sound] die on me." And he goes into his flashback, [audience chuckle] and I start to wake up, and the pain was intense enough to give me a little boost.

 

And I look at him and I go, "Please, you're hurting me. Can you stop?" [audience laughter] But the blood now is coming out of my mouth. And then the ambulance pulls up. And I'll never forget, the ambulance comes up, and the first guy out of the ambulance is a very tall, slender black guy with little dreadlocks, little two-inch dreads coming. And he looks down at me and everyone's telling him what happened. And I'm looking up at him, and he grabs me by the chin and he said, "This is going to hurt." And I said, "Okay." [audience laughter] And he takes his scissors and he starts to cut my clothes off. And I remembered I had a really nice cashmere sweater on. And I said, "You have to cut the sweater." [audience chuckle] And he stuck an adrenaline needle in my neck. And he looks back at his partner and he goes, "Why do they always say that?" [audience laughter] In the back of my mind, I knew for the first time that he'd done this before and that maybe I was going to be okay because he knew exactly what he was doing. 

 

So, they took all my clothing off my torso, and he lifted up my arm and he sliced me open under between my ribs. And he shoved a tube between my ribs into my lung. And that hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt. And I came up off the sidewalk and he pushed me down. He goes, "Oh, we got to do the other side." [audience aww] So, he lifts my arm up and he sliced me open. He shoved another tube in, which hurt equally as bad. And the good part about that is that all my blood was now draining onto the sidewalk so I could breathe. They put me in the ambulance, they bring me to the hospital. The surgeons are ready. I was in surgery. It took them about 10 hours to open me up, take all my organs out, like unpacking a suitcase, check everything, and then I lost organs I didn't know that I had. He took about 12 feet of my intestines out, stitched me all back up, put it in. I'm out at this point.

 

And I wake up the next morning on life support. I've got tubes up my nose. I got tubes out my lungs. I've got a catheter, I've got morphine drip. I've mean, just punctured through and through. And at the end of my bed are two homicide detectives. And the surgeon and the homicide and everyone is so sure that I'm going to die, that homicide has the case, right? [audience laughter] And what they say to me is, "You know, we caught those guys, and the DA will be here in a little while. And you don't have to talk. We'll just tell you what's up, and you can agree and put a little X on the form, and we'll--" And they thought I was going to die. Like, nobody thought I would make it.

 

And they were so sure that I wouldn't live through the surgery the next 48 hours with the infection, nobody thought I was going to make it. And the detective says, "You know, we recovered the knives. And I have never seen anybody get hit with the kind of knives you got hit with, buddy. What do you eat?" [audience chuckle] And I said, "Goodness." And that seemed to satisfy them. And I became basically a mascot in the Sixth Precinct for not dying. And then my dad and mom flew out, and they stood at the end of my bed. And while they were divorced, they argued [audience chuckle] but anyway, they were happy that I was alive. And then my dad went to the bar that night and met everybody. And he came in the next morning and he goes, "Eddie, you know what? I got an envelope here, and this man came up to me last night, and he goes, 'Is it the case that you're the father of Edward Gavigan?'" My dad's like, "Yeah." And he goes, "Would you please come here? I'll tell you something." And he goes, "Mr. Gavigan, there was a time when those punks wouldn't have made it off the block. But those times are gone, and we'd like to apologize. Here's a card for your son." And I opened the card. It was full of money, and it was the cheesiest Hallmark card you could ever see, signed by the boys of Sullivan Street, the mafia. [audience chuckle]

 

So, I get out of the hospital, come off life support, and when I get off life support, I'm released under this special program they have for people with no insurance which when they find out you don't have insurance, they give you a bottle of Percocet, a cane and push you out the door. [laughter and applause] So, I ended up at home. My girlfriend at the time is completely distraught. She hates New York. I can't go to sleep because every time I try and sleep, the movie starts, and the stabbing and the horror. And so, she wants to leave New York. And I say, "I'm not going to leave New York. I'm not leaving." She's like, "Well, I'm going to leave. If you don't leave, I'm leaving you. Okay, got to go. Bye." So, at this point, then, everything is bad. Like, I have behind on all of my bills because I had expended every ounce of credit. I'd borrowed money, I'd maxed my credit cards, everything to open this bar. I was behind on the rent when I went into the hospital. And now I'm getting calls, right? the creditors every morning. And yet I'm so happy to be alive. 

 

So, I walk down the street and I look at a flower, and it'll be singing, and I'll be like, "I'm so happy to be here every minute." I'm just overjoyed. And yet my life is [beep sound] because every day it's like-- until the phone got cut off, and the landlord has padlocked my shop in Brooklyn [audience chuckle] because he wants to make sure he can keep my tools to sell when I don't pay the rent and I get the eviction notice. And my folks say, "We're not going to help you stay in that horrible city there back in Wyoming where I grew up." And they said, "If you come back here, we'll buy you a pickup truck and you can get better and just build houses here--. It's a horrible city."

 

And I said, "No, actually, I don't like the strings you're attaching to the help. And so, I'm not leaving, and I'll be here. Thank you." And I talked to my partner at the bar, and I said, "You know, what about the money? Is there any money?" And he said, "Well, business is hard. Expenses are high." And I thought to myself, "Wow, Okay." And then I came home one day, and all my possessions were in plastic garbage bags on the sidewalk. And I was evicted, and homeless guys were picking through my stuff and carrying it off. And I was like, "Go ahead. I got no place to go." And so, I called this cute Canadian bartender that we had at the bar. She was a poet. And I said, "Can I sleep on your couch?" So, she agreed. And so, I went to sleep on her couch. And I was getting more and more angry at the world, and I would alternate with "I'm so lucky to be alive." And then my medical problems were so horrible, but I had no money to do anything. I couldn't even ride the subway.

 

And I then have these moments where I'd look at a doorknob and think of all the lives that had come and opened that doorknob and how exquisite everything was. And then I thought, "All those guys that are sitting rocking in the corner in the mental institutions, this is what every day is like for them." And I press it down and keep going. And then one day I was like, "You know what? That bar, that's got to be making something." And I went in. It was late Saturday night. And I go in and I go through the books. Turns out my partner had renegotiated our deal until I could work the three nights a week. I was a zero percent partner. And the bar had actually been doing really well. And I went berserk. 

 

So, I started to bust up the joint and take out all the beautiful things that I'd made and smash everything I could get my hands on. And the manager called 911 and the Sixth Precinct came to arrest me, put me in handcuffs and bring me back to the station house. And on my way in the door, who do I see but the detective? And he's like, "Eddie, what the-- take the cuffs off of him. What do you want in your coffee? Sit down. Get him a sandwich. Come here. Sit down." [audience chuckle] They fingerprint me, and in comes the phone call from my partner. And I did say I was going to kill him. So, he said to them that he needed an order of protection.

 

And so, the detective says to me, "You know what you got to do? You give that guy the ultimatum, you won't kill him. He gives you a check." He goes, "The bigger the check, the sooner you forget who he is." [audience chuckle] It was great advice. Got a check, was able to get some therapy, go back to the doctor for the first time, get some medication. Found out how to deal with everything. Married the Canadian poet bartender. [cheers and applause] And my brother calls me from Wyoming and he says, "You know, Eddie, how come you never left? Like, you didn't have anything going on? What kept you there?" And I said, "You know, you can almost die anywhere in the world, but this city saved my life."