Any trip to Lucy’s Cantina Royale is likely to involve witnessing a drunk, overweight 45-year old man interrupt a heated phone exchange with his wife to take an incoming call from his girlfriend, in between footing the tab for a nearby group of drunken 21-year olds, completing the well-honed stage act by stuffing a $20 bill into the bust of a scantily-clad bartender.
Avoiding the manic glazed glare of resident unlucky-in-love drunk, who, after failing on all fronts to bag himself a new bedfellow with whom to share a special 12 hours of roaring snores, our special friend simply vanishes, leaving an unpaid $160 check in his wake.
Also completing the pleasant experience at this Madison Square Garden-adjacent pre-game favorite, is the off-duty, disgruntled employee, usually female, waxing lyrical about her toxic relationship with a jerk from a bar way uptown, most definitely from a broken home, and loudly and vocally complaining about her desire for new roommates, cocaine, a tattoo, $700 hair extensions from ‘that’ place in Harlem, and, in some instances, all four.
Menus at the Mexican-themed, flamingo-faring fine establishment are tossed on tables with the love and devotion of a crack mother putting her wailing toddler down to rest, with many of the servers looking like they’ve pulled 18-hour shifts, which, if seated at the bar, you quickly learn their sleepless night was the result of a quickie with their ex, which morphed into an all-night love fest.
Sun, music and a view of the Garden lit up at night amid the banging beats of some top 40 track are about all one should expect from the well-trodden tiki bar, which functions as a half-way house for patrons in dire need of a cold drink after surviving the hell of an ongoing Macy’s sale next door, or the tourist couple searching for a crowded place in which to deflate their burgeoning post-shopping binge feud.
On one visit, I was fortunate enough to overhear the purpose of one 20-something female patron’s visit – a place to rest her toosh while waiting to be picked up by car, by a potential employer she found for an unidentified bar job on Craig’s List.
“Are you sure that’s safe? To hop in a car with a strange man you’ve never met? Why doesn’t he have an office?” responded a mildly-interested bartender upon hearing the tale of this doe-eyed New York transplant, dressed in a strapless dishrag that only just covered her recently purchased breasts.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” she responded, slurping her frozen margarita with the same rigor her alleged ‘new employer’ likely imagined he would soon be receiving on an appendage of the similarly-shaped variety, only minutes from now.
The resident drunk, smashing a beergarita downstairs while hiding from his $200 bill before stumbling his way home to enjoy an evening of porn with his estranged wife, overhears our Snow White’s impending car-bound job interview, the corners of his wicked smile curling upwards in glee.
“You do realize we’ll be responsible for identifying your dismembered limbs in a vacant lot somewhere north of the Bronx, chopped up into a thousand tiny pieces and shoved in a cheap suitcase, without so much as a shallow grave in which to rest your weary memories of your minute in New York?” he said, in a rare moment of literary elegance amid his bourbon-fueled haze.
The girl’s face turned as white as a ghost as her eyes locked with a substitute for her future potential rapist, deciding in an instant that a ‘car ride uptown’ wasn’t worth the potential evening in tips for a mysterious ‘job’ at a bar with no name.
And so she paid the check and left, leaving nothing but a sweaty bar stool in her wake.
The collective sweat of a million New York hopefuls hangs over Lucy’s Cantina like a piece of Times Square, providing tourists and locals alike with the very best and worst of New York.
‘The Ultimate Big Apple Experience,’ Lucy’s Cantina Royale is not.
But it will provide you with a lot of colorful, seedy memories – and there’s nothing skimpy about that.
