In the early summer of l987 The Stephen Talkhouse had been closed because the current owners were in litigation with each other. Since it opened as a nightspot in l970 The Talkhouse always exemplified a hip, wild, but unpretentious place. I had always loved the Talkhouse. It was the best place to drink and the best place to meet women, especially if you weren't looking for someone who was born on third base but thought they hit a triple (not my line).
I had just given up on making it as a novelist, a quest I had pursued for about 7 years and l,700 pages. I hated the job I had. One night when I was feeling especially low the writer Clifford Irving asked me if there was ever anything else I wanted to do. I mentioned owning a bar and he suggested buying The Talkhouse. In that moment I decided to do it. It took about five days to raise the money from the original investors. They were Jerome Schneir, my father-in-law at the time, Adrienne Schwartz, my aunt-in-law at the time, her friend Robert Pinto and my new wife Marcie Schneir and I. We opened in about two weeks on or about August l, l987.
The first and smartest thing I ever did in business was to drive up to the Sea Wolf where Larry Wagner was working the door. He had done the same in my years going to the Talkhouse. He was the most consistently personable bartender I had ever met and there was no one I was more hopeful would come on board. He did, teaming up with Michael Gochenour, aka Frampton, who possessed ample amounts of southern charm and humor as well as good looks. Phillip Vega, the unflappable, ever-friendly and ever-oblivious Puerto Rican was one of my next important free agency acquisitions. I got him from the Sea Wolf, the other great bar of that era that was run by the ever distracted, but always good humored, Wolf Reiter. It was from Wolf that I briefly snagged Kevin Finnigan who had worked at the Talkhouse since the 1970s.
