Like Hemingway’s Paris, The Goodbye Blue Monday is now going to have to be something crazy that we carry within us—a light burning like the tip of a hand-rolled America Spirit.

 

 

In this café in the Mission of San Francisco, I should be working on the article that is due at midnight. But upon hearing that Bushwick’s iconic Goodbye Blue Monday has closed, this time for real, all I can do is write this eulogy.

This news hit like learning of the death of a loved one. Anyone who finds this overdramatic, clearly never understood what The Goodbye Blue Monday meant to us.

My first show in New York, my first show in the United States as an adult, was at the Goodbye Blue Monday. For me, it is hard to separate The Goodbye Blue Monday from New York, since it was a staging ground for everything that New York became for me. It was the place I met most of my friends in the city.

The Goodbye Blue Monday was not a restaurant. It was not a bar. It was a place where all the misfit toys of the world fit seamlessly in. A place free of judgment where musicians, comedians and performance artists could get on the stage for the first time and face a crowd of sympathetic smiles and applause.

On my last few trips back to New York, many fellow Bushwickians started to talk about Bushwick as people talked of Williamsburg around 2010—that gentrification was finally changing the tides that brought bohemia.

Change is inevitable. In New York change is preordained and rapid. My fingers naturally want to continue typing a lamentation, but I’m trying to tell them to stop and just be grateful. Be grateful fingers that you plucked guitar strings at the Goodbye Blue Monday, where the moveable feast was spread for almost a decade. Be grateful that for four years of that feast, you gorged.

Hemingway wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

The people met and moments made at The Goodbye Blue Monday are not going anywhere. It’s closing is a reminder that the doors to all of our lives will shut one day. Bushwick is changing, has changed and will continue to change. But the people that made it the community it was are still around.

So when I get rid of this piercing in the pit of my stomach, I hope what remains is smiling gratitude that I was part of something as reaching and real as The Goodbye Blue Monday.

Steve, thank you for pushing that first domino and opening the doors. You sir, are a legend.

To Linda, Jadon, Joe Crow Ryan, Jessica, Steve, Ryan, Matthew Silver, Andrew, Rush, Alex, Dave, J, Julianne, Tom, Buffy, Sunday and all the lovely bartenders and sound guys; to everyone involved in those hazy late night jam sessions out back where for a moment our music conquered the universe, all the poets published in Bushwick Poetry; damn I hope we miss the hell out of The Goodbye Blue Monday. I hope even decades from now, we continue to meet people who become our instant best friends when we learn that they used to drink $3 PBRs at The GBM too.

Like Hemingway’s Paris, The Goodbye Blue Monday is now going to have to be something crazy that we carry within us—a light burning like the tip of a hand-rolled American Spirit.