A Lizard, Lounging

It was October 21, 1986 and all significant others were out of town and therefore missing a momentously important birthday. Stepping into the breach were friends Bruce, Ben and Ira. They took me to the Lone Star Café on East 13th Street (on the corner of Fifth Ave.) to see Roy Orbison (or maybe Willie Nelson) and, due to an unending stream of tequila shooters, the rest is only a blur of down-home debauchery and honky-tonk good-old-boy, red-necked delirium and if they had had a mechanical bull to ride I’m sure I would have been right up there. I’m afraid I don’t remember a lot of the details or even if we did see Mr. Orbison (or Mr. Nelson), but I somehow had my glassy-eyed photo taken without a shirt and wearing a sombrero, a stupid grin on my face and a comely chickpea on each arm, so there is some proof it all happened. Evidently the whole evening was hilarious and according to my brethren I was never again as entertaining and witty and I just hope to high heaven I didn’t try to sing along. But I probably did.

The much venerated (and maligned) Lone Star Café was not only famous for being the only western bar in NYC at the time but was in a totally inappropriate residential area, and on its roof stood the fabulous Iggy, an eyesore for days and a landmark for the less artistically picky. Iggy was 40 feet from teeth to tail and he reared his superbly ugly head in defiant disregard for anything that made any sense in the world. The legend “Too Much Ain’t Enough” was emblazoned on the building’s façade at his dangerously clawed feet.

Iggy was sculpted from steel and polyurethane by Bob Wade and was originally in a “display place,” whatever that means, near Niagara Falls. In 1978 the café’s proprieter bought the sculpture for $10,000 and, according to Mr. Wade, half of that was in bar privileges. The Lone Star closed in 1989 and Iggy pretty much disappeared although I do remember seeing him for a couple of years, a dirty and crumbling image, in a field just off the West Side Highway at about Pier 25.

Now comes the good part. Iggy has been resurrected in his full glory and now sits on the roof of the new herpetarium at the Fort Worth, Texas zoo and Mr. Wade, who now lives in Austin, was there for the installation. My research does not reveal whether or not tequila shooters were included at the opening reception but, if not, they missed a bet. Iggy was (and is) not a champagne lizard, no matter how well he’s been cleaned up, and his place in low-down NYC history is secure, as he is in my own cleaned up but low-down memory.