PLEASE SNORT ME - PART 2

An Oral History of Brooklyn's Most Notorious Bar

THE SNOWY HEYDAY

JERRY P: Kokie’s went through a series of changes after I started going there in ’99. You could tell how long somebody had been a regular based on whether or not they were familiar with certain milestones. When I first started going, they had a live salsa band in the corner on certain nights.

BRIAN F: Wednesday night, I think, was salsa night. Man, it was decked out. They had a huge band in there—vibes, percussion, everything. It filled up the entire back room. An old man in brown pants would be dancing with some hot mama with a flower in her hair. It felt like being in Cuba in the 50s or something. I felt like Henry Miller.

JUDY W: They had karaoke nights there too, but they started at 6 PM and ended by 10 so we never got there in time to do it. The karaoke setup looked like an AV unit that was stolen from a high school or something.

JERRY P: Eventually they fazed out the band and got a jukebox. But it was still pretty decrepit. Just dark, dingy, walls and little yellow lightbulbs. It was all empty and weird on weeknights. I loved the shittiness of it.

SHARKEY FAVORITE: One night in 1999 I was at Kokie’s and I was wearing this scarf that my girlfriend had spent two months knitting and had just given to me that day. Well, of course, within a couple of hours of running around Kokie’s like an idiot, the scarf was gone. I spent the whole night looking for it and complaining about how she was gonna kill me for losing the thing. When it finally came time to face the music, sure enough, she was pissed. I followed her around the apartment, apologizing over and over again. She looked at me and said, “You just don’t get it,” and left. I glanced at the clock. It was 2 PM. I had no idea I’d just spent 13 hours at Kokie’s. It was a time vacuum and it made me a bad boyfriend.

MEG SNEED: The windows were blacked out in the front and there were no windows at all in the back—you had no sense of time or reality.

LORI A: Nothing good ever happened to me at Kokie’s. I’d only go there when I was already too drunk and it was 3:30 AM and someone would inevitably shout, “I know! Let’s go to Kokie’s!” The next thing I knew I’d be back in that curtained booth doing the worst coke in the world until well past dawn.

JERRY P: The coke was stepped on like crazy. I think it was cut with meth, because it lasted so fucking long. I personally didn’t mind it.

BRIAN F: It was convenient living nearby because the coke was so awful. As soon as I did a bump I would run home, shit my brains out, and then come back refreshed and ready for more.

MEG SNEED: The coke there was pretty bad, true, but it was such a pleasant place to be. A real positive atmosphere and community feeling. I even thought about hanging out there without drugs once or twice. Of course I never did.

LUCY P: I don’t know if I ever talked to anybody there who I didn’t know, but I felt as though I could’ve. And it wasn’t just the drugs. There was a sense that everybody was there to enjoy some sort of desperate eked-out freedom. As though a line had been crossed into comity. You know, the purity of purpose people shared.

STEVE L: The first time I walked in there, I could see that all the action was in the disco room, where a crowd of mostly middle-aged Puerto Rican mamis were dancing around to what sounded like electro-Merengue. One of them, in a hot-peach tube top, bleached cut-offs, and espadrilles dragged me out on the floor to get down with her. I must have pranced with every orange-haired lady in the place.

STUART McCLENNAN: Kokie’s usually came alive around 3AM. It always looked so dead from the outside but then inside it was packed with people partying like extras in an 80s party movie. The crowd was about 75 percent Puerto Ricans dancing the mamba or whatever with perfect precision and 25 percent college kids grinding their jaws and doing a jittery hip-hop version of the mamba in a futile attempt to blend in.

VALENTINA A: I’d never heard of Kokie’s until early 2000. I was walking with my boyfriend who had just moved to Williamsburg. It was late, maybe 2 AM, and as we walked by Kokie’s I heard a psychedelic 70s Colombian salsa song that I love— not the kind of song that you normally hear coming from some dive bar in Brooklyn. I had no idea what kind of place Kokie’s was. The door was locked, so we waited for a minute and when this hipster girl went in, we scooted in with her. I was hoping to find a crazy dance party, but instead there were a bunch of very white kids sitting at tables and not doing much of anything. We ordered beers and I soon realized that everyone serving at the bar was Colombian. I started talking to them about Colombia, one thing led to another, and this bartender named Nora ended up giving me a bunch of coke for free!

STUART McCLENNAN: You bought coke from this guy who stood in a fucking closet in the back room. It was $20 a bag, right? If you had a mustache he would say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about” at which point you’d have to give your $20 to a girl and have her do it.

JERRY P: I remember they wouldn’t serve [singer of a then-popular band] because he had this big, goofy mustache and he looked like a policeman. He asked me if I would cop for him, and I said no. I didn’t want them to see me getting drugs for the guy they didn’t want to serve. I was like, “Sorry dude, serves you right for looking like that.”

MEG SNEED: In the early Kokie’s stages, you couldn’t just walk in and buy the coke right away. You had to sit in the bar area in the front and buy a drink. The drinks were tiny. They had these mini Budweisers that looked like baby bottles. One time I ordered a vodka with orange juice and they gave it to me in a Dixie cup.

LESLIE R: It wasn’t so hard to figure out how to buy the coke. I just went up to some college kid who seemed high and asked, “How is it done here?” He pointed to a booth in the corner. It was like a little closet. I walked over there with a $20 and stuck out my hand. The guy took the $20 and handed me a bag. Boom. Finished.

STUART McCLENNAN: The first time I went there I had no idea how to go about scoring the coke. I notices a curtained off booth in the corner. That was where people go to do their bumps after buying it. But I didn’t know that and after watching about a dozen people go into the closet and come out sniffing, I was sure that was where to go buy the coke. I ducked in behind the curtain and there was nobody there. Doye. There was, however, a big hole in the wall that had pipes running through it. I figured the dealer was behind that hole so I stuck my hand in with $20 and waved it around. “Just a twenty-bag, thanks,” I said. Nothing. Maybe he was taking a break or something. So I wedged my head in the hole and said, “Psst. Hey … you there?” How Mr. Bean Goes to Kokie’s is that?

STEVE L: I’d heard about the infamous tooting area and headed over expecting to see a dimly-lit gauntlet of art hipsters (this was just before the swarms hit Williamsburg), gang-bangers, and mamis all giggling and snorting together. Instead, I threw back the curtain and saw an orange-haired older lady, bent over like Betty Boop, enthusiastically blowing a British painter of my remote acquaintance. I said howdy, did three bumps, and went back to join the dance party.


TO BE CONTINUED
PLEASE SNORT ME | 1 | 2 | 3 |


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