IN THE MAGAZINE

PLEASE SNORT ME - PART 3

An Oral History of Brooklyn's Most Notorious Bar

THE COMEDOWN

JERRY P: Eventually they refurbished the coke closet. When we first started going it was the size of a phone booth, but then they put up some drywall to double the size. And they had a bouncer stand outside the booth to regulate how many people were in there at a time. There would be a line around the side of the room waiting to go into the coke closet, and if they caught you doing coke outside of the coke closet they’d kick you out immediately.

ANN G: One night I was in the booth and this Dominican guy was giving me bumps off his key. People were usually pretty nice about sharing. We were chatting and he said that he was the brother-in-law of the owner. I tend to be a real lighter klepto, like I’m always pocketing people’s lighters and whatnot just absent-mindedly, and I guess I pocketed his key ring. I got home that night (or morning, technically) and when I dumped out my pockets there was this huge ring with like 20 keys and a million dangling key-chain doodads. I was scared. That guy was scary! I shame-spiraled into a total coke depression. Those keys symbolized everything that was wrong in my life and I wanted to keep them as a reminder. I never returned the keys and I never went back to Kokie’s again.

MARIA S: My friend and I met this group of greasy leather-and-chains-clad biker dudes one night at Kokie’s and they invited us back to their clubhouse someplace in bumblefuck Brooklyn. Their place was a garage in the front and a rec room with a bar in the back. It was decked out in pink balloons and streamers for a baby shower that was happening the next day. One of the dudes kept going around with a paper plate and a switchblade, giving us bumps off the tip. The sun was starting to come up and we were about to call a car and the guy asked if we wanted one for the road. Sure! Why not? So he cuts up a new batch and comes around with the knife, bump bump. I began to sweat. I mean, profusely, like I needed a towel. As I headed toward the door to get some fresh air I saw one of my friends hunched over the toilet barfing. I could barely walk. I found a stoop in the sun and plopped down. I remember this incredible, warm, peaceful wave go through me as if all was right in the world and I didn’t care about anything. We cabbed home during morning rush hour. Traffic was backed up on the Williamsburg Bridge and every time the cab stopped we would open the car door to puke. We spent the rest of the day tag-team vomiting into my friend’s toilet. We were so out of our heads that it took us hours before we realized that the biker dudes had slipped us heroin.

LUCY P: One time we were all kicked out in the morning and it was very bright and no one wanted to go home. Some people said there was a party at their apartment. So everybody (20 or so people at least, mostly total strangers) tromped over to an industrial building through this maze-like series of corridors to find the apartment with the party. Well, a party it sure as hell wasn’t. No booze. Just some lame band practicing. Not playing. Not a show. Band practice. And a whole bunch of really disappointed, hopped-up goofballs watching them. No one knew how to get out but it was clear within minutes that it had to be done. I found a door down some corridor and went back and led the people out. The thing here was the total abuse of goodwill. Man, you just don’t abuse that trust. If there’s no party at your apartment, that’s fine, but don’t tell people your idiot roommate and his idiot bandmates are a goddamned party.

JERRY P: My roommate and I started talking to these two people one night: Tony, a 35-year-old Latino man, and Adrian, a 38-year-old black woman. Adrian was a dental technician and Tony was a marine who was on leave. It got late and I invited them back to my house. And it was far, all the way out in Greenpoint. We got to our tiny, railroad apartment and my roommate immediately freaked out and went to bed, but of course he couldn’t sleep because he was all coked up. He told me that he sat on his bed listening to us all night. Tony and I argued about who the best rapper of all time was for about an hour. He thought it was KRS-One and I thought it was Biggie. Adrian didn’t really say much. Toward the end of it, when I started to get really weirded out, Tony was telling me that he could see my aura. He was like, “Man, it’s all about auras, man”, so I finally kicked them out around dawn. We were standing on the front steps, squinting in the sun, like, “Yeah, great meeting you guys, bye!” Stuff like that happened all the time. I shiver just thinking about it.


THE BUBBLE BURSTS

BRIAN F: In 2001 Kokie’s became the official hipster cocaine vending machine. They started to pander to the crowd. The place closed down for a week and reopened up with, like, mod Ikea gear and neon lightning bolts everywhere.

JERRY P: Yeah, the final milestone before it died was that they painted these lame tropical murals on the walls. You’d walk in and be like, “What the fuck?” It was so weird, they wanted to jack it up and make it nice, but it was so out of touch with their new clientele.

JUDY W: Sometime toward the end of the era, a guy who worked there invited me to a party at a new place that the Kokie’s owners were opening up. I think it was on Broadway and it had Trinidadian dance vibes. He gave us cards for it. They were glossy and had color photo of chicks in bikinis on them.

GARY J: Around this time, someone went on the internet and wrote, “Oh man, it’s like Amsterdam in Williamsburg! It’s awesome!” And that was the beginning of the end.

RICK P: The final nail in the coffin came when the local precinct got a new police captain who had come straight from doing narcotics and vice work. She wasn’t having a coke bar in her precinct. They busted the place a few times and that’s pretty much the end of the story. They went out of business. They couldn’t conduct his trade anymore.

GARY J: I worked at the Antique Lounge, which is what Kokie’s became after it went out of business. The owner told me that he found bullets in the walls when he gutted it out.

SUSAN S: I own The Levee, the bar that opened after the Antique Lounge closed. I think business was pretty bad for the Antique Lounge. People thought it was still the same owners as Kokie’s so they had a hard time drawing a new crowd. People still come in to this day and talk about how they miss Kokie’s. There are so many different stories about Kokie’s that at this point it’s kind of a local legend. A few of the door guys who had worked there come in and play pool sometimes. They’re really sweet. One of them brought his dad in to show him where he used to work. We’ve really had to work hard to shake off the coke stigma.

JEFF JENSEN: Kokie’s has a huge place in Brooklyn’s history. I would also like to submit that the genre of electroclash was officially started at Kokie’s. I can prove it because I was there. In the early days, there was a janitor who worked at Kokie’s who was from Saskatoon and claimed that he had seen Bigfoot. Me and Casey Spooner used to laugh like crazy over his Bigfoot stories. That’s what gave Casey the idea to start Sasquatch, his Bigfoot-themed band that eventually became Fischerspooner.

MEG SNEED: Kokie’s and electroclash. That’s all I remember about 2001.


COMPILED BY VICE STAFF

Do you have a fond Kokie's memory of your own? Please do tell us in the comments section below.

PLEASE SNORT ME | 1 | 2 | 3 |

Comments

Anonymous, on Apr 26, 2009 wrote: Man, we were just talking about Kokie’s and how much we missed it. I remember a New Year’s eve I spent there. Maybe 98 or 99. The weirdest scene I’ve ever seen. Super bright lights, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews, and us. And as much terrible coke as you could handle. It was the best New Year’s I’ve had in NYC. There was another similar place in Bushwick until a few years ago. (I’m not saying the name.) Seems like that’s gone too. There’s no real sleaze left in the city.

Anonymous, on Apr 21, 2009 wrote: Nothing much to add, but I enjoyed spending that "quality time" with 1 or 2 wonderful older Puerto Rican ladies in the booths the few times I was there. They were almost maternal as we took turns with the keys.

Anonymous, on Apr 20, 2009 wrote: i still buy my coke on berry and hang out at levee all night.

Anonymous, on Mar 20, 2009 wrote: I was

Anonymous, on Mar 1, 2009 wrote: Kokies as the shit....and the coke was shitty, but it was always better than nothing. PLus they had ice cold Heinekins. The biker club on South 6th was the Road Tramps, not the Road Sores. I lived next door and they beat up my roomate for peing on the street.