‘Sunny’s Nights’ review: Tim Sultan visits an odd Brooklyn bar

So, a man walks into a bar. In the winter of 1995, Tim Sultan found himself in Brooklyn’s scrappy Red Hook neighborhood after a wrong turn. The waterfront district is cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the BQE, and its forlorn isolation intrigued him. So did the no-name watering hole Sultan went to after he parked his car to take a look around.

It’s known as Sunny’s, and it’s still there, gussied up now and refurbished after Sandy nearly wrecked it. But back then, way before there was any artisanal upmarket anything in Red Hook, Sunny’s operated almost like a speakeasy. It was only open on Fridays; it had no liquor license and basically winged it. The place attracted a die-hard clientele that came as much for the camaraderie as for the rhetorical stylings of its eponymous proprietor, Sunny Balzano.

A neighborhood lifer born nearby, Balzano had a “thousand ways to make a person feel like a million bucks,” Sultan writes in his bittersweet memoir, “Sunny’s Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World.” Balzano loved artists and art house cinema. In a world of fakers and poseurs, he was a legit bohemian, “equally at home speaking Beckettese and Brooklynese,” as Sultan observes one evening after Balzano began declaiming a monologue from “Waiting for Godot.” Descended from Italian immigrants, he did not care one wit for money and didn’t even have a bank account. He liked to tell people “This isn’t my bar any more than it’s anyone else’s bar. It don’t belong to me. It belongs to each of you who have come here and have served to make it what it is that it is. It’s our bar, aye?”

Sultan went from patron to employee. Son of a career foreign service officer always on the move, the then 27-year-old author, uneasily working a 9-5 at a Manhattan magazine, was looking for a place to fit in. He found it at Sunny’s. Balzano affectionately calls him “Timmy,” and tantalizes Sultan with tales of his family and lore from a neighborhood that had fallen on hard times, known for its forbidding housing projects and rundown warehouses.

You can’t write this kind of thing without being compared to Joseph Mitchell, the mid-20th century New Yorker magazine writer who haunted the New York waterfront and made a specialty of befriending souls like Balzano. Sultan mentions his forebear, but is a confident, engaging enough writer that he makes the material his own. Lost youth, a vanishing New York, the purpose of work: Sultan ponders these vexing matters, even if he sometimes falls into the New York-was-better-when-it-was-worse trap. He does not care much for Mike Bloomberg’s vision of the city as luxury experience.

Sultan’s love of Red Hook shines through, and it’s hard not to be swept along on the ebb and flow of his emotions. Of late-night swims with pals, he writes: “I would never feel more a part of New York than when I was drifting in its harbor and looking at its lights — the shore lights, the skyscraper lights, the bridge lights, the ferry lights, the moonlight above, the phosphorous lights below, and us out in the middle of it all, bobbing corpuscles in the city’s bloodstream.” Such scenes made this middle-aged reviewer pine for his own youthful days exploring the city.

It could not last. Sultan’s book is, among other things, a meditation on the fragility of the moment and the passage of time. Balzano battles health problems and nitpicky bureaucrats who want the bar to operate on the up and up. Sultan grows estranged from Red Hook as it becomes cool. This is life in 21st century New York. Wistful, funny and biting, “Sunny’s Nights” rewards you with its evocation of a certain place in time and, as Sultan calls him, “the most original man I have ever met.”