By David Staba
Contributor

After absorbing incoming memories from various still-working sectors of my brain for about 24 hours since learning THE PINK IS BURNING via social media, one remains remarkably clear – walking out onto Allen Street as the sun came up.

It was the first day of 1998. New Year’s Eve had been a long work day, as my job involved covering the Buffalo Bills and Marv Levy had picked that inconvenient date to retire from coaching. After finishing up my coverage around 10 p.m. in the Niagara Gazette newsroom (laptops existed only for big newspapers), I made the daily commute home to Buffalo.

Cell phones were still a luxury few of my peers could afford, so I stopped at one of the places where people I knew were most likely located – Faherty’s on Elmwood near Hodge. Sometime after ringing in 1998, a friend mentioned that The Pink had somehow acquired an all-night license for the occasion.

This raised a question: What happens if Buffalo’s finest last-call bar never calls last call?

The answer: Without a large bouncer or bouncer repeatedly making the dart board-to-front door walk shouting “Time to go, people,” and/or “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” no one did.

Well, almost no one. Despite the bar only being about half-full, my colleague and I managed to lose track of each other, and he had apparently abandoned hope of a reunion and departed sometime before me. It should be noted that I was at the end of the bar a few feet from the door.

After realizing it was after 7 a.m., I figured it was, in fact, time to go. Stepping out into swirling snow falling from a sky steadily getting somewhat less gray, I got in a cab parked out front.

“So that place stayed open all night?” the cabbie asked, a bit incredulous. “What was that like?”

Weird, man. Deeply weird.

Thinking about all the nights there before and since, there’s no description of the place that feels more accurate. I can’t come up with a word that captures all of The Pink – the wide spectrum of the crowd, the contrast between the smell of the bathrooms and the taste of quite possibly history’s greatest steak sandwich, the impossibly perfect soundtrack emanating from the DJ booth, the graffiti in the men’s room (“And Jesus wept” on the outer stall, with “Of course, you’d cry too if someone drove nails through your fucking palms” in a distinctly different handwriting below is my favorite scrawl anywhere) – any better.

Not weird like frightening or off-putting – though I’m sure there were plenty of unfortunate people who felt that way. Weird like the work of Hunter S. Thompson or R. Crumb – when the distortion of reality becomes at once grotesque and beautiful.

Growing up in the sticks, to parents who found Buffalo terrifying (thanks in no small part to nightly television reports of pistol-packing punks roaming the streets of a city in perpetual flames), The Pink was one of the places where friendships were built as a group of newspaper people, graphic designers, DJs, musicians, artists and other ne’er-do-wells made the city into another home, one vastly different from the one where I grew up.

I hadn’t spent much time there in the past 20 years (or at least nearly as much), but would stop in at least a couple times a year, usually to expose a first-timer to the weirdness I loved. And they generally left just as smitten.

A small piece of personal history burned Monday morning, or maybe got knocked into the rubble Monday afternoon. Back before the turn of the millennium, when no local media outlets had much of an online presence, Mark Wisz and I started the Buffalo Post website meant to exploit the void. With a non-existent marketing budget, Mark designed a series of small stickers with which we decorated the men’s room of various establishments, as well as about anywhere else were could put them without someone yelling.

One such spot was just inside the entrance of the DJ booth at The Pink. Over the years, I’d check and there it would be. Steadily fading, but there.

While introducing a first-timer to The Pink a few months back, as was my wont when serving as a personal  Buffalo tour guide, it was reassuring to know it was still there  in that little corner of my world, promising “Super Dope Fresh: Online in ’99.”

My oldest son turned 21 in May, and I bought him one of his first legal drinks in New York there. His second visit to The Pink (I’d taken him in for a steak sandwich previously) turned out to be my last.

I plan to be in the neighborhood later today. Some of the people who basked in the grotesque at The Pink with me decades ago are playing down the block at Nietzche’s when The Steam Donkeys plug in at 6 p.m. for their weekly soiree.

There will be some time spent absorbing the reality of an Allentown and a world without The Pink. I already know how it will feel.

Weird, man. Deeply weird.

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David Staba is a recovering journalist who has written about the Buffalo area since a very long time ago.