Magic’s Pub and the Artful Dodger have been reduced to piles of rubble in the heart of the downtown Westhampton Beach makeover, transformed to the place in our heads occupied by the likes of Summers Beach Club, the Matchbox and Captain Norm’s, where the memories are most likely leaning up against a post or slumped down in a rickety bar stool.
Its legendary owner, though, is still alive and kicking, and as entertaining as ever — and, on this day at the Quogue East Pub, wondering what all the fuss is about.
A fundraiser at the Westhampton Country Club attended by hundreds exchanging Magic’s memories is at the time still days away, and the guy most responsible for those memories nurses a light beer on ice at the end of the bar.
It’s possible the best barometer of whether you’re a local, at least in the western half of the Hamptons, is whether or not you have a good Billy Thorne story. If you’ve got more than one, like some of us, consider yourself fortunate for making it into the 21st century on this side of the daisies.
And yet it’s amazing how much I didn’t know about a restaurateur who, in the heyday of the dual businesses he ran, would think nothing of smashing his head into a peanut machine like a charging bull, or drinking the hot wax out of a (lit) candleholder on a diner’s table, if the mood needed lightening.
Now in his 70s, he still doesn’t take himself too seriously and, I have no doubt, is curious as to why this is worth writing about.
For the record: It’s because doing what Billy’s good at is more complicated than it looks. Because you first have to have the awareness to know that a situation needs to be addressed. Then you have to have enough heart to care about fixing it. And, finally, you need the talent to pull off the remedy — and Billy Thorne, a born showman, has that in spades.
The back story: He was a baseball whiz, earning college scholarships, but had to grow up quickly and put plans on hold when his dad died when Billy was just 20, with six siblings who needed looking after. He bought the bar/restaurant that became Magic’s (the Dodger behind it already existed) at 26 in 1972 and turned it into the beating heart of downtown until selling it 34 years later.
He quacked at customers and friends a lot. I always wondered why.
“It began right after birth,” he said, I think sort of joking but maybe not. “If you follow Franklin Avenue [on Quiogue, where he grew up] down to the cranberry marsh, there was a duck pond. My mother said I went ‘quack, quack, quack’ before I went ‘ma, ma, ma.’”
I was at Fellingham’s with my wife about 15 years ago when Billy passed by, heading to the bar. I made eye contact out of the corner of my eye, but it didn’t really matter, because he doesn’t really know who I am, other than I’m friends with Tim Laube, who is with me at the QEP tonight.
But he doesn’t miss much and must have seen me whisper to my wife and deduced the content, because a few minutes later he walked up, leaned over the table and gave us a good quacking.
“If anything was getting serious, I tried to goof the situation out of being a problem,” he said. “It did work about 95 percent of the time, but not always.”
The 5 percent: A couple of diners were bitching about their food and rough on the waitress: “… They were giving me an earful, and I was tuned up and I didn’t want to hear it, so they’d say, ‘Well, what should we do?’ I said, ‘Well, get the quack out of here’ …”
Magic, the nickname? It’s not, as I always heard, a reference to his baseball prowess. The exact origin, though, is best kept quiet over statute of limitations concerns.
The candle wax? He didn’t really drink it, he confesses; it was stored in his cheeks until a time for proper disposal came about. And he’d do it only when he was “thermonuclear %#*$ed up.”
Laube’s favorite: “He was showing us his pickoff move” — only problem was, he was doing this in the busy and tiny restaurant on a holiday weekend — “… He got people to move their tables. He was standing in the middle of the room and put us all in position. Everyone went along with it.”
Billy follows with a similar story, for some reason in a college class, that ended with him sliding into the teacher’s desk, “knocking her out of her %&*$ing chair.”
When it got out of hand, his own staff, including his brother, the bartender, kicked him out of his own place. So he’d retreat to a nearby bar, or the Dodger, where he “liked it better anyway.”
My personal favorite — it’s about as inappropriate as you can get it, but it was a long time ago, everyone lived and no one’s endorsing it now. But it is funny:
He’s up all night, closes the Dodger, still wants to go out, so heads with friends to John Scott’s Beach Bar. By 11 that morning, he’d had his fill, so the bar owner got his young manager to give him a ride back home.
Only Billy wasn’t ready to go home yet. He’s got some fancy event to go to, and the manager has an important event at the bar to oversee, so everyone’s trying to find them. Then, the car returns, after pit stops at Summers and a couple of others, with Billy driving — and the manager passed out in the passenger seat.
“The owner says, ‘Billy, thanks, I’ve got a marriage in progress and the manager can’t stand up …’”
It wasn’t easy to give Magic’s up — and he had “no interest in watching that building get knocked down” — but he had had a quadruple bypass and the season kept shrinking, and he hopes the downtown landlords will be wise enough to see the big picture and cut businesses some slack through the lean winter months once the overhaul is complete. “I just hope it doesn’t end up as a beautiful ghost town,” he cautioned.
Naturally, the bypass itself comes with a great story: “I had a heart monitor on, and it looked like a time bomb …” so he pulled up his shirt in a bar to show everyone, and … well, you can imagine.
So, Magic’s lives on in our memories, and the Magic’s burger lives on, too — celebrity chef John Tesar, formerly a dishwasher and prep cook at Magic’s, featured it at the just-concluded Food Film Fest in Manhattan — and its owner offers a few final words to live by.
“Try to do the right thing. Think positively. Just believe in something. Go Hurricanes.”
And then, maybe thinking that sounded too stiff: “Don’t give yourself a %&#$ing earache. Shut up and have some fun.”
With that, he quietly excused himself and left the bar.
But that didn’t stop the show.
From my left: “You could always count on Billy being at home Hurricane baseball, football and basketball games — anything Westhampton, he would be there …”
From down the bar: “We had a black semi-pro baseball team in Riverhead, the Bluebird Aces, and we needed a pitcher. We got him to pitch a whole season. He didn’t know the water in the cooler was actually alcohol, but we made sure he got back to his house …”
Back to the left: “Due to Billy, if you want to nominate someone as the parade grand marshal, you have to give a nominating speech in front of the full committee. He started that …”
Immediate right: “He was the best boss ever … we had a policy that the customer was never right. He would always stick up for us …”
From my left: “He was always willing to donate to charity. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Westhampton Beach businessman who did more than he did …”
From across the corner of the bar: “He challenged me to a drinking contest, and I’m, like, ‘Billy, I only drink one or two,’ and he said, ‘C’mon, you wimp, I’ll drink you under the table, I’m buying, on three.’ When he gets to three, he puts his beer down and takes the hot citronella and drinks the whole thing, all the hot liquid, and it was dried up all over his chin …”
You think he might be missed when the party finally ends?
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