Cigars and Coke with Frasier Crane

Tossed Salad and Smoke in Queens, one October in 2023.

12th October, 2023
Rego Park, Queens, NY

I have never been to Rego Park on purpose. I’m not sure anyone has.

You don’t go to that part of Queens; you wash up there, the way a single thong washes up on a beach, and you stand around wondering what current brought you in. The current, on this particular night, was Kelsey Grammer.

Let me back up.

There is a kind of New York evening that arrives with no announcement, no posters, no press, that turns out to be one of the strangest nights of your life. This was that. The only two corners of the internet that knew it was happening were a brewery called Faith American and a cigar lounge called Havana Dreams, and neither of them, frankly, seemed entirely sure either. There had been zero publicity. None. For a reason I’d later understand and find oddly moving: the SAG strike was on. Grammer wasn’t allowed to promote the Frasier reboot, which was premiering that very night on Paramount+. So instead of a red carpet, he had a humidor in Queens. Instead of a press junket, he had me and my cartoonist friends.

I should explain why I was there at all, because on paper I am the least likely person in that room. I’m an Australian cartoonist who draws for a living and apologises for existing. I am not, by temperament, a man who fawns over celebrities. I once stood next to a Hemsworth at a barbecue and managed only to ask him whether he wanted onions on his hot dog.

But here is the part I don’t say out loud at parties.

Frasier saved my life.

Not in the way people mean when they say a TV show “saved their life,” which usually means it was on while they ate a sandwich. I mean during the pandemic, when -with the exception of 7pm- the city went quiet, and the walls of my tiny East Village walk-up began their slow, patient closing-in, the thing that got me to morning was Dr Frasier Crane. It was running on Netflix then, the whole run, and I would put away three, four, five episodes a day. Three before bed, minimum, the way other people take a tablet. There was something about that warm, jazzy, oblivious world, that very particular fictional Seattle, all sherry and apricot walls and brothers being insufferable at each other, a pre-everything calm I could climb inside and pull shut behind me.

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I got hooked on the nostalgia of it. The whole Frasurbane of the thing, before I knew that was a word other people had also coined in their own lonely apartments. A spin-off from Cheers, of all the unlikely lineages, this fussy radio psychiatrist peeled off from a Boston bar and given his own life two thousand miles away. When I finally got to Boston, I went to the actual Cheers bar like a pilgrim, and they had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Grammer from his Cheers years, younger, with the longer hair, the mullet, frankly. I stood in front of it for longer than a grown man should. It cheered me up.

I’m not too proud to tell you that a piece of laminated cardboard in a tourist trap did more for my mental health that year than several actual professionals.

So when my friend Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, who is a Frasier superfan of a devotion that makes mine look like a passing interest, mentioned there was a thing in Queens, I went. Ie got there before Hilary did, which means that according to the official record, the canonical comic Hilary later drew of the entire evening, the first two things she noticed upon entering were, in order: 1. Cigar smoke and 2. Me and 3. Kelsey Grammer “just hangin out like old pals.”

The lounge was full of what Hilary would immortalise as the “cigar men of Queens,” a category of human I’d never knowingly encountered: large, contented men sitting in deep leather chairs, side by side, not speaking. Not to each other, not to anyone. Just sitting, smoking, gazing into the middle distance like a Rothko exhibition that had given up. Grammer himself found this unnerving, and said so, that all these men could sit beside one another in total silence. I thought it was the most honest thing in the room.

Me & Frasier

We ended up out the back. Several of us, sharing cigars, just hanging about and talking the way you do when the night has decided to be a long one. There’s a thing that happens out the back of a place like that, away from the television and the silent men, where time goes loose, and you forget the situation is absurd, and for a while you’re just a few people in a cloud of smoke in Queens, and one of them happens to be a sitcom legend. I was drinking a Coke, for some reason. He commented on it and suggested I buy one of his beers.

And then he started to weep.

Not at us. At the beer. He’d snuck to the front of the bar, and had been telling the story behind the Faith American can, his brewery, the one he’d named, he said, because he loved Faith, his daughter, and he loved America, in that order, and it would be churlish of me to point out that this is also a sentence a cartoon villain says before flooding a town. He read out the label.

There was a whole legend printed on it about the Anti-Rent War, about men on a full moon riding down on the sheriff’s men of Andes, New York, costumed and freedom-minded, the Calico Men, riding into “this singular, distant page of American History.” And as he read it, the great man’s eyes filled, and spilled, and there it was: Kelsey Grammer, crying, in a cigar lounge in Rego Park, about a nineteenth-century tax revolt printed on a beer can.

Hilary and James were a few feet away. Hilary, in her comic, draws her own thought bubble at this exact moment, and it reads: Kelsey Grammer is crying to me about something called the Anti-Rent War. I had the same bubble. We just rendered it differently. She let hers show on her face.

I was trying to stay cool.

You should know how excited I actually was. Underneath the flat Australian affect, the laminated-cutout-in-Boston of it all, I was a man watching the figure who had got him through the worst year of his life stand three feet away and openly feel things about a beer. I was, to use a word my people reserve for moments of genuine internal weather, chuffed. Deeply, helplessly chuffed.

I spent the entire encounter performing the opposite, nodding sagely at the can, holding my cigar, going “mm” and “right” and “that’s a lot of history for a lager,” while inside the apricot walls of my own ridiculous heart, eleven-thirty-pm-pandemic-me was screaming.

Hilary felt it all on the surface and let it pour out: the hugs, the kiss on the head he gave her, the “I love you, Hilary,” the drawing she made him on the back patio that took her three attempts because her hands were shaking. She got the religious experience. The full Lourdes.

She got him to sign the cartoon she drew of him in the New Yorker (A parody of Hellraiser) before he hugged her. She was in a surreal daze.

We left when he left, because there is no reason to stay at a party once the icon has gone home to bed. On the way out he was still in good cheer, still talking about his beer, telling us with great sincerity that sometimes you have to try someone else’s beer and it’s terrible and you have to lie, but that he was proud of his own. I believed him. I believe a man who weeps at his own label is not lying about anything.

Hilary was frantically scribbling down details of the encounter for her comic, not wanting to lose any of the granularity of the night.

The reboot, for the record, was not very good. Nobody really watched it. It came, and it went, the way these things do, the way Rego Park does, a current that brings something in and then takes it back out. But I wasn’t there for the reboot. I was there, it turns out, to stand in a cloud of smoke and quietly thank a man who’ll never know he sat up with me through 2020, one apricot-walled episode at a time.

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I asked him something about his beer.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.