Horse, just as it's impossible to prove that the blacksmith shop wasn't part of the Underground Railroad, or that the bookcase hadn't, at one point, led to the street. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels." And anyway, Dylan Thomas died in St. Vincent's Hospital. So from that point forward, I just said yes to all of the legends. "I heard Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby here." He sure did, and in fact, you are sitting in the same booth. "Is it true that R.F.K. sketched out his presidential campaign platform in this bar?" Yeah, and would you believe it was in this exact booth! You could have asked me anything. Did William Burroughs name Naked Lunch after Chumley's BLT? Is that the barstool where e.e. cummings gave up capital letters? Is this where a blind John Milton dictated Paradise Lost to his amanuensis? You bet, and I don't want to blow your mind, but it was in this very booth. Wait a second, the fictional you is thinking, Milton died before the West Village existed. Sure, but didn't you know that the dumbwaiter in Chumley's was once a time machine? After escaping entrapment in the Pokmon- sheet cave, I cut down a block and moved swiftly on Walker Street toward the center of Chinatown, intuiting that my next assignment would be on the west end of Canal, where no one had seen me yet,