“Midnight is the dog next door.”

It was Leo Vigue who gave me the inspiration to craft that ideal pulp-fiction opening line. It was for a special issue of the Advocate where the staff chronicled “A Day in New Haven” hour-by-hour.

Leo’s Howe Street backyard abutted the backyard of the small groundfloor Elm Street apartment I inhabited for 12 years. Leo’s longtime workplace, Rudy’s Bar & Grill, was my next door neighbor and essentially my living room.

Midnight was his dog back then, well-named because the hound would howl at that hour as if he was a rooster at dawn. I never minded—I wished I could have a dog myself, and besides, Rudy’s Bar at midnight was louder that several dozen dogs could ever be.

This was the 1990s, when Leo’s turf extended not just around the corner of Howe Street but several blocks down Elm as well, to his designated daytime seat at the Daily Caffe. (In the years following the Daily’s demise, Leo frequented Patricia’s diner on Whalley.)

Unless I was out of town on business or vacation I was at Rudy’s every single night . Sometimes I just popped in to pick up messages. Often, I helped bus tables at closing time as a way to unwind after a long day. Too many times, I virtually moved in: writing stories, doing interviews, covering hundreds of live band shows, running an informal “Playreading Gang” which met on Sunday nights in the pool room for over seven years, and drinking several zillion martinis.

So I knew Leo as a sort of roommate. He wasn’t family, and he wasn’t a close pal I confided in or had special things in common with. But he was always around. It’s a bartender’s role to fade into the background at will yet be ever present. That’s what Leo did, deftly and effortlessly, for something like half a century.

I have three prevailing images of Leo Vigue in my mind. One is of him listening merrily to a David Essex tape I had on my Walkman one night when he was off duty and just hanging around the bar. Another is of him tut-tutting about a Rudy’s regular’s substance abuse, disapproving yet never scolding, behaving like a disapproving uncle from a Victorian novel. The third of Leo staring down another Leo—Ted Leo, the internationally esteemed punk rocker. It was closing time and an ignorant opening act had hogged all the stage time, leaving Ted Leo & Pharmacists less than half an hour in which to do their hour-plus set. Leo responded to the imminent pulled plug by playing and singing at a reckless double-timed speed. Leo Vigue stood sullenly next to him the entire time. It was like a piece of performance art about aging, or intergenerational angst.

I lived in that Leo zone for 12 years, until I got married, moved and stopped drinking. But since the big move was all of a block and a half, Leo was still a neighbor whom I waved to several times a week, whom I ran into at the supermarket, whom I chatted with all springtime about the Red Sox’s chances that season.

Leo was down to earth, level-headed and approachable. But the Rudy’s I knew was about stretching myths out of all proportion. When they hired a female bartender, she was promoted as the first ever, even though there’d been other women behind the bar before her. When The Yale Daily News did its annual articles on Term Paper Night (free drink for a the cover page of your thesis paper), when that tradition was only a year or two old, the bartenders hoodwinked the student reporters into believing that the ritual had been around for decades.

And last year, when Rudy’s lost its lease at 372 Elm Street and the place’s spirit essentially split into two entities—the relocated Rudy’s at Howe & Chapel and the Elm Bar which took over the old site with minimal modification— there was a pitched battle for Leo’s blessing and patronage.

But Leo was not that kind of icon. He was an old man, and many of those who knew him hoped he could rest and enjoy his retirement. Which is what it seemed, for a brief and crucial period, he was able to do.

Leo Vigue died last month, over the Thanksgiving break. For hours, there was a steady stream of comments about him on my Facebook friends’ feed, which I had to peruse in Massachusetts. A guy like that dies, you feel like it’s happened in the next room. The Facebook remorse felt just like one of those scattered yet sincere, rambling yet riveting Rudy’s conversations which I engaged myself in at the bar counter every night for 12 years.
Back when Midnight was just the dog next door.