Bars

I grew up a son among daughters; one older sister, two younger. Within the world of our family, the inclusive world that we shared with cousins and aunts and uncles and relatives of indefinite connection, there were other circles of existence that were equally exclusive. The adult world beyond the borders and just out of earshot from the world we, as kids, lived. This was a realm that my older sister, Sheila, longed to penetrate, moving on the edge of it when she could, the entertainer, the helper. When the adults were off somewhere and she was in charge, she slipped quickly into the adult role and did her best to run us like a flock of sheep, but, in truth, it was more like herding cats. My younger sisters and I became allies in rebellion and Sheila’s life became both one of mother hen and straw boss, leaving her floating somewhat in her own world, somewhere between my parents and the underground world of our childhood.

Of course the world of the adults was also clearly divided: the world of the men and the world of the women. Family gatherings, frequent in those times, found the women hovering in the kitchen, moving with the authority of those in complete charge. Uniformed in aprons, talking constantly, often simultaneously, they brought endless offerings of food to the old folks perched and slouched in the living room, the men in the den, and the hordes of us who grazed our way through the corridors on the periphery of their mission. The men drank in the den or played poker in a back bedroom, smoked, swore, and pressed coins into our hands in secret. On the edge of that world was the world of the cousins, games and plots and strategies for raids on food and, later, whiskey.

Just as the larger family split itself by gender, at least early in the evening before the singing started, so did my father and I find ourselves as men among women and wove patterns in our lives of which my mother and sisters were never a part.

My Dad, a lifelong sportsman, went off on Saturdays or Sundays after mass to a world full of men, to games and bars and lounges, places where bets could be laid down and thirsts could be quenched. On Sunday morning my mother and sisters would get up and go to an early mass and my Dad and I would go to a later one. We would come back to Sunday breakfast, for in those days you could not eat before Communion, and then my Dad would be out the door and into the pub culture and I would be along for the ride. “Promise me that you’ll say nothing to your mother”, he would say, as if it had crossed my mind.

The games, at first were soccer, but they were always preceded by a stop or two where Dad would place bets or “see a man about a horse”, and sometimes we would join other men and go off on our day’s adventure on a chartered bus. The gathering places for expatriates in 1950’s LA were places like Exposition Park or Rancho La Ceinega.  Men with accents, tough working men, would come together to play soccer on teams called the Scots, or the Danes, or the Celts, to sweat and bleed and fight and curse their way through a Sunday afternoon before retiring to a pub for what, in those days, was the closest thing to instant replay. Later, the Rams came to LA and we began to go out to the Coliseum. Seldom going in the turnstile, we would more often move through a quickly opened gate with a nod and a quick handshake, and disappear into the crowd, down the dark tunnels and emerge into the roar and color and wonder of yet another world.

While the games were always exciting, my thoughts of those times take me into the bars which were always a part of the way home. In later years, the actual going to the games was less frequent as games became televised, and many afternoons were comprised of visits to a string of watering holes where Dad was often greeted like family and the bartender never had to ask him what he would be having. For me, it was always a Shirley Temple or Roy Rogers or a Coke, a stool next to himself at the end of a long bar or a red leather tuck and rolled booth to myself where I could see the screen and listen to the easy banter of men. Behind the bar, rows upon row of bottles were lined against a long mirror in an endless illusion of plenty. In my favorite places, the men gathered together at one end of the polished wood to laugh and cheer and bet, places preferred by me to the bars where every fourth stool was filled by a solitary drinker and the mood was only broken by the shock of sunlight when another patron came through the door.

These outposts had names like The Scotsman, The Round Table, The Bat Rack, The Flight Deck, Murphy’s, or the shrewdly named Office. (As in: “I’m going to the office, dear”.) There was the Porthole, where Big Bill Costello put his huge arm around me in the parking lot and confided in me in whiskey breathed secrecy that my father was a prince among men, a kind of saint. The same Bill Costello who got Dad’s shillelagh when he died and who gripped the casket across from me as we carried our load from the church to the waiting hearse. But that was a few years later, after the world changed under us and the drink and a lifetime of smoking had taken its toll.

Big Bill was also part of that memorable afternoon that we stopped into a roadhouse on the way home from the USC/Notre Dame game only to find, by the miracle of tape, that the game was just beginning in the bar and men were placing bets. Dad and Big Bill could hardly contain themselves with their luck as they bet on plays, individual players, the final score, and even entered the attendance pool. I can’t recall ever going into that particular place again, but I do recall that it was the only time that Notre Dame ever lost to USC that did not create a brief state of mourning in our house.

When my cousins or sisters were along, we never went in. We would sit in the car in the parking lot for hours, playing guessing games, while an occasional cocktail waitress would materialize from the inner sanctum with a round of Shirley Temple’s in tall glasses with cherries and red cellophane straws. It never occurred to us that this might be out of the ordinary. One Sunday afternoon Dad emerged from the cave-like darkness with none other than Pat O’Brien, a demigod in our household, who sang us a chorus of “Harrigan”, shook my hand and kissed each of my sisters. God was smiling on the parking lot of The Rumpus Room that day.

It was a few years later, as the Sixties swung into high gear outside of the dim upholstered lounges and my father retreated deeper into the safe familiarity of those rooms, that I began to resent the bars and their darkness in the daylight and see my father as a relic of another time.  It was even more time until I understood that he was an old-world man from an old-world culture, where men gathered in pubs in the afternoon. And, even though the padded cocktail lounge was worlds away from the pubs of the old country, it was where my father felt at home, when our home and the world were rapidly changing.

By the time that I was seventeen, I was doing my own share of drinking, but resenting my Dad about his. Our communication became more distant and, by the time that I grew my hair below my ears and tried to CO at the draft board, we had quit speaking to each other at all. I left home that year and it was nearly four years until we were able to speak more than a sentence to each other again. As it turned out, I did serve, going in as a medic, and I was twenty-one before I came home.

I can’t recall how it came about, perhaps a slight softening on both our parts, but, in an awkward and affectionate effort at a truce, we stopped into Frascati’s, a lounge on Wilshire Blvd., to have a drink together, as men, for the first time. As long as I could recall. Dad sang in public. When I was young it never struck me as out of the ordinary. He would just stand in a bar or restaurant, tapping a fork against his glass, announce that it was my birthday or some other occasion, and sing a song to the room.

That night, he spoke to the piano player, who he knew of course, and stood weaving with drink in hand to sing “Danny Boy” for his son who had come home from the war. His liver just about gone, just a drink or two would leave him slurring his words. Down the bar, two guys on barstools began to heckle him. One finally turned to me and said in tones loud enough to be heard around the bar, something to the effect that he felt sorry for me, having to put up with an old drunk like that. It was not much of a decision for me to stand up and punch him. I did not see his friend swing to hit me, nor did I see my father coming from the piano to deck the second guy. After that there was general wrestling and shouting and five minutes later Dad and I are hugging and laughing and crying together in the parking lot, five years of estrangement healed. Two weeks later he was gone, a victim of a weak heart and a used up liver. “Promise me that you’ll say nothing to your mother”, he said. It never crossed my mind.