Get a rope (Page 1 of 1)

"Hey," I heard someone holler. "Get away from my Jeep!"

I stood up from the passenger doorway of my Nissan, where I'd been stuffing everything into a gym bag to take upstairs and looked around.  I didn't see a Jeep at all, and then a man approached me from the street corner. "Oh," he said. "You're white. You're not stealing anything."

It was a questionable comment, but I could tell by his appearance he was used to life in the Brooklyn streets.

"Look, man, I just walked all the way from Central Park." He hugged himself to show me how cold he was. "I'm trying to get home to see my lady. Can you help me out?"

It was 11 p.m., and with his back to the streetlight, his face was buried in shadow.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out $3. I handed the money to him across the bed of my truck. "It's all I got."

"It's good, man. Thanks." And then he started to walk away. "Hey," he said, turning back around. "You got any loose change? So I can call her. Tell her to slip into something nice?"

I reached back into my pocket and extracted two quarters.

"Thanks, man. I'm gonna treat the old lady right tonight."

With that, he was gone, disappearing into the shadows of Kosciusko Street, leaving me to wonder if he was really going home to see his lady.

And then, as if on cue, my girlfriend, Jetta, pulled up and parked behind me. I'd just driven 700 miles from Maryville to New York to see her. I threw my bag on my shoulder, forgot about the guy bumming money, and soon, we were upstairs clinking the necks of a couple Smuttynose IPAs.

Jetta moved to New York in 2000 to pursue her career in fashion design, and throughout the last three years we've been together, I've spent much of my free time (which is considerable, since I'm a teacher) in the city with her.  Summertime here is glorious: While Jetta hammers away at purses in her studio, I wander the streets of Manhattan all day, poking into bookshops, eating street vendor slop and frequenting the many museums. On Saturdays, Jetta goes to The Market, a young designers co-op on Mulberry Street, and I ride into Manhattan with her and tool around The Village. And it's here, on East 7th Street, that I found the greatest bar on earth, McSorley's Old Ale House.

It opened in 1854, and since then, nothing has changed. It's the same bar, the same floors, the same doors and potbellied stove. It's dark and beer-wet, with sawdust sprinkled over the stained ground. There are no chairs at the bar, so you have to stand and go elbows-down. They take only cash, and they serve only two different beers: McSorley's Dark or McSorley's Light. You get them two-at-a-time for the shockingly cheap New York price of $4.50.

The history here is as thick as the litter in the East River: ever-present, floating on the surface, and washing up constantly. They say Abraham Lincoln once came in for a draft (What a thought: Old Abe hunched over the damp bar with the fuzz from a dark on his upper lip!). Wishbones hang on the chandelier above the bar — never once dusted and now covered in a furry layer — and they've been there since men leaving for World War I hung them. There's a pair of handcuffs on the footrail that failed to bind Harry Houdini.

The first time Jetta and I went, we met two guys from Connecticut, best friends, throwing back beers and swiping mustard across the standard appetizer: saltine crackers served with white cheddar squares and a thick slice of white onion. Their names were Ed Bill and Bill Ed — I made them show me their driver's licenses.
Another time I stood beside a guy who leaned over to me and asked, "Who was the greatest Yankee of all time?" I'm not a baseball fan, but I guessed Babe Ruth. He shook his head. I tried again: Mickey Mantle.  Nope. At that point, I'm ashamed as a sports fan to admit, I had no other guesses. Finally he slapped a 20 on the bar, ordered us another round, and said, "How about my uncle, Joe DiMaggio?" I made him, too, show me his driver's license.

I met a 50-year-old Italian with buckteeth and frosted hair, wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt, who screamed so loud when he talked that his face turned red and little purple veins wormed across his temples. He was the drummer for a Judas Priest cover band. "You can't prove there's no god with Scientry," he said.
Eventually the bartender, Gregory de la Haba, saw me scribbling into my notebook, and he bought me a beer and asked if I were a writer. Before long, he was answering all my questions. He pulled down a flask from a shelf behind the bar — in it were the ashes of Bobby Boles, a regular who wanted his final resting place to be McSorley's.

Gregory is an artist, and in between his slinging of beer mugs up and down the bar, we talked for a couple hours. By the time I had to leave to meet Jetta for dinner, he'd invited me to help him cart a couple of old round tables from the closing school across the street to his studio in Long Island City. We agreed to meet the next morning in front of the bar — he'd rented a U-haul to carry the tables.

As I left McSorley's, a little buzzed and squinting against the late afternoon sunlight, I wondered if I'd agreed to help some guy I'd just met lug furniture around the city. When I told Jetta about the plan, she laughed and shook her head.

Maybe I'll just sleep in, I thought that night as I lay down. Surely he won't wait around on me all day. He can't expect a guy from the other side of the bar to be faithful to his word, can he?

But I knew if I skipped out on him, I'd have to leave McSorley's off my list of regular New York City haunts. Not only is he the bartender, he's married to the owner's daughter.

The place was too interesting to be swept away like that — I was stuck. I knew I'd be on the subway the next morning.

Continued next issue...