Chapter 34
Thursday came.
My lifelong friend Billy Caldwell was getting married on Saturday. So Thursday night, we all gathered at the Spindle Pub (The Tavern), about twenty of us, to take him out for one final roaring drunk before his big day.
Decky, Luke, and I were the first ones to get there that night. Little by little, the others came and eventually we all assembled as a group toward the rear of the long bar. Billy, looking all surprised, and his brother Cliffy, soon arrived, and we all hooted and hollered out Billy’s name when he walked through the big red door in the front. The coolers clanged, and the taps poured. As the mood of the occasion slowly grew, we began to discuss the long night’s plan, everyone with arms flying about in the dank, dreamy darkness, everyone cavorting, mingling, and moving in random groups of three. Some of us leaned on the walls outside of the bathrooms and against the Pac-Man machine while a neon Budweiser sign flashed in the window above us. Car light reflections from the VFW Highway ran madly in the big window in a streaming line, one after the other, mostly heading eastward on the boulevard. As the cold, bottled, longneck beers grew in our hands, I listened intuitively to the sound of nothing for a few moments. It seemed so peaceful to me. It was just like the old days again, I thought, and in my anxious excitement, it felt like maybe I had never left Centralville at all.
The plans were finalized. Our first stops would be a few of the nicer establishments along Market and Middle streets, like Pollards or the Dubliner, and later, we would head back to Central Street where the real people were, Charlie McIntyre’s Pub.
Charlie McIntyre was one of the nicest guys in the whole world. Billy played on his softball team along with Richie, Sully, and Dukie, and Charlie had wanted to see us all that night. If you met him, Charlie was a big and burly guy with a steel keg of beer for a stomach; he was the baddest men’s club softball pitcher in all of Middlesex County. At the pub, drinks for the softball players and their friends were always on the house, especially after a win, so much so that Charlie fell deep into debt over the years, and consequently, his vendors slowly began to cut him off. In the latter days of the pub, there were many discussions that he had to have with the delivery drivers out in the dark and damp side alley, just to find a way to pull off a little more credit, just to get a few more kegs delivered, the lifeblood of his friends. Like all good things, however, the kegs were drying up, and time was quickly running out.
That night, after one of those regular beer vendor alleyway discussions, Charlie came back in through the side door and announced to everyone, “Sorry, we’re all out of Miller beer indefinitely, but we still got free Budweiser!”
And everyone in the small place cheered, “Yay!”
At the pub, a heavy lady, maybe in her middle forties, was terribly wasted; she sat at Charlie’s bar slobbering, talking to herself, murmuring moans, with her eyes half-closed, burying her head for several minutes at a time. I noticed the poor dear was missing two front teeth and had the characteristic nose of W. C. Fields. She raised her head to sip a free Bud draft from a pilsner glass and then quickly jumped up to go to the ladies’ room, talking inaudible gibberish to me as she passed. As I stood there all alone, she snapped a bark in my face before turning away and then continued on toward the crowded restroom corridor.
Two skinny, T-shirted, middle-aged men, drunk, with bluish blurred-out tattoos all over their thin, boney arms, moved in toward her seat near the bar, bickering over their lady friends who seemed to also congregate in that long restroom corridor.
My sister Kate’s boyfriend Sully pointed to a scruffy little guy sitting all by himself at a two-seater table by the six foot-by-six foot platform dance floor, and told Luke, Decky, and I that the guy was a Vietnam vet. “He has seen terrible things; I think someone said he was one of those guys that they dropped into the Viet Cong tunnels to ferret out the enemy. After a while, the guy just went plain crazy and had to be honorably discharged.”
I took it all in while looking around me, wondering at the beauty of this grand carnival of life. These were mostly the descendants of the streets of Lowell, and Charlie had taken them all in. They had been a part of this inner-city culture from the times of our grandfathers; they were descendants of America’s Great War veterans, descendants of the cotton mill laborers, the tired and the poor who had been shoveled to the streets by everyone else. All of the jobs seemed to be moving to the south or overseas, and there was nothing left for them to do. These were my brothers and sisters, these sad descendants of Galloway.
All the while we were there, the front door was kept wide open by a brick with the cool September breeze blowing in from back Central Street. I walked around with a Budweiser in my hand as I observed everyone. A tall lady, with long dark hair, probably in her midtwenties, with terrible dark yellow teeth from apparent heroin addiction, swore at no one as they walked through that door. She yelled out into the open night air after Charlie, even though Charlie stood out of earshot behind the bar inside.
“Hey, Charlie, call me a cab!”
“Okay, you’re a cab!” some wise guy yelled back at her.
A group of three big ladies with their skinny alcoholic men companions were gathered near the dance floor. All of them smoked cigarettes and whispered into one another’s ears. I imagined that they talked about the softball group stag party that had just invaded their establishment.
At the bar, I noticed a short-haired, thin, handicapped man seated alone at the opposite end with a severely deformed arm. Three small fingers extended out of his short arm; the arm itself was about half the length of his good arm. He smiled at me and worked the thirsty, draft beer quickly with the little arm.
“This is my good arm! It’s closer to my mouth!” he gleamed at me with happiness.
Back at the restrooms, a big black lady with a short tight Afro told another in the recesses of the dark corridor, “I have nothing in common with him so he can go fuck himself!” She looked out toward the dance floor. Out on the small platform dance floor, two thin black men danced to the disco juke box, one wearing a beard and a Red Sox cap, the other one bald. The bearded man pointed to the bald man dancing, laughing aloud, and said, “Never mind her! He’s got nothing in common with himself!”
With all of this going on, a surge of patriotism came out of nowhere. I don’t know how it all started, but it was as if someone close to the door, perhaps the lady still yelling for a cab, had wrangled a sudden wave of unity that blew in from the ancient city night. Perhaps it was a leftover chorus from a 1945 Victory Parade that marched down Central Street. It had been floating out there for decades, just waiting for this night. Within a few short minutes, everyone was singing “God Bless America!”
I remembered the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team victory and a similar feeling of national unity after their improbable “Miracle on Ice.” And now, at McIntyre’s Pub, everyone, including the vet, the lady that had been sleeping, Charlie, the people who had been fighting in the corridor, all of them began to sway and sing, with arms locked around each other; no one had a care in the world. I reached over to the guy with the deformed arm who sat in the corner and put my hand on his shoulder to join in. We were soon swaying and singing loudly with all of America. His little arm hoisted his mug of beer.
Here in tiny McIntyre’s Pub on back Central Street, the world was immediately overcome by the rapture of beer and song; everyone had become one. We were misfits, all of us; spirits resonating in the real world; one single gigantic strand of DNA that wrapped around the whole room. Everyone remained arm in arm, braided, and sang as loud as they could scream. The great chain of life grew and fed off of itself and soon moved outward from the pub and spilled into the narrow alleyway and street. On the street, hands stretched out to grasp other hands, but the singing soon died down and people unwillingly broke away and eventually disappeared.
As he had done before, Charlie had thrown his tethered lifeline out from the pub into the lonely Lowell night to save us all. McIntyre’s Pub was always a different glimpse of beauty and madness, all rolled up into one that life will sometimes show you. It was always fresh and exhilarating to me. I was grateful to old Charlie for this. With everyone singing and locking arms and singing “God Bless America” like that, it seemed like such an incredible moment in time.
How many more dive bars across America were like McIntyre’s? How many here had chosen this path that they were now upon? Was there a greater purpose to it all? Truly, this could never be the end for some of these blessed souls. Where would they all be in a few years? There should always be such a comfortable place for the tired and the poor like this. Were there places in Lowell like this throughout the late 1800s and earlier part of our century? How I wished I could walk every corridor of time in order to find out. I got momentarily lost in the verse of Edwin Arlington Robinson . . .
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
We poured out into the night from McIntyre’s, Billy in tow, singing, jubilant, headed to O’Jay’s. From O’Jay’s, we went to the Lokai to drink crazy-colored fruit drinks and eat the carnation garnish that came with them. Billy’s brother, Cliffy, and I ate two or three carnations each before we left to end the night at Towne Pizza, where I showed Decky and Luke how to eat greasy cheese steaks at two in the morning, just like we used to do on our way home from the bars before I had ever left for California. My friend Liam threw a slice of pizza at me from across the joint, for we all teased him for trying to talk (he was incoherent) to five girls who were ordering something at the counter. The slice bounced hard off of my shirt collar and fell to the floor.
I looked at the upright slice on the dirty floor and wondered about the five-second rule and if it might still be good enough to pick it up and eat it.
After a few minutes, I picked up the slice of pizza and started eating. It was still warm. It was delicious.