The Cloud of Unknowing (13 page)

“Who do you think . . .”

He shook his head, dispelling my question.

The sounds of conversation from the kitchen got louder and more agitated until, just as the early lunch rush was kicking in, Lloyd took off his toque and went back through the swinging doors. Orders started to pile up. The new cashier was plating blue-plate specials as fast as she could.

Finally, Osman emerged from the kitchen in handcuffs, a cop gripping each elbow and the owner trailing them. Osman stared straight ahead, chin up and shoulders square, as they steered him through the lunch crowd, out the front door, and into the back of the cruiser. I went back and saw Lloyd packing up his knives while Michael looked on with an unreadable expression.

“Watch your ass, Kitten,” said Lloyd as he brushed past.

After work I found Lloyd at Lou's, as I'd known he would be. We had the place to ourselves except for the barman and, at the other end of the bar, an old man sleeping on his folded arms with his hat sitting on the stool next to him. Lloyd ordered us some rum and cokes. When his change came, he gave me a quarter and said, “Why don't you plug in the box and hit 17A for me one time?” The barman nodded, so I did as he said.

“If you should lo-o-o-ose me,”
sang Barbara Lynn as I sat down. I looked around, wanting to memorize everything: Lloyd's quiet profile, the blue plastic dixie cups, the corona of dust hovering in the shaft of sunlight over the old man's bald head.

“Well, what do you know about that?” said Lloyd, breaking the silence.

“You don't think Osman—” I remembered him angrily poking his broom around the table legs on the day Michael showed up.

“Oh hell no. You know who took all that shit, and the money too.”

“Poor Osman.”

“Here's to poor old Osman. And kitten, I wouldn't suggest waiting 'til it come around to you.”

“I don't get it, though. What does Michael want with a bunch of hams?”

“He's on the pipe, sweetie. One ham, one rock.”

“Crack? No way.”

“Don't you smell what come out of that stockroom after take a break?”

I thought about Michael mopping his face with his handkerchief. “But he's a lawyer!”

“Oh brother. Just watch your ass.”

I don't know if it was because I'd been tipped off or because things were catching up with him, but it seemed to me that Michael really started to fall apart after Lloyd left. The ballast was gone, I suppose. Michael hired new people to replace all the ones who had gotten fired to cover up his petty, crack-scale embezzling, and then he started churning through the replacements. I thought about inviting him out for another drink, just to shore up my position a little, but I knew I should quit before my turn came.

The end came suddenly for me, as it had for the others, and despite the cloud of inevitability that hung over all of us, it managed to catch me off-guard. I went down to the stockroom
looking for coffee filters and found Michael there, absorbed in the task of massaging pipe with flame. Inhaling, he raised his head, and his eyes surged with toxic adrenaline as they met mine. My luck had run out. I walked out the alley door and into the melting August sun, and the next day I slept until ten o'clock.

The Smockey Bar

As is often the case with bartenders, a lot of people knew Smockey a little. Smockey wasn't talkative, he didn't call you “Sport,” he betrayed no particular enthusiasm for anything except WWII documentaries on the History Channel, which was always on in his bar. But if you spent enough time there, you learned a few things about him. For instance, his name wasn't really Smockey. That was a sort of stage name that he'd inherited when his father died. Smockey the Elder, a South Philadelphia Italian, had opened up the bar in what was then a Polish neighborhood, so he gave it what he thought was a Polish-sounding name, “The Smockey Bar,” and he became Smockey. And when he passed the bar on to his son, he passed the name on too.

I liked the place right away, just based on the sign: black lettering on a white field, the kind of Plexiglas sign that lights up at night, though it was afternoon when I first stopped in. It was on the ground floor of a narrow row house—just wide enough for a long bar and a few small tables and a pay phone. The walls were paneled, stained dark and coated with a glossy spar varnish. I thought at first that a trick of perspective was making the room appear to taper toward the back, but in fact the building wasn't square. It must have been built as an afterthought to fill in the slightly trapezoidal space between two older houses.

Smockey had the place to himself when I first came in—an old man in a vest with a nice full head of Grecian Formula-black hair, brushed straight back from his forehead. He was sitting on a stool by the door and looking out at Passyunk Ave. I sat near the front so he wouldn't have too far to walk.

“A lager, please,” I said as he dumped my ashtray and swabbed the bar with a grey dishrag.

“Woant a gleyce?”

“Sorry?”

“A gleyce? Or you just woant the bottle?”

“Oh . . . no glass. Just the bottle is fine.”

He fetched himself an O'Douls and went back to his stool, and we sat in companionable silence until a couple of other old guys came in and started chatting me up. I recognized them. I'd seen them sitting in lawn chairs outside the barbershop on 10th Street, a few blocks away. Introductions were made all around, and I stayed for another lager. At some point a kid came in—really a kid, maybe not even in high school—and bought a six-pack to go.

“You know, Smockey,” I said when the kid was gone, “I don't think he was twenty-one.”

“Bah. He ain't even eighteen,” Smockey said.

There was no jukebox at Smockey's, but if there had been, it would have been loaded with Sinatra. The walls were covered with Sinatrabilia: posters, signed photos, even a moody, heavily impastoed oil painting of young Frank leaning against a lamppost. It was that kind of place, an old man's bar. The inner circle of regulars were guys with names like Taffy and Bimbo, old friends from the neighborhood who split their time between the barbershop and a La-Z-Boy when they weren't looking in on Smockey. The place belonged to them, but I think Smockey liked to have young people around, too. There were plenty of other old man bars in the neighborhood—places with the same dark paneling and nicotine stained mirrors and shelves sparsely stocked with Old Granddad bottles and bowling trophies—but the Smockey Bar had a particular geniality that encouraged
mixing. Sometimes, later in the evening, every barstool would be occupied, and union plumbers would rub shoulders with bookstore clerks. And as the volume rose from all those minds meeting, Smockey would turn on the closed captioning so he could follow along as the Luftwaffe got its ass kicked in the Battle of Britain.

I started coming in regularly, and he set me up with a tab. Before long he was trying to get me to buy the place off of him.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked. “You're like a farmer, Smockey. When was the last time you had a day off?”

“She's got you there, Smock,” said Taffy.

Smockey probably hadn't had a day off since he started helping his dad out behind the bar when he was ten years old. He himself had no help; he was there seven days a week. If it wasn't busy, he took an hour off in the afternoon to go home for lunch, but otherwise, he made do with whatever he had warming in the ceramic steam well behind the bar: canned chili, beef stew, clam chowder and oyster crackers. He'd never married—he lived with his sister around the corner—and now he was old, and stiff, and he'd heard all Taffy's jokes, and he was ready to retire. He wanted to go fishing. There was a picture of a bass boat taped to the cash register, and a postcard of a beach in Florida. But there was no Smockey III.

It became a routine between us. “When are you gonna take the joint off my hands so I can move to Florida already and get warm for a change?” he'd ask as he plunked a bottle of beer in front of me, and I'd wave him away. But secretly, I fantasized about it. What if I raised the money somehow and took over? Every decision for the rest of my life would be made. I imagined myself sitting on his stool by the window and gazing out at the pizza place across the street, slowly shrinking and
desiccating, my hair getting blacker and blacker as I presided over my wedge-shaped time capsule.

Another thing I learned about Smockey: he'd been born upstairs, at a time when working-class Italian women had their children at home. He had probably been taken down to the bar and shown off to his father's customers before he even saw the South Philadelphia sky. One evening I brought someone in with me, and when Smockey went into his routine about unloading the bar, my friend asked for a tour of the upper floors.

“There ain't nothing up there now, but you can go ahead and look,” Smockey said.

We found a jukebox on the second floor, and stacks of chairs, and tables too big for the bar downstairs, and a pile of disconnected swag lamps that must have hung over the tables—everything under a blanket of dust. There was a clawfoot tub in the bathroom, left behind after a casual renovation. I imagined young Smockey knocking down the walls of his childhood home, eager to banish the crepuscular gloom of his father's time. I imagined flush years, and couples dancing, and after-hours poker games with Bimbo and Taffy. And I saw how Smockey's world had closed up like a telescope. First he'd left his apartment on the third floor for a clean room at his sister's house. Then the second floor of the bar had become too much, so he'd abandoned that too. Now, finally, he wanted to lock the front door and hand someone else the key.

I moved away to a city where there were no old neighborhoods, or not in any form I could recognize. I drove through permanent sunlight, past endless iterations of the same strip mall, trying to find a bar where I could start up a tab and settle in. After a while, I stopped looking for a Smockey Bar and developed an appreciation for the cinderblock-and-stucco
cantinas that were its native counterpart. Word came to me that Smockey had sold the bar. I didn't mourn it, though, because I pictured Smockey with a fishing rod in his hand and a cooler of O'Douls at his side.

And then, not long after that, Smockey died, and someone sent me an obituary—a tribute, really, written by another of his young customers. It was full of surprises. Smockey hadn't moved to Florida. He was still living with his sister when he died. According to the article, he'd never even been farther than New Jersey, and he didn't know how to swim. When he sold the bar, he hadn't bought a bass boat: he'd bought a new Cadillac and parked it over by the barbershop every day, and he'd told anyone who asked that selling the bar was the biggest mistake he ever made.

The Smockey name died with him. The old white sign with the block letters has been replaced by a giant, whimsical Schlitz can. The upstairs room is open for business, and they have music, and quizzo nights. And, in what I guess is a lunkheaded gesture of commemoration, they call it “The Dive.”

Tomack

Nancy and I are driving down the Ridge Pike spotting Ladies of Norristown: women with bowl haircuts and nutty eye makeup walking along the side of the road in mismatched footwear. The Pike turns into East Main Street as you approach the business district. Scratch-and-dent appliance stores, astroturfed tax offices, television repair shops. Nancy and I agree: a room above a discount store in Norristown PA is where we picture ourselves once we've exhausted all other possibilities.

An old man in a paper hat dispenses cherry water ice through a window cut out of a plywood storefront. Next to the water ice stand is a nondescript bar, its door propped open to let in the June breeze. We stop in for a glass of beer. There are five or six barflies holding down the fort, and we get a few looks when we sit down. The barman tells us we just missed happy hour, which is funny because it's 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.

And now we're waiting out the rush-hour traffic. After a while, a lady of Norristown comes over and tells us they thought we were soliciting when we came in. Nancy reassures her that we aren't, and soon we're all friends. I try, but I can't establish whether they thought we were salesmen or hookers.

Rush hour has come and gone. The old man with the paper hat is here now, and he's showing Nancy a dream book. She's earnestly explaining to him why he shouldn't play the lottery. A number, she says, can never be due. A dream is just a way of talking to yourself. You need to make your peace with the water ice and the plywood window, or if you really want to take your chances, get on a bus for Philadelphia.

The door flies open with a bang. A young man, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five, stands in the doorway with his arms spread in an enveloping gesture. He runs over to the jukebox and dials up a song: “Lovergirl,” Teena Marie. He peels off his shirt, takes a running start, and jumps up on the bar. Everyone ignores him as he twists and bends and pumps his fists. Soon, perspiration has pasted his lustrous black hair to the sides of his handsome face. When the song ends he jumps down behind the bar, puts his shirt back on, and holds out his hand to me: “Tomack's the name. T-O-M-A-C-K. What are you girls drinking?”

“The stars are available tonight,” I say to Nancy as we stagger past the padlocked plywood water ice window. What I mean is that the dim lights of Main Street are too feeble to reach the starry dome above. Nancy considers this and replies, “I think Tomack used to be my dental hygienist.”