Lawrence Block: When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Mathew Scudder 06

The windows at Morrissey's were painted black. Theblast was loud enough and close enough to rattle them. It chopped off conversation inmidsyllable, froze a waiter inmidstride, making of him a statue with a tray of drinks on his shoulder and one foot in the air. The great round noise died out like dust settling, and for a long moment afterward the room remained hushed, as if with respect.

Someone said, "Jesus Christ," and a lot of people let out the breath they'd been holding. At our table, BobbyRuslander reached for a cigarette and said, "Sounded like a bomb."

SkipDevoe said, "Cherry bomb."

"Is that all?"

"It's enough," Skip said."Cherry bomb's major ordnance. Same charge had a metal casing instead of a paperwrapper, you'd have a weapon instead of a toy. You light one of those little mothers and forget to let go of it, you'regonna have to learn to do a lot of basic things left-handed."

"Sounded like more than a firecracker," Bobby insisted. "Like dynamite or a grenade or something. Sounded like fucking World War Three, if you want to know."

"Get the actor," Skip said affectionately. "Don't you love this guy?Fighting it out in the trenches, storming the windswept hills, slogging through the mud. BobbyRuslander, battle-scarred veteran of a thousand campaigns."

"You mean bottle-scarred," somebody said.

"Fucking actor," Skip said, reaching to rumple Bobby's hair." 'Hark I hear the cannon's roar.' You know that joke?"

"I told you the joke."

" 'HarkI hear the cannon's roar.' When'd you ever hear a shot fired in anger? Last time they had a war," he said, "Bobby brought a note from his shrink. 'Dear Uncle Sam, Please excuse Bobby's absence, bullets make him crazy.' "

"My old man's idea," Bobby said.

"But you tried to talk him out of it. 'Gimmiea gun,' you said. 'Iwanna serve my country.' "

Bobby laughed. He had one arm around his girl and picked up his drink with his free hand. He said, "All I said was it sounded like dynamite to me."

Skip shook his head. "Dynamite's different. They're all different, different kinds of a bang. Dynamite's like one loud note, and a flatter sound than a cherry bomb. They all make a different sound. Grenade's completely different, it's like a chord."

"The lost chord," somebody said, and somebody else said, "Listen to this,it's poetry."

"I was going to call my joint Horseshoes amp; Hand Grenades," Skip said. "You know what they say, coming close don't count outside of horseshoes and hand grenades."

"It's a good name," Billie Keegan said.

"My partner hated it," Skip said. "FuckingKasabian, he said it didn't sound like a saloon, sounded like some kind of candy-ass boutique, some store inSoHo sells toys for private-school kids. I don't know, though. Horseshoes amp; Hand Grenades, I still like the sound of it."

"Horseshit and Hand Jobs," somebody said.

"MaybeKasabian was right, if that's what everybodywoulda wound up calling it." To Bobby he said, "You want to talk about the different sounds they make, you should hear a mortar. Someday getKasabian to tell you about the mortar. It's a hell of a story."

"I'll do that."

"Horseshoes amp; Hand Grenades," Skip said. "That's what weshoulda called the joint."

Instead he and his partner had called their place Miss Kitty's. Most people assumed a reference to "Gunsmoke," but their inspiration had been a whorehouse inSaigon. I did most of my own drinking at Jimmy Armstrong's, onNinth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. Miss Kitty's was on Ninth just below Fifty-sixth, and it was a little larger and more boisterous than I liked. I stayed away from it on the weekends, but late on a weekday night when the crowd thinned down and the noise level dropped, it wasn't a bad place to be.

I'd been in there earlier that night. I had gone first to Armstrong's, and around two-thirty there were only four of us left- Billie Keegan behind the bar and I in front of it and a couple of nurses who were pretty far gone on Black Russians. Billie locked up and the nurses staggered off into the night and the two of us went down to Miss Kitty's, and a little before four Skip closed up, too, and a handful of us went on down to Morrissey's.

Morrissey's wouldn't close until nine or ten in the morning. The legal closing hour for bars in the city ofNew York is 4:00 A.M., an hour earlier on Saturday nights, but Morrissey's was an illegal establishment and was thus not bound by regulations of that sort. It was one flight up from street level in one of a block of four-story brick houses onFifty-firstStreet between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. About a third of the houses on the block were abandoned, their windows boarded up or broken, some of their entrances closed off with concrete block.

The Morrissey brothers owned their building. It couldn't have cost them much. They lived in the upper two stories, let out the ground floor to an Irish amateur theater group, and sold beer and whiskey after hours on the second floor. They had removed all of the interior walls on the second floor to create a large open space. They'd stripped one wall to the brick, scraped and sanded andurethaned the wide pine floors, installed some soft lighting and decorated the walls with some framedAerLingus posters and a copy ofPearse's 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic ("Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and of the dead generations…). There was a small service bar along one wall, and there were twenty or thirty square tables with butcher-block tops.

We sat at two tables pushed together. SkipDevoe was there, and Billie Keegan, the night bartender at Armstrong's. And BobbyRuslander, and Bobby's girl for the evening, a sleepy-eyed redhead named Helen. And a fellow named EddieGrillo who tended bar at an Italian restaurant in the West Forties, and another fellow named Vince who was a sound technician or something like that at CBS Television.

I was drinking bourbon, and it must have been either Jack Daniel's or Early Times, as those were the only brands theMorrisseys stocked. They also carried three or four scotches, Canadian Club, and one brand each of gin and vodka.Two beers, Bud and Heineken.ACognac and a couple of odd cordials.Kahlúa, I suppose, because a lot of people were drinking Black Russians that year. Three brands of Irish whiskey, Bushmill's and Jameson and one called Power's, which nobody ever seemed to order but to which the Morrissey brothers were partial. You'd have thought they'd carry Irish beer, Guinness at least, but Tim Pat Morrissey had told me once that he didn't fancy the bottled Guinness, that it was awful stuff, that he only liked the draft stout and only on the other side of theAtlantic.

They were big men, theMorrisseys, with broad high foreheads and full rust-colored beards. They wore black trousers and highly polished black brogans and white shirts with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and they wore white butcher's aprons that covered them to their knees. The waiter, a slim, clean-shaven youth, wore the same outfit, but on him it looked like a costume. I think he may have been a cousin. I think he'd have had to have been some sort of blood kin to work there.

They were open seven days a week, from around 2:00 A.M. to nine or ten. They charged three dollars for a drink, which was higher than the bars but reasonable compared to most after-hour joints, and they poured a good drink. Beer was two dollars. They would mix most of the common drinks, but it was no place to order a pousse-café.