Malachy McCourt - Singing My Him Song

It’s amazing what the imagination can do when you’ve had a few drinks and have a voluble tongue to convince the other person of the imminence of a frightful incarceration. I was convinced that the entire police fraternity of Long Island was being mobilized to get us heinous criminals who had cheated a restaurant, and had Epstein believing the same. We were bedeviled, too, by the sight of the gas tank needle doing its delicate dance and gently touching empty, with no gas stations open at that time of the morning. We stopped at every closed gas station and practically sucked out the gas remaining in the hoses. At one of them, we discovered a jerry can half full of blessed petrol, which we stole without so much as a “Sorry to have to do this.” I would have stolen it from an old-age pensioner to avoid another night of durance vile. ’Twas that plus faith plus talking nicely to the car, now named Matilda, that got Epstein and myself to civilization and safety.

I deposited the odd bits of clothing in a room in Epstein’s digs in Astoria, Queens, New York. The building was owned by the uncle and Epstein’s mother, and the lad was living rent-free. There’s nothing like a rent-free bed in a reasonably comfortable flat with a roommate who thinks you are the wittiest, wisest Hibernian he has ever encountered, and when I realized that the FBI was not coming after me for an unpaid dinner tab of $19.27 plus tax, I relaxed and circulated once more.

The atmosphere in the apartment was ripeish, to say the least, which I attributed to deficiencies in the housekeeping department, but upon inspection it seemed clean enough for a bachelor’s digs. The smell seemed to get worse, though, and finally my nose led me to the epicenter of this horrendous stink. Under the place of my repose, my bed, I discovered a dead crow decomposing and giving nourishment to a full complement of maggots and other guardians of the environment. That foul of the air took its last flight out my window, accompanied by larvae, worms, maggots, and other bosom buddies taking their first and last flight, startling a gossip of elderly women exchanging dark forebodings in front of the building, and giving them fodder for even darker words about the world of dead carrion that flies.

Great barmen, like great hairdressers, are reputed to havewhat are known as followings; that is, they attract coteries of bods who like the way a bartender talks about sports, or mixes a martini, or in the case of the lasses, the bit of flattery and name recognition. ’Twas said that I had such a following. I wasn’t being unduly modest when I said I didn’t believe it, as I honestly wondered who in the name of Allah would follow me anywhere. But if Epstein believed this, as apparently he did, and if his uncle was going to finance my reentry into the bar biz, as apparently he would, who was I to say nay, and the search for a suitable premises began.

We found an out-of-the-way spot at 118 East Eighty-eighth Street called the Dublin Bay Café, apparently owned by a Dublin man name Larry Luby. We broached the idea of purchasing the joint but the man did not seem able to say yes or say no. He mumbled something about having to consult with somebody or other, that he didn’t really own the place.

The real, but concealed, owners were a couple of shadowy speculators, a husband-and-wife team, smallish stout people named Joey and Tessie who, despite appearances, were brilliant at deal-making in real estate, saloons, diners, jukeboxes, and cigarette machines. Tessie did a wonderful good-kindly-mother act, whereas Joey did a lot of growling and talked about cutting people’s balls off and other sporting events of that nature. Because of some legal difficulty with the SLA (that would be the State Liquor Authority, and not the Symbionese Liberation Army, though the one often seems no more reasonable to deal with than the other), they were prohibited from being licensees in any premi wherein liquor was vended.

So we negotiated with them, and settled upon an agreeable price, and all that was needed was the check from Steve Epstein’s uncle, which we were assured was a routine matter and would be taken care of as soon as said uncle returned from whatever trip he was off on. But the weeks began to pile up and so did the pressure from the stout people to conclude this deal. I never did figure out whether Epstein was in a fantasy world about raising the money for the purchase of the place all along, or if his uncle just changed his mind in the end. Finally, though, Epstein confessed that his uncle had no intention of financing a saloon for his dopey nephew and his drunken Irish pal.

’Twas left to me to inform the other folk that there was no money in the coffers and the deal was off. They weren’t too perturbed, as they immediately had an idea for me. They would shift Mr. Luby to another location, and put me on the Dublin Bay license. I would move into one of the three studio flats in the building. Fine with me, and I immediately took over and changed the name to Himself and did the bit of renovation to make the joint more publike.

While all this was going on, Diana’s telephone number remained imprinted on the brain, but I was hesitant to call her, as I was sure she wouldn’t remember me. There was many a night I’d take out that matchbook cover and look at the RIverside-9 number, go for the phone, and then find a list of reasons not to call. She wouldn’t remember me. She wouldn’t be interested in me. There was the vaguest possibility she’d remember me, but suppose she said, “Why are you calling me?” or said she was deeply involved with someone, or demanded—angrily, of course—to know who gave me her number. So, even though my mind was slowly letting go of its obsession with my now ex-wife, Linda, and it came back again and again to a vision of Diana, with all its lovely promise, I never called. I’d say bollox on it and have another evening at the drink as we fixed up the new saloon, Himself.

I’d applied to that wonderfully corrupt agency, the State Liquor Authority, to be the official licensee of Himself and was eagerly awaiting approval, as the only blot on my record was the disorderly conduct charge from having barged into Linda’s apartment in a somewhat violent manner a couple of years prior. They’d been handing out licenses fairly freely to the Mafia all over the city, and failing to take them back even if the licensee had someone garroted on the premises or put explosives in the toilet to blow the shit out of an enemy. So, imagine my astonishment when the official envelope arrived to inform me that I was turned down.

It was due to the fact that I had been on another license, five or six years previously, that had been revoked. While still a partner in my first bar, Malachy’s, I’d briefly gone into partnership for a minute sum of money with one Lew Futterman in an establishment in Greenwich Village.

Lew, a progressive young fellow, whom I’d met during my rugby-playing career, had noticed that there was no place in all of New York City where couples who were not of the same race could get together to have a beverage and a bite of food without being given bad tables near the kitchen, along with insults and sullen service from waiters and bartenders. He had the logical and commercial idea that were we to open a spot where the miscegenationists could gather, not alone would we be doing God’s work, we could make pots of money in the process, because, you see, black folks’ money is the precise color of white folks’ moola, and has exactly the same value.

I needed a bit of capital for this venture, so I spoke to the missus on the subject, as Linda’s parents were well set, and there were indications of a trust fund lurking in some vault. She approached the parents and they, in concert, simultaneously, not to mention together, rose to their full respective heights with an “Aha! We told you he was a fortune hunter, this Mick, and he wants to destroy your fortune while making his.”