Two and Two

CHAPTER 1

The Company of Men

I HAD MY FATHER'S SATURDAY routine memorized before I learned my multiplication tables. He'd roll out of bed around 9 a.m., two hours before the bar opened. I'd be ready long before then, waiting on our living room couch, pushing the last few Frosted Flakes around a bowl of cereal-sweetened milk until I'd hear him groan or sometimes fart from the other side of my parents' bedroom door. Moments later he'd emerge and take his first knock-kneed, half-stumbling steps into wakefulness. Saturday was his hump day, the middle of his work week, and it meant one more grueling haul behind the bar before the relative calm of Sunday and Monday night. So as eager as I was to start bugging him about McSorley's on those Saturdays, I knew to wait—at least long enough for him to hit the bathroom and then pour a mug of coffee.

After he'd taken a couple of sips, though, I couldn't help but start harassing him. Who's working the bar with you today? Which waiters are on the floor? Is there a doorman? Is Henry in the kitchen? Or Eddie or Jackie Ng? What about the shithouse? How long can I stay?

"What's your mother say?" he'd ask.

"I'll get lunch with Mimi and then pick him up around two," she'd answer without looking up from the Times Metro section.

I was in. After two cups of coffee and a couple of spoonfuls of yogurt, my father would grab a worn-out sock and a small tin of mink oil and start waterproofing his work boots. They came waterproof when he bought them, but my father preferred extra protection. With his hand inside the sock, he'd scoop out a mound of mink oil with his index finger and spread it over the toe of his boot, working back toward the heel. Each week he'd apply a fresh layer, and each week he could count on being soaked with ale and water from the knees down by shift's end.

Then he'd pull on a long-sleeved thermal undershirt and start buttoning a white dress shirt over it. McSorley's bartenders have been wearing white button-downs since the tavern opened, and my father always had a stack of them—washed, starched, and folded—ready for work. He'd leave the top open at his neck, fasten the two small buttons at the tips of his collar, and then tuck the shirt into a pair of faded blue jeans. He'd pull a pair of heavy wool socks up to his calves, then squeeze a shot of talcum powder into his boots before working his feet inside. Next, he'd roll the sleeves of both shirts up to his elbows and spend a few moments rubbing a small growth on his wrist.

He'd given the gumdrop-sized ganglion (a kind of cystic fluid tumor caused by inflamed tendons) a name: the knob. It had formed on the inside of his right wrist, some kind of repetitive-use injury from his years of pumping ale and grabbing giant handfuls of mugs. But to hear my father tell it, the knob never hurt much. Still, he thought it an eyesore, so he would strap a leather brace with three buckles and a zipper around his wrist for extra support.

"You ready?" he'd ask, and since I had spent the previous half hour watching him suit up, I never was. It didn't matter, though. I'd say yes and scramble to my room to pull on a sweatshirt and chase him out the door.

Normally, my father would bike to work. But I was too young to ride alongside him, and the days of seeing hip New York dads pedal their kids around in custom bike seats wouldn't arrive for another fifteen years. So we'd either walk the half hour to McSorley's from our apartment in the far southwest corner of Greenwich Village, or, if we were running late or my father's knees were hurting, we'd hail a cab.

By the time we set foot in the bar, around ten, the door would be unlocked, with a wooden chair blocking the entrance to dissuade unknowing customers from moseying in before eleven. Richie the King, the back-room waiter, would already be inside, setting up along with the chef, who'd be chopping vegetables and warming chicken stock for the day's soup. Frank "the Slob" Slovensky, a longtime customer turned informal employee, would be there, too, sitting at the table next to the women's restroom, slumped over a crate of onions and peeling them to make slicing easier for the chef.

"Hey, Rafe, you wanna work?" Richie would ask. I never thought of saying anything but yes.

"Run downstairs and grab a bag of coal for the stove."

I knew the route by heart: into the back room, between Frank the Slob's table and the one next to it, through the emergency exit that opens into the ground-floor hallway of the tenement building at 15 East Seventh Street, and down the steps into the cellar. The room was filled with rolls of duct tape and hammers that looked old enough to have been swung by Old John McSorley. Broken chairs were scattered throughout, waiting for someone to replace their missing legs. Behind the staircase was a mound of white burlap sacks, each filled with a fifty-pound load of coal. I'd grab one, drag it back into the bar, and watch Richie build a fire in the blackened potbelly stove that had been in use at McSorley's since the nineteenth century.

"Jimbo!" my father called. (It was a term of endearment that, along with its derivatives Jim and Jimmy, he and other bar employees constantly flung back and forth.)

"Quit pulling your pud and get over here! You know what to do." He'd hold out a tin can filled with steaming water and a pair of long-necked pliers. It was time to extract nickels and dimes and quarters from the tables in the front room. Over the years, customers had adopted the tradition of hammering coins between the seams of McSorley's hundred-year-old tabletops. My job was to remove the change from the tables and hopefully dissuade drinkers from committing copycat crimes. If customers didn't look down and see coins wedged into the cracks of their tables, they might not decide to smash their own little ten-cent bits of history into the establishment. The practice did just enough damage to the sturdy old tables to cross the Be Good or Be Gone line. As payment, I was allowed to keep whatever money I retrieved.

My game plan with the pliers was simple: First, I'd scan a table, searching for the coins that looked to have been hammered in most recently. Those came out easy. If a large enough sliver of the coin was protruding from the tabletop, I'd just latch on to it with my tool and wiggle back and forth until it popped out. Sometimes I'd use my fingertips to roll a bit of the coin up from the table—just enough so the pliers could grip it. I targeted quarters first; then nickels, then dimes. Nickels came before dimes because although they were worth less, they were harder to mistake for pennies. A dime is obviously slimmer and more silver, but imagine how being lodged inside an ale-soaked table for a couple of decades might alter that appearance.

That's where the can of hot water came in handy—to soak away whatever grunge had grown on the coins over the years. Just about every Saturday I'd manage to pry loose a quarter that had been encased long enough to turn green and grow fuzz.

"Make sure you get the feduh, Jimbo." Feduh, pronounced "feh-DUH" with the emphasis on "duh," is what grows in dank corners of hundred-year-old bars. It was there when my father first started bringing me to McSorley's, and it's still there now, almost thirty years later. Feduh is another word for the Yiddish schmutz. The term comes from a Ukrainian immigrant one of the other bartenders would bring to McSorley's on weekday mornings to help clean and set up the bar. This guy's name was Fedyuh (or something like that—my dad's ability to render Cyrillic-to-English phonetic spelling is probably far from perfect), and he complained about wiping the slime from behind the bar. Naturally, my father named the gunk after him, and the term stuck.

Feduh isn't simple grime, but something more primordial. It's no longer recognizable as plain old dirt. It becomes cheeselike, sometimes gooey, and working at McSorley's can make you a connoisseur of the stuff. Feduh tends to inspire a gross, corporeal fascination. You can't just wipe it off and forget it. You feel compelled to examine it, play with it, show it to the guys.

Once, I decided to share it with my father. "Jimbo," I called out to my dad, eager to use his lingo, "look at this one." Then I flipped a mossy coin at him, freshly pulled from a table, knowing that his reflexes would force him to catch it. When it landed in his palm and he felt his fist close around the slimy metal, he let out a retch and a laugh. "You little fucker!" he said, tossing the coin into a sink full of hot water and dishwashing solution behind the bar. "You're gonna get it now."

He wasn't kidding. That morning, I saw how quickly feduh pranks can escalate into all-out warfare. I also learned that my father's knowledge of the place left me hopelessly outgunned in this arms race. There's more unseen gunk growing behind that ancient bar than in the rest of McSorley's combined. Over the next fifteen minutes, while I helped Richie spread a fresh layer of sawdust over the saloon's smooth hardwood floor—"toss it in handfuls like you're throwing out chicken feed," Richie advised—my father went on a schmutz expedition. He scooped feduh from the damp shelf beneath the ale taps; he fished crud from the drainage hole in the corner of the bar where the waiters pick up overflowing orders of twenty, forty, one hundred ales at a time; he lifted the rubber mats on the tile floor behind the bar and wiped what lay below. Then, once he'd assembled the feduh smorgasbord and collected it all in a single bar rag, he got his revenge.

"Jimbo!" I looked up to find the rank ball of cloth hurtling through the air at my head. Before I could think to dodge it, my arm shot up and snatched it from the air. And as soon as I did, I felt ages of accumulated New York filth grease my palm. It was grainy and slick and smelled like rot. My dad was laughing his balls off behind the bar, and I couldn't help but join him.

By half past ten the bar was ready for business. Richie had emptied a bottle of bleach into the urinals to freshen up the men's room. McSorley's weapons-grade spicy mustard had been mixed—the condiment was made every morning with mustard powder, water, and suds from newly tapped kegs, then decanted into beer mugs to be left on the tables and spread over saltine crackers and squares of cheddar cheese. The phalanx of mugs that had been lined up atop the bar when we arrived had been washed, scrubbed, rinsed, and stacked on shelves behind the taps, ready to be rinsed again and then filled with ale. The coal inside the potbelly stove was glowing, and the staff sat around the table next to it, five men in white undershirts and blue jeans, reading the Daily News and the Post, cursing about George Steinbrenner and the dismal late-eighties Yankees, and sipping coffee from blue cardboard cups before work.

Most of their banter was shop talk—barman's gossip about fights and scams and sex, shot through with gallows humor and cynicism. I was too young to understand much of it, but just sitting there allowed me to soak in their world and absorb a communication style that felt like a way of being—all dismissive chortles, knowing nods, belly laughs, and surprised grunts.

You should have seen the fucking disaster in here Thursday night. Aussies at one table, bikers on the other side of the front room, and cops in between. It was the cops we had to throw out first, and I'm still finding bits of the Aussies' puke in the shitter.

Did you guys hear about Ronnie, the manager of one of the Irish pubs out in Sunnyside? His entire building flooded at six in the morning after he got home from work because the crazy prick tried to flush the tape from the bar's cash register down his toilet!

After a few minutes of story time, I'd usually wander the bar, looking at the framed photos and drawings on the walls, revisiting the faces of historical figures and McSorley's misfits before the customers arrived and made it impossible to climb on chairs and press my face up against the wall to get a good look. My father had me playing baseball at age five and started taking me to recreation centers to teach me basketball a couple of years later, so my Saturday tour of McSorley's inevitably focused on sports artifacts.

Behind the bar, I'd reach up and palm the weathered softballs sitting atop a row of old ceramic McSorley's mugs. The softballs had accumulated over the years, brought in by guys from local firehouses at the end of their rec-league seasons, until an entire section of wall behind the bar was given over to their display. Some of them remained fairly unmarked by time, so it was still possible to make out the engine company numbers the firefighters had inked onto the leather orbs. Some had been there so long that their exteriors had dried and darkened and shriveled and cracked.

Down the bar from the softballs, I'd take a moment to pay my respects to the Babe. High in the ranks of treasured McSorley artifacts, along with the wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth, a signed letter from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and others, is a print of Nat Fein's Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, "The Babe Bows Out." Fein captured the image of Babe Ruth two months before his death in 1948, as he climbed out onto the field for his final curtain call at Yankee Stadium. The story goes that Fein himself made the print, signed it, and gave it to then-manager of McSorley's Harry Kirwan, and customers who've been to Cooperstown have sworn that the framed photo behind the bar is larger than the one on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Next I found my way to the boxers. McSorley's has been around long enough to encompass much of the history of American prizefighting, and it's no coincidence that a New York watering hole opened by an Irishman in the mid-nineteenth century would favor the sport's great Irish champions. Just above the Babe, next to a bust of John F. Kennedy, is a bronze figurine of John L. Sullivan, the Boston-born fighter who was boxing's last bare-knuckle heavyweight champ. Just beside the taps, affixed to the wall that separates McSorley's front room from the back, there's a signed portrait of Jack Dempsey, framed in the center of a collection of Mecca Cigarettes boxing trading cards. The Mecca cards dated back to the early 1900s, and I loved to circle around to the other side of the wall, which had a hole cut in it to display the descriptions on the cards' backs.

Joe Gans, lightweight champion: Fought over 150 battles winning all but 5.… He died of consumption in Baltimore, August 10, 1910.

Gentleman Jim Corbett, heavyweight champion of the world: Won the heavyweight championship from John L. Sullivan, who had held the title for 12 years.… Lost the title to Bob Fitzsimmons in 14 rounds at Carson, Nevada, March 17, 1897. (That would have been the forty-third St. Patrick's Day at McSorley's.) Retired from the ring and is now an actor.

Back then, I had no real understanding of what Dempsey meant to the sport. Nor did I really know a thing about Joe Gans—that he's among the greatest lightweights of all time or that he was the first African-American world champion. But the boxers still mattered to me. They were another part of McSorley's that invited me into a past and a tradition I might never have discovered otherwise, and they made a twelve-year-old in 1994 feel like he could step back into 1906.

The last stop on my rounds would be a sliver of space in the front room between the end of the bar and a round window table near the entrance. The best piece of McSorley's sports history is up there, and it has nothing to do with an iconic moment or legendary athletes. It's a team picture called "The McSorley Nine," a black-and-white photograph from 1877 of a recreational baseball team sponsored by the bar and led by Peter McSorley, one of Old John's sons. The men posed, some seated and some standing, all wearing plain white uniforms with cleats and boxy, short-brimmed caps, gazing stone-faced into the camera. There isn't a smile among them—just handlebar mustaches, steely eyes, and the player in the middle with one hand on his hip and the other holding a wooden bat against the ground like a cane.

I always wondered why they looked so serious. Were they photographed after a heartbreaking loss? Were they preparing for a big game? Were men in the 1870s just like that—sturdy, cocksure, emotionless? That masculine ideal has stuck around through the ages, but I grew up around a crew of McSorley's men who knew how to play the strong, silent type but preferred the humor and camaraderie and bawdiness of bar life. There was no apparent lightheartedness among the McSorley Nine.

The greatest mystery, however, was what had happened to the last member of the McSorley Nine. Every time I walked up to inspect the photo, I'd count the players from left to right. One, two, three… seven, eight… eight. The McSorley Nine had no ninth man. And the eight guys pictured didn't seem concerned with his whereabouts. I imagined what he must have looked like. A husky first baseman—like I was back then—left-handed, adept at scooping short-hop throws from the dirt, and a line-drive hitter who always pulled the ball. Maybe he was sick that day. Maybe he didn't believe in team portraits. Maybe he was drunk at McSorley's. Maybe he was the one taking the photograph. Every week, I imagined something different, and every week it seemed as plausible as the last week's guess.

Okay, I lied. There's an even greater mystery in the McSorley Nine photo. In a way, it explains what happened to the ninth man. One of the first times I stood looking at the portrait, my father crept behind me. "Look over here," he whispered in my ear, and pointed between the player standing in the center with the bat and another player to his left. The picture was taken in a park, with lush trees and grass and clear skyline in the background. In the spot where my father directed me to look, in the negative space between the players and the tree branches behind them, I spotted the outline of another man—the final member of the McSorley Nine, or just an apparition.

"Do you see the ghost?" my father asked. It looked like a McSorley's bartender. The empty white sky formed his dress shirt; then the branches shaped the hazy outline of an oblong head with a mustache.

"It looks like you," I said.

"That's what everyone says," my dad told me. "Now look at this." He pointed to the photograph next to "The McSorley Nine," a framed image, also from 1877, titled "McSorley Chowder Club." It was a group portrait from one of the annual McSorley picnics, when the bar's owners and employees and family and friends would head to North Brother Island for an afternoon of frolicking in the summer sun. Again, my father pointed to an area at the center-left of the image. "You see it?"

I did. It was the same apparition, the same oval head and mustache and narrow eyes formed by the white background and tree branches and leaves in front of it.

"The ghost?" I answered. It was as if my father, who hadn't set foot in McSorley's until his first night in New York City back in 1967, had been there all along.

"Yep," my dad said. Maybe ending up at the bar had always been his destiny. Maybe it was mine, too.

I'm afraid I'm making McSorley's sound like a library. The artifacts, the gravitas, the legacy—that's all part of it, but the bar's energy is often anything but contemplative. As a boy, I usually couldn't inspect the Chowder Club ghosts for more than a minute or two before a bartender or waiter would pull me aside to workshop his newest dirty joke or saloon story. Scott, who wasn't even twenty years old when he began working at McSorley's in 1986, felt like an older brother, and I regarded his stock wisdom on the Yankees and Rangers as if it were scripture. An ale deliveryman from Barbados named Jeffrey never missed an opportunity to recommend a product called China Brush to my dad and the other barmen—it was some kind of numbing salve that prolonged erections and made Jeffrey a world-class Casanova. Then he'd grab seven-year-old me by the shoulders and impart life lessons: First time you get a woman, boy, you better eat the pussy good! Due to my age, Jeffrey's love advice might have qualified as a criminal act, but inside McSorley's it was just another story. And nothing Jeffrey came up with ever came close to matching the lewd genius of Tommy Lloyd.

Lloyd was my father's sidekick on many of those Saturdays. While Bart stood behind the taps and poured ale, Lloyd would scamper up and down the length of the bar, serving customers, collecting cash, making change, and grabbing empty mugs to wash. He stood about five foot seven, with wiry, pipe-cleaner arms and a perfect bowl of straight brown hair that flopped over his forehead and stopped just short of his satellite dish ears. Lloyd had come over from Roscommon, Ireland, in the sixties. He had been bartending with my father for the better part of a decade. When he told stories and laughed, his smile seemed to take up two-thirds of his face, and around me he was always spinning those blarney-filled yarns. To a boy growing up in New York, he might as well have been an in-the-flesh leprechaun.

"Hey there, lad, your old man told me you took up an attitude with him the other night. Is that true?"