Marty’s drink or die club
by Neal Pollack
Clark & Foster
The guy at the end of the bar was dead. Carlos had seen dead guys before, so he knew. They usually didn’t get many customers in Ginny’s, especially not before 5:30, which was when Carlos had started his shift, slapping the mop around the pool table: A couple of bikers had gotten into it the night before, leaving the usual dried residue of blood, saliva, and Leinenkugel. Tonight, the guy slobbered in and took the stool by the window. He sat hunched, not out of some deformity, but just overall weakness, his hair long and gray and greasy under the Cubs hat, his eyes brown and wide and blank, staring at himself in the mirror, or maybe through the mirror, at something beyond.
“Get you something?” Carlos said.
No answer. Carlos set the mop by the pool table and walked through the hutch. The guy had flakes of dry snot on his mustache, which was as peppered and unkempt as his hair. He gave Carlos a little nod, though even that looked like a struggle, and raised his right hand familiarly. Carlos thought this was strange, since he’d never met the guy before. The hand shimmered turbulently.
“You want a drink, man?” Carlos said.
“Whuhhhhhh,” the guy said. “Wiiiiiiiiiii.”
Carlos spoke wino. He reached under the bar, pulled out a little tumbler, flipped a few ice cubes into it, and added a double shot of well whiskey. When a guy was this far in the bag, brands didn’t matter.
“Run a tab?”
“Ahhhhhhh,” said the guy.
“All right,” Carlos said. “That’s two seventy-five.”
The guy folded his arms on the bar and put his head down into them, without taking a sip of his whiskey. His jacket slid halfway off his shoulders. Screw it, Carlos thought, I’m not gonna shake this dude down. He can pay me when he wakes up.
A half hour later, the guy’s arms slid off the bar. He hovered there on the stool for a second, arms flopping, before momentum pitched him forward. He bonked the bar; he tipped sideways and then he fell, his head hitting the bottom rail before he stopped, facedown, fully sprawled, on the floor. There wasn’t any blood, but Carlos still didn’t want to touch him. Carlos called the apartment upstairs.
“Ginny,” he said. “You’d better get down here now.”
Then he noticed the business card. It had fluttered across the room, settling under the jukebox. Though he knew enough to stay away from the body, this he decided to touch. He walked across the room and picked up the card. It said,
MARTY’S DRINK OR DIE CLUB
PHILOSOPHERS, STATESMEN, MEN OF CHICAGO
Below that was an address, and Johnny Quinn’s signature, in a shaky hand, and then underneath that, in red lettering, all caps:
MEMBERSHIP EXPIRED
The red letters smelled strong, like they’d recently been applied with a Sharpie. Carlos was no better detective than he was a bartender, but he guessed that this dead guy was Johnny Quinn. And he definitely knew Marty’s.
In those days when the city gave real estate breaks to connected developers like stocking stuffers, there were two types of neighborhood bars: those that understood and cared about the changing landscape, and those that didn’t. Ginny’s fell in the latter category, one of the few leftovers from the 1960s hillbilly takeover of Uptown that had sent everyone else fleeing except for the most committed members of Students for a Democratic Society. Ginny had basically given up around 1987, when her sister died, and now she was one code violation from the end, which would happen soon enough. By this time next year, a mid-scale seafood restaurant would be serving up nineteen-dollar swordfish steaks in this spot, and Ginny would be sleeping on her son’s foldaway sofa in Schaumburg.
Marty’s was the other kind of bar.
When he’d been alive, Marty Halversen operated his place with a sense of whimsy. If any other working Chicago bar had once been a speakeasy, the newspaper reporters and Wild Chicago producers hadn’t discovered it yet. Marty had liked to boast that his liquor license was the third issued by the city after the end of Prohibition. He’d put the license over the bar, in the same frame with a picture he’d taken of Capone drinking in his basement. By the time Marty left, those days of potluck Sundays, sponsored basketball teams, and neighborhood golf outings were fading, but the new owner, a neighborhood kid named Scott Silverstein, spoke just the right mix of regular-guy sympathy and monied schmooze to keep it going. He loved giving tours, showing cameramen and tourists Capone’s secret cashier’s booth, the trap door to the basement, and the old still that he’d preserved so well.
At night, the place filled with actors and bankers and lawyers, anyone willing to dress down a little and appreciate original fixtures and tin ceilings but also willing to spend five bucks on a weiss beer. The regular crowd still gathered to drink with Scott and raise a glass to Marty’s memory and the glories of what once had been. The old patrons still had their corner of the bar. Scott could put in all the kitschy lighting he wanted. They owned the bar’s soul.
The regular crowd was in session when Carlos walked into Marty’s. He saw three guys conspiring around the bar toward the back, deep in conversation with a bartender leaning against a brightly painted wooden mermaid. Shot and beer glasses had accumulated. One of the guys looked to be in his mid-sixties, with a long, confident face, like a neighborhood Kirk Douglas. The other guys, including the bartender, were around forty. Carlos went over to them. One of the younger guys, pudgy, short-haired, and excitable, was in the middle of a monologue.
“... A movie just isn’t a movie unless there’s a talking ape in it,” he was saying.
“When was the last great monkey movie, anyway?” said the other young guy, who had his blond hair tied back in a ponytail.
“Any of you work here?” Carlos asked.
“My name is Schultz,” said the pudgy guy. “I know nothing! Nothing!”
They broke up laughing. Carlos had no idea why. He pulled the card out of his pocket.
“I found this on the floor at Ginny’s,” he said. “You know this dude?”
The older guy, in his last year or two of distinguished handsomeness, took the card from Carlos. A severe look crawled across his face. He let out a puff of air.
“Ah,” he said. “Little Johnny Quinn. To sleep, perchance to dream.”
“The cops took his body away awhile ago,” said Carlos.
“Was yours the last face upon which he gazed?” the man inquired.
“I was behind the bar, and he just fell down,” Carlos said.
“A sadder day we haven’t seen in these environs for some years,” the man said.
“What does this mean,” Carlos said, “Membership Expired “?
Eyebrows raised at the bar.
“The game is afoot!” said the guy with the ponytail.
“Who is Keyser Soze?” said the monkey man.
“Monsieur Poirot,” said the older guy, “my name is Francis Carmody. We’ve been waiting for you!” He spoke to the rest of his fellowship. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this man has a suspicious nature. I suggest we repair to our hideout a little bit later to alleviate his concerns with libation!”
The guys all raised their beers. As one, they said, nearly whispered: “Aye! Aye! Aye and aye! We drink, we drink, we drink, or else we die!”
What the fuck, Carlos thought.
Francis Carmody lived in a split-level bungalow a few streets west of Clark, on a block that still housed many people who’d been consciously alive in the 1960s. He’d owned the place for more than forty years, and had the accumulated basement of newspapers, magazines, and lyric opera programs to show for his tenure. An ill-placed match could have burned down the neighborhood. A decade previous, the paper volume had reached critical mass, but rather than recycle — a habit which Mayor Daley, an unlikely environmentalist, encouraged in all Chicagoans — Francis did something wholly out of character: He built an addition onto his house. It was the only improvement he made in all his decades of living there.