Rafe Bartholomew - Two and Two: McSorleys, My Dad, and Me

S ATURDAY MORNINGS WERE MY TWISTED version of heaven. I was five, six, seven years old, and every weekend I got to spend a few hours hanging out with grown men. Not just any men, but charactersworkingmen, old men, homeless men, policemen and firemen. Men who cursed and spat and groaned, who broke each others chops and answered insults with a Right here! and a handful of crotch. (They were also doting fathers, occasional criers, and poets, but those things didnt seduce me back then.) Men with names like Frank the Slob, whose last name, Slovensky, was itself slovenly; names like Fat Sal and Johnny Wadd, Dead Eddie and the Buggerman; if I was lucky, I might catch a glimpse of Bunghole Thompson.

I worshipped them all, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in every way, and the man I most wanted to be like was also the reason I was there. Where? McSorleys Old Ale House, New Yorks landmark saloon on East Seventh Street, open in the same spot since Old John McSorley founded the place on February 17, 1854. My father, Geoffrey Bartholomewbut at the bar its just Barthas worked at McSorleys since 1972.

Throughout my childhood, he brought me to the bar, partly because he and my mother had nowhere else to put me. Saturday mornings and early afternoons belonged to my mom. They were her time to attend antialcohol twelve-step meetings, to get lunch with friends, to study for her degrees in food studies. I was a few years too young to be left alone in our Manhattan apartment, so my dad took me to work. But my trips to McSorleys were always about more than simple necessity. My dad wanted to bring me, to show me his world of drunkards and lunatics, neighborhood sages and men in uniform. It was the late 1980s, when New York felt a little bit less like the playground for plutocrats it does today, and probably the last handful of years when you could get away with calling the East Village gritty.

Wed arrive at the bar between nine and ten in the morning, a little more than an hour before opening. While the waiters and barmen prepared for a seven-hour shift that usually meant serving ten to twelve kegs of McSorleys light and dark ale, the guys would toss a couple of bucks my way to buy coffee, Danishes, and an occasional bialy. Id memorize the order and scurry down the block to Kiev, the Ukrainian diner on the corner of Seventh and Second Avenue. The change was mine, a tip for my trouble, but the real reward came when the staff sat down for breakfast together. This was when the guys traded stories, bullshitting about palms gashed on broken mugs and laughing over customers who had to be eighty-sixed. One morning, there was talk of a fight the night before that had cleared out the bar, and my father dusted off a pair of homemade brass knuckles that a waiter hed worked with in the seventies had given him. It was a thin strip of metal that had been bent into a rectangular loop and wrapped with layers of black electrical tape, with space in the middle to slide ones fingers through and make a fist. Thank God no one ever needed to use em in the bar, my dad said. But the guys in Zorys day must have been rough if they were carrying these. He tossed me the weapon to try onit was so big that I could almost slip it over my wrist and wear it like a bracelet. I imagined being grown enough for my hand to fill it, not because I wanted to crack some skulls, but just to close my fist and feel that power, to join them in manhood.

Just as powerful as the flesh-and-blood characters of McSorleys was the bars history. I grabbed bar mops and wiped down tables under the eyes of Theodore Roosevelt, JFK, former New York governor Al Smith, and a slew of other public figures of Irish heritage or Roman Catholic background or just plain New York stock whose framed portraits lined the walls. I hauled blocks of cheddar cheese up from the basement refrigerator for my father to load into the same eight-foot-tall nineteenth-century icebox Old John had installed behind the bar when he opened McSorleys. (The iceman stopped delivering in the middle of the twentieth century, and although the iceboxs ancient faade was preserved, its guts were converted to a refrigerator.)

Between tasks, Id daydream, gazing at the ceiling, where Harry Houdinis handcuffs dangled a few feet from a medieval-style mace and a pair of Civil Warera shackles from the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. I already knew better than to reach up toward the sacred turkey wishbones hanging from the busted gas lamp above the ale taps. With steel in his voice, my father told me that first Saturday he brought me to work: Those belong to the neighborhood guys who fought in World War One and never came back. Nobody touches them. I scanned the newspaper clips and photographs and posters, absorbing the lore of heavyweight champs Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, Yankee legend Babe Ruth, and champion racehorses whose names and exploits might only still be remembered on the walls of McSorleys. John McSorley himself, with his intense, prideful eyes and white mutton-chop whiskers, stared down at me from various paintings and snapshots. Reminders of his legacy were everywhere: Signs in the bars front and back rooms reminded staff and customers to heed one of Old Johns original mottoes BE GOOD OR BE GONE while newspaper headlines from the day in August 1970 when female customers were first served at McSorleys marked the death of Old Johns other founding creed GOOD ALE, RAW ONIONS, AND NO LADIES.

The object that I came to love most was a framed certificateabout the same size as the bars yellowed replica of the Declaration of Independencethat honored my fathers first twenty years of employment. It hung from a spot high on the wall, looking down on the taps where my dad spent the majority of his shifts, pumping light and dark ale, surveying the floor, and barking orders to the waiters. I would mouth the words on his certificate while watching him work: