Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [16]
Of the old bars that have survived the latest flux of immigration into our neighborhood, the three that front the avenue itself are very good bars. The owners and their clientele have a laissez-faire attitude toward the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese treat them in kind. Neither culture seems particularly curious about the other, and that suits both just fine.
The only other bar near the Ho Chi Minh Trail was off the avenue, at the end of a dirt road that was stunted when the town ran out of funds to complete it in the mid-forties. The alley that remained never saw the sunlight. A trucking company’s hangar-sized depot loomed over it from the south. A dense thicket of three-deckers blocked it from the north. At the end of this alley sat the Filmore Tap, as dusty and seemingly forgotten as the aborted road it sat on.
Back in the days of the Dot Ave pub crawl, even men of my father’s ilk—brawlers and boozers all—didn’t go in the Filmore. It was stricken from the pub crawl map as if it didn’t exist, and in my entire life I never knew anyone who frequented the place on a regular basis.
There’s a difference between a tough working-class bar and a sleazy white-trash bar, and the Filmore epitomized the latter. Fights in working-class bars break out frequently enough but usually involve fists, maybe a beer bottle over someone’s head at worst. Fights broke out in the Filmore about every second beer and usually involved switchblades. Something about the place attracted men who’d lost anything worth caring about a long, long time ago. They came in here to nurse their drug habits and their alcoholism and their hate. And while you wouldn’t think there were a lot of people clamoring to get in their club, they didn’t look kindly upon potential applicants.
The bartender glanced at us as we came in from the sunlight Thursday afternoon and adjusted our eyes to the sallow dark green ambience of the place. Four guys huddled around the corner of the bar closest to the door, and they turned slowly, one by one, and looked at us.
“Where’s Lee Marvin when you need him?” I said to Angie.
“Or Eastwood,” Angie said. “I’d take Clint about now.”
Two guys shot pool in the back. Well, they were shooting pool. And then we came in and somehow messed up their game, and one of them looked up from the table and frowned.
The bartender turned his back to us. He stared at the TV above him, intently focused on an episode of Gilligan’s Island. The Skipper was hitting Gilligan on the head with his cap. The Professor was trying to break it up. The Howells laughed. Maryann and Ginger were nowhere to be found. Maybe that had something to do with the plot.
Angie and I took stools at the far corner of the bar, near the bartender, and waited for him to acknowledge us.
The Skipper kept hitting Gilligan. He was apparently mad about something involving a monkey.
“This is a great one,” I said to Angie. “They almost get off the island.”
“Really?” Angie lit a cigarette. “Pray tell, what stops them?”
“Skipper professes his love for his little buddy and they get all caught up in the wedding arrangements and the monkey steals the boat and all their coconuts.”
“Right,” Angie said. “I remember this one now.”
The bartender turned and looked down at us. “What?” he said.
“A pint of your finest ale,” I said.
“Two,” Angie said.
“Fine,” the bartender said. “But then you shut up until the