Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [32]
Rite Liquors is like a spinster among the young and the beautiful. Directly across the street are two new stores: Smack, a clothing boutique, and Bamboo Nail Spa. There’s a Starbucks on the corner, and down the street a sushi bar and the Smoke Daddy, a rib joint (which despite the fact that it is relatively trendy has some of the best ribs in the city, along with live blues bands). But Rite Liquors refuses to give ground. Patrons, mostly men, still beat the bar’s owner to work, waiting under the awning at seven a.m. for the doors to open and for the beer and whiskey to flow.
“It’s still here.” The voice has a warbly quality to it. Guinan, who at sixty-nine is slightly built and light-footed, has sneaked up behind me. His face, which looks alternately dour, amused, and baffled, is almost cartoonish-looking in its pliability; Guinan has the expressiveness of a mime. Guinan was once a regular at Rite Liquors, where he would come to sketch two patrons in particular. One was a young blonde bartender, Dorota, who had come from Poland just a few years earlier, and who complained to Guinan that his sketches made her appear unhappy. (The bartenders at Rite Liquors still tend to be recently arrived young Polish women.) The other was Loretta, an African-American woman who had worked in a commercial printing facility for years until her hands mysteriously broke out in a bad case of eczema. She was on disability when Guinan met her, drinking to fill the void in her life. Embarrassed by the unsightliness of her hands, she wore black leather gloves, which made her look exotic among the young men in torn leather jackets and the old-timers in frayed shirts.
Guinan hadn’t been here for a number of years, but little has changed; the place is still owned by Michael Liacopoulos, who came over from southern Greece and purchased it from a Jewish man in 1982. As you walk in, there’s a liquor store to the left, and to the right, running the length of the seventy-foot store, is a narrow, handsome bar made of oak. A thirty-five-year-old Budweiser clock hangs over its center; a nineteen-inch television sits at one end. A pool table is in the rear. The clientele, at least during the week, is a melting pot of Ukrainians, Poles, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans; on weekends, the young professionals and artists—the recent arrivals—come to play pool. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Liacopoulos serves his patrons a turkey dinner.
Guinan and I take a seat at the bar. “Used to be packed with mailmen before they went to work,” Guinan tells me. The local post office is the bar’s neighbor, and while the postal workers come in less frequently, they still appear for the occasional shot and a beer. Guinan was reluctant to meet me here because in the early 1990s, a local weekly at Guinan’s suggestion had written about the bar, and what was written—that it was a dive—angered the tavern’s owners. This is the first time he’s been back since that article, but all seems to have been forgiven: Liacopoulos greets him warmly. Guinan orders a Zywiec, a Polish beer, and—although he says he’s stopped smoking—pulls out a pack of Marlboros. “I’m smoking now just ’cause I’m in a bar,” he explains.
For nearly thirty years, Guinan drank