Chicago Noir

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,

Below that was an address, and Johnny Quinn’s signature, in a shaky hand, and then underneath that, in red lettering, all caps:

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.

Francis needed the addition because he collected films, and not DVDs, either. Francis didn’t believe in digital images. One could possibly make the argument that celluloid was equally dishonest, but if one made that argument, Francis would shut down the spigot and you’d find yourself drinking alone.

At about 9:30 p.m. on that Wednesday, Carlos found himself walking through the back door of Francis Carmody’s 350-square-foot home theater. Carlos had been lured there with the promise of free booze. The last movie he’d seen was The Chronicles of Riddick, and then only because his date had a thing for Vin Diesel and Carlos hoped that little tingle might carry over into afterwards. So Francis’s collection of framed posters from Jean Harlow and Errol Flynn movies didn’t mean anything to him. Carlos didn’t remember Jessica Lange as King Kong’s girlfriend, much less Fay Wray. And when Francis announced that the evening would feature, after selected trailers and shorts, a double feature of The Informer and The Lady from Shanghai, to Carlos he might as well have been announcing lessons in medieval Catalan.

“These films were beloved by Johnny Quinn, blessed be his memory,” Francis said.

A bottle of high-end vodka had appeared. Carlos didn’t see where it came from, but these guys had been buying him drinks for hours, and he was already close to hammered.

Francis Carmody poured little tumblers for them all. “We quaff sublimely for Johnny,” he said. “For he drank too wisely, and never from the well.”

“Indeed,” said the guy with the ponytail.

They took their seats on comfortable couches that smelled of two generations of cat, facing a screen that looked like it’d been rescued from a high school janitor’s closet. Francis stood behind them at a projector. Behind him was a wall of film canisters. He pulled one down and pressed a button on the wall to his left.

“Laura,” he said, “we’re ready for the boiled meats.”

On cue, a hunched woman in an unattractive housedress appeared, bearing a tray of flabby hot dogs, hydrogenated buns, and the appropriate condiments.

“My wife, Laura,” Francis said to Carlos. “The bulwark of my soul.”

She put the hot dogs on a table in front of the couches and shuffled out of the room without a word.

“A fine lady,” Francis said.

They watched a Carmen Miranda short, then one starring Esther Williams, followed by a Chuck Jones cartoon that made fun of Hitler. Francis poured the vodka between each reel. Francis showed The Lady from Shanghai, but the movie stopped after an hour, without an ending.

“Art is at its purest when unfinished,” Francis said. “I believe Johnny Quinn would agree.”

“Hear hear,” said the guy who liked monkey movies.

Finally, Carlos, who’d floated along on an existential sea all evening, oblivious from drink, said something.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“Ah, the natural inquisitiveness of youth has surfaced at last,” Francis said. “Boys, shall we lift the veil of ignorance from his eyes?”

Francis stood in front of the screen, lecturing without a pointer.

“The only thing more intoxicating than the free flow of drink,” he said, “is the free flow of ideas. On the rare occasions that the two combine, it’s possible to know the face of God. Once, philosopher-kings who worked for a living, men who knew their way equally around a factory floor and a lecture hall, ruled Chicago. Their era was short but glorious. The city could barely build enough taverns to hold them all. They loved their learning and their drink, and the platonic joys of sophisticated male friendship. I was one of those men.

“So was Marty Halversen, the finest man I ever had the privilege of knowing, a scion of the Navy and a veteran of the slaughterhouse, and the holder of a degree in English literature from DePaul. He was a man truly worthy of the title tavern keeper, a great poet, a lover of women, and a friend to the neighborhood. I revered him more than my own father.

Much more.

“Marty believed above all things, as do I, in the enlightenment of the human soul. To that end, we chose the finest thinkers of all the fine thinkers we knew, and we formed Marty’s Drink or Die Club. We were young then, so the club’s idea seemed fanciful. There would come a time, we joked, when our doctors would tell us that we had to stop drinking or else we would die. But not to drink is, in essence, to die anyway. Therefore we made a pledge, forged at the bottom of a glass: If one of us received the Hippocratic word, then the rest of us were bound by fraternal duty to make it come true.”

At that, Francis held a glass as if for a toast, and everyone in the room drank on cue. He continued: “For twenty-five years, the club met happily. We formed a protective shell of ideas and camaraderie around ourselves, our intellects serving as a shield and a balm against the bitter shocks of the wider world. Then one day Marty came in the bar with his face ashen yet resigned.

“‘Gentlemen,’ he said to us, ‘I have heard the bad news. According to my doctor, my liver is Dunkirk. He’s told me that I’ve downed my last. He even brought in a specialist, who confirmed the toxicity of my X-ray. It’s all gone to shit.’

“Oh, we thought, the shame! Our leader, the owner of our resting place, had been stopped from drinking by diagnosis. But what he said next sealed our fates in the afterlife: ‘I expect you to honor our pact,’ he said, ‘and to honor it this afternoon.’

“We laughed. Death to us, though we certainly found ourselves aging, was still a metaphor. But not to Marty, who had us in years and in gallons consumed. He produced four vials from his pocket and placed them on the bar.

“‘Three of these contain tap water,’ he said. ‘The other is pure tetraethyl pyrophosphate. Colorless, odorless, and generally fatal. You will each take one vial and empty its contents into my last glass of Bushmill’s, which I will now pour.’

“He did so, a double.

“‘Within an hour,’ he continued, ‘I’ll be dead, and you’ll all be culpable. Yet none of you will be. It’s not murder if you have the consent of the murdered. Or maybe it is. Regardless, we need to assume we won’t get caught. But once this pact is sealed in embalming fluid, you must all promise to follow me when your own day comes.’

“We promised what Marty asked, though not without some subtle tears, because we understood that a strange combination of whimsy and duty had now bound us all to the same end. But before that happened, we agreed that the club shouldn’t die with us. For every light extinguished, another would flicker on. Our shining white city of the mind would burn for generations. Marty downed his final whiskey, patted us each on the back in return for the favor of merciful death, and walked slowly toward the door. He turned and waved, silhouetted in the arch by the late-afternoon sun, and went home to his bed. Ronald was there at the bar...”

The guy with the ponytail said, “Yes, I was.”

“Stopping in for a shot after band practice. We knew him to be a young man of the neighborhood, resolute in character and ethical in judgment. He had discovered our club, as sometimes secrets slide off drunken tongues, particularly when trusted bar regulars are talking. He agreed that day to take Marty’s place. And two years later, when Mickey Lasker got the news from his doctor, Will, our monkey-film expert, took the night off from spinning records at Medusa’s and became one of us. He, too, had learned of the club late one night, by accident, and he, too, is a forgotten genius of the North Side. Scott Silverstein joined the fold soon after upon the unfortunate demise of Leonard Loveless, former drama critic for the lamented Chicago Daily News. The papers all said that Leonard passed of natural causes. But we knew that he had drunk and died.

“Now we say goodbye to Johnny Quinn, a man of independent judgment who never crossed a picket line. Barely ten hours ago, we stood at Marty’s and one of us slipped him the drops that caused him to breathe his last. And like those before him, he drifted off with grace.”

Francis Carmody opened a cabinet and a record player slid out on a tray. He pulled a 45 out of a sleeve. That, Carlos decided later, is when things really got weird.

The room had grown excessively warm. It smelt sour and gassy. Francis put a record on the player and hustled to the front of the room, where the other members of Marty’s Drink or Die Club were standing. They’d linked arms, and they gestured for Carlos to join them. The song started, so they didn’t notice too much when he didn’t. They sang along with the record:

The song made no sense to Carlos, but as the men sang, it was obvious that it moved them deeply. When they reached each chorus, he could barely make out the words over their blubbering. This made Carlos very uncomfortable. Men in his family didn’t show emotion like this, not even in private after midnight. The song, mercifully, came to its final verse.

They unlocked arms and Francis just kept talking.

“Boys,” he said, “Johnny Quinn is forgiven all his sins, if he ever committed any. I only hope that you will have the same mercy on me. For I can’t imagine my tenure on this soil will last much longer. I can feel myself fading even now.”

“Blow it out your hole, Ahab,” said the ponytailed guy.

“I grow old, I grow old,” said Francis. “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. With your indulgence, I’m going to play one more record. As you all know, I was once a featured performer at the Hanging Moon on North Avenue, back in the time when songs had lyrics you could understand. The great Moses Asch himself, of Folkways Records, recognized my talents, and I made this recording. When you hear it, I want you to remember the words, and remember me by them.”

“Do we have to?” said the monkey man.

“You do,” said Francis. “I’d like to think it was Marty’s inspiration for our club.”

He put the record on. Carlos heard tinny banjo music and a voice that sounded nearly forty years younger. But it was definitely Francis. The song went:

Even over the music, Francis talked. “It’s a particularly melancholy moment for me,” he said. “So many friends lost. So many millions of words. So much profundity. And now I alone remain of that first generation as the final distillation of a way of life. When will it end? One doesn’t know. But one does know that young Carlos here has borne witness to our ritual.”

“Indeed!” said the monkey man.

“As such, in our tradition, we should nominate him to take Johnny’s place.”

No way, Carlos thought. This wasn’t even something he wanted to understand.

“But,” said Francis Carmody, “Carlos has shown us nothing to indicate that he possesses the intellectual integrity to fulfill the bylaws of Marty’s Drink or Die Club. Agreed?”

“Agreed!” said the other members.

“Therefore,” Francis said, “as is our tradition, we offer young Carlos a choice: Maintain silence about what he knows, or die.”

Carlos slowly backed away from them, toward the door.

Francis held up his glass. He indicated to the others that they should stand. “Do you accept our terms, young man?”

“I gotta go,” Carlos said.

He ran for the door and flung it open, and as he escaped, he heard Francis Carmody say, “Do not betray us, Carlos! We’ll find you!”

It was early November. The night felt crisp and cutting. Carlos’s head should have been a fog, but as he ran out of Francis Carmody’s backyard and down the side streets toward Clark, he felt nothing but clarity. Maybe he’d go back to Truman College after all, get that two-year degree and then see what was possible. But he’d never go back to Marty’s again.

The digital bank clock said 1:15. Just then, the Number 22 came, as if sent by the bus fairy. Carlos got on and slid his card through the reader. His Uncle German’s place was just fifteen blocks up in Rogers Park; he’d get there by closing time no matter how slow the bus ran. German always had a pot of menudo going this time of night. Carlos could already feel it, warm and fresh and greasy, in his stomach.

He couldn’t wait to get sober.