Past Due (5 page)

T
HEY SAY
P
HILLY
is a city of neighborhoods, but it’s really a city of neighborhood taps. There they sit, one on every corner, with the same hanging sign, the same glass block windows, the same softball trophies, the same loyalty among their denizens. When you’re a Philly guy you can count your crucial affiliations on the fingers of one hand; you got your mom, you got your church, you got your string band, you got your saloon, you got your wife, and the only thing you ever think of changing is your wife.

Jimmy T’s was just such a neighborhood joint. When Beth and I stepped inside we were immediately eyed, and for good reason. We were strangers, we were wearing suits, we had all our teeth.

The dank, narrow bar was decorated like a VFW hall, Flyers pictures taped to bare walls, cheap Formica tables, a pool table wedged into the back, a jukebox in the corner with its clear plastic cover smashed. Someone had made an unwise selection, maybe something not sung by Sinatra. Workingmen of all ages slumped at the bar, leaned on the tables, wiped their noses, sucked down beers, complained about politics, the economy, the Eagles, the cheese steaks at Geno’s, the riffraff moving in from the west, their girlfriends, their wives, their kids, their lives, their goddamned lives. Before we stepped in, it had been sullenly loud, but the moment we opened the door it had quieted as if for a show. It didn’t take
long to realize we were it. I figured we might as well make it a good one.

“You sure yous are in the right place?” said the bartender, a crag of a man with a great head of white hair and a missing arm. The thief, Lloyd Ganz, I presumed.

“We’re in the right place,” I said. “I’ll have a sea breeze.”

Ganz blinked at me. “Say what?”

“A sea breeze. It’s a drink.”

“Hey, Charlie,” said Ganz without looking away, “guy in the suit says he wants something called a sea breeze.”

A slim-jim at the end of the bar, long, brown, and desiccated, said in a rasp, “Tell him to drive his ass on down to Wildwood, face east, open his mouth.”

I turned away from the derisive laughter swelling behind me. “You don’t know how to make a sea breeze?”

“Are you really sure yous in the right place? We don’t got no ferns here.”

“Careful,” I said. “My mother’s name is Fern.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. Do you have grapefruit juice?”

“It’s late for breakfast, ain’t it?”

“Cranberry juice?”

“You kidding me, right?”

I let out a long disappointed breath. “Why don’t you then just inform me as to the specialty of the house?”

Lloyd Ganz blinked at me a couple times more. “Hey, Charlie. Man here wants the specialty of the house.”

“Give him a wit, Lloyd,” said Charlie.

“A wit?” I said. “Something Noel Coward would have ordered, no doubt.”

One of the guys behind me said, “Wasn’t he the councilman up in the Third District, caught with that girl?”

“Yes, he was,” I replied. “All right, Lloyd, let me have a wit.”

Lloyd took a beer glass, stuck it under the Bud spigot, pulled the spigot with his stump, placed it before me.

I looked up at him, puzzled. “That it?”

“Wait.”

He took a shot glass, slammed it on the bar next to my beer, filled it with tequila. When I reached for the tequila, he slapped my hand away. Then he lifted the shot glass, hovered it over the beer, slop-dropped it inside. The beer fizzled and foamed and flowed over the edges of the mug.

“What the hell’s that?” I said.

“A guy comes in,” said Lloyd, “sits down, says, ‘Lloyd, let me have a Bud,’ he gets just the beer. But he says, ‘Let me have a Bud wit,’ then this is what he gets.” He leaned forward, cocked his head at me. “Mister, it’s the closest we got to a specialty of the house.”

I stared at the still foaming drink for maybe a bit too long, because an undercurrent of laughter started rising from behind me.

Beth reached over, snatched the beer with the shot glass still inside, downed it in a quick series of swallows, slammed the empty glass back on the bar so the shot glass shook. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, swallowed a belch.

“How was it, missy?” said Lloyd.

“It’s not a sea breeze,” said Beth, “but it’ll do.”

I took a twenty out of my wallet, dropped it on the bar. When another wit sat before me, boiling over, I lifted the glass high, turned to face the crew watching me from among the tables, said loudly, “To Joey Cheaps,” and downed my drink.

It roiled in my stomach like a pint of sick. I shook my head, gasped out a “God, that’s bad.”

I expected a jiggle of laughter at my discomfort with the drink, I expected a few expressions of surprise that I had mentioned Joey Parma, I expected maybe a few murmurs of assent to my toast, a few sad exclamations of poor bastard as they remembered the man who had turned Jimmy T’s into his local tap. I expected something different from what I got, which was a dark, glum silence.

It took me a minute to figure it out, but I did.

“So,” I said, “how much he end up owing you guys when he died?”

There was a moment more of quiet, and then one of the men said, “A hundred and six.”

“Thirty-eight,” said another.

“Fifty,” said a third.

“How about you, Lloyd?” I said. “What was his tab here?”

“Two hundred, thirty-six, and fifty-nine cents,” said Lloyd. “Approximately.”

“Well, we got you all beat,” I said. “Three thousand, five hundred. Approximately.”

There was a moment of stunned quiet and then someone, barely suppressing his glee, said, “Oh, man, you got hosed,” and then a wave of nervous laughter hit the bar.

“What were you, his bookies?” someone said.

“Worse,” I said. “We were his lawyers.”

The entire tap then collapsed into laughter, loud belly-grabbing laughter. Even Charlie at the end of the bar turned his sour gape of a mouth around. “His lawyers,” he said in rasp. “What a pair of saps.”

“It would have been quicker you just let him burn your money,” said another.

“Joey’s lawyers. What a perfect pair of saps,” said Charlie.

“Hey, Joey’s lawyer,” said a man, “how’d it feel to be getting it up the bum instead of giving it for a change.”

As the laughter spiraled and swelled, I joined in and then I said loudly, “You know what we need to soothe our empty wallets?”

“What’s that?”

“We need to have ourselves a proper wake for our debts. But not on wits, no more wits for me.”

“What yous got in mind?” said Lloyd Ganz.

“Why don’t you send someone to the Wawa for some juice,” I said, “and then, Lloyd, let me teach you how to make a sea breeze.”

It didn’t end with a conga line, but it came close.

The first taste Lloyd took of a sea breeze made his lips twist. You could tell he didn’t take to it right off.

“Close your eyes this time,” I said.

Lloyd’s eyes blinked shut, the crowd came closer.

“You’re on a tropical island. Beyond your lounge chair, the ocean is lapping. A cabana girl, tawny and lean, wearing a lot of nothing”—catcalls, whistles—“has handed you your drink. She leans over, her breath is sweet, redolent of coconut, conch.”

“Conch?” said Lloyd, eyes still closed.

“Conch. And she leans ever closer and her warm breath now is in your ear and she whispers, her voice smooth as the white sand beneath her bare feet, ‘How is the drink, Lloyd? Is it okay? Is it, Lloyd? Is it okay?’ ”

Lloyd took another sip, swilled like a swell, considered carefully. “Better than a stick in the eye,” he said finally, and a cheer went up and we were off and running.

The jukebox with its smashed plastic was plugged in and the volume jacked, Sinatra bypassed for a few novelty numbers from the bottom of the list. I was behind the bar, jacket off, tie loose, shirtsleeves rolled, making up the sea breezes as fast as Lloyd could take the orders and get me the glasses filled with ice. Two jiggers cranberry juice, one jigger grapefruit juice, one jigger house vodka, a slice of lime. Maybe not perfect but close enough, and they were going as fast as we could set them up. An empty peanut basket had replaced the till, two dollars a pop for the drinks, all cash, all of it earmarked for the Joey Cheaps bar tab memorial fund. The kid we had sent to Wawa to buy the juices and the lime was sent out two times more.

Glasses clinking, shouts called out.
“Hey, mambo,”
sang Rosemary Clooney,
“don’t wanna tarantella. Hey, mambo, no more mozzarella. Hey, mambo, Mambo Italiano,”
and then the guys shouted out the next line along with her,
“All you calabraise do the mambo like-a crazy.”

Beth sat on the bar, legs crossed, leading the singing, her pink drink sloshing over the sides of her glass. “Hey, Lloyd,” she said, “turn up the heat.”

“Why?”

“Let’s make like Jamaica.”

He did, and soon the jackets came off, and then some shirts, which would have been better left on, and the drink orders came in even faster than before. Guys were hogging the phone, calling their wives and girlfriends, sometimes both, telling them to come on down to the party. Guys were stopping in, drawn by the noise leaking through the steadily opening door, asking what the hell was going on.

“It’s a wake.”

“Who died?”

“Do it matter?”

Hell, no, it didn’t matter. The crowd grew, grew louder, more frantic. “Two more, Lloyd,” said a man with both hands already filled with drinks. “Let me have some more of this pink crap,” said another, “but this time wit.”

Charlie climbed himself up top the pool table as the jukebox sang,
“Day-o, day-ay-ay-o, daylight come and me wan’ go home.”

“I always liked that Sidney Poitier,” said someone.

“Hell of a singer,” said another.

“Two more sody pops, Lloyd,” shouted Charlie on the pool table just before he collapsed on his back, his head banging off the felt like an eight ball.

Just as I was running out of cranberry juice for the third time, when the beat cops had stopped in for the second time, when we were listening to “Mambo Italiano” for the fifth time, someone called out, “Frank,” and it turned into a chant, “Frank, Frank, Frank,” and someone else banged the jukebox, skipping off Rosemary Clooney before he punched in a number by memory and soon enough the sweetest voice that ever was came pouring out like liquid regret. The place immediately calmed, Sinatra sang Paul Anka’s surly anthem to individuality, we leaned one against the other, and listened and sang along badly and when Frank had let out his final
“My way,”
Lloyd raised up his sea breeze and said, “To Joey Parma.”

A razzing of Yos and Hurrahs.

“We all knew his dad,” said Lloyd. “The best damn meat man in the city. I remembers when Joey was just a kid, coming in here to pull his dad home. They weren’t on the best of terms, yous remember, but that’s the way it is with dads and sons. He wouldn’t come here when his dad was alive, but as soon as Joey Senior died, Joey
Junior, he started showing up. He said to me, he said, ‘Lloyd, there ought always be a Parma at Jimmy T’s.’ And there always was, though I guess, unless that battle ax shows her face, there won’t be none no more. But let’s give Joey his due. Can’t say the man wasn’t consistent. He went out the way he lived his life—in debt. To Joey Parma.”

“To Joey Parma,” came the response from the congregation.

“Good,” said Lloyd. “Now somebody want to scrape Charlie off the pool table?”

“Tell me about Joey’s last night,” I asked Lloyd when the money had all been stashed, the glasses cleaned, the jukebox unplugged, and the place every bit as quiet and sullen as it had been when we first stepped inside. He stood behind the bar, leaning on his arm, talking to us as Beth and I each sat on a stool. He had seemed like a dour old coot when first we met, but our sea breeze party had opened him up like a steamed clam.

“Nothing to tell, Victor,” said Lloyd Ganz, my new best friend. “A cop came in asking the same thing and I had nothing for him, neither. A big black fellow with some Swedish name.”

“McDeiss?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Scottish.”

“Funny, he don’t look Scottish.”

“He doesn’t look Swedish either. Just tell me anything you can remember.”

“He was the same as always, came in, ordered a Bud wit, felt around in his pockets, and then told me just to put it on his tab.”

“And you did?”

“Yeah, I always did. When I got out of the VA and my pension wasn’t enough to take care of the family, his dad took care of me, you know. I always had meat on the table. A lot of shit you can eat in your life when you got meat on the table. So with Joey, out of respect for his dad, I let the tab run.”

“He promise to pay it off?”

“Sure. Always. With Joey, the big score was just around the bend.
And that night was no different. He was jumpy, you know, bouncing around, telling everyone that he was on to something.”

“Did he say what?”

“Nah, and truth—no one cared. It wasn’t like we hadn’t heard it all a hundred times before, him and his pipe dreams. And it didn’t look so promising, him coming in with that mouse on his eye. I asked him about it, he just said it was a wake-up call.”

“A wake-up call?”

“Yeah.” Ganz looked both ways, lowered his voice. “So he’s in here, drinking and talking, telling everyone he was getting ready to pay thems all off, when he gets the phone call.”

I looked at Beth. “Phone call?”

“From the woman who was always calling him here. Some dame never set foot in the place.”

“Joey’s mother?”

“Nah, she don’t call here. Every time she sees me she spits between her fingers, like I’m giving her the evil eye. First I was getting free meat and then, when I got enough to buy this place, Joey Senior spent more time here than at home, not that you can blame him, her and her knives. But this other dame was always calling here, and Joey, he was always this little sheep on the phone, baaing out yes, yes, yes.”