It's always a fog gray day inside Archie's Bar.
Two small basement windows that haven't tasted
Windex since before the War block most of the light. Sixty years
of cigarettes and nickel stogies -- no dollar cigars here --
stain yellow the walls and air. Take a breath
and chew last year's spilled beer and
last week's spilled piss and
today's Pall Malls mouldering in half-empty Bud bottles.
It's a beer bar, a drinking bar, a neighbohood
bar where Poles and Puerto Ricans group
after the plant lets out at 3.
There's nothing fancy. Cases
of Heinemann are stacked six high along two walls. Maybe they
block paintings,
or framed pictures of local pols and near-famous athletes; probably
they don't. Not even
the requisite dollar ensconced in its frame
to oversee the brotherhood, worshippers, communing,
one cheek on the chair, on foot on the rail. Intent
on their cleansing, raising
the chalice to sip the ablution that washes work and worry --
at least for today.
-II-
Behind the bar Archie lords over
whiskey and wisdom for the faithful,
wiping glasses with a soiled cloth,
spreading the slopped beer,
pasting bits of pickled egg and tobacco ash
into the black caterpillars stenciled and etched on
the glossy surface
of the bar.
Where a pool table might have been, two cheap
card tables squat, surrounded by refugees from the Senior Center,
playing euchre without a full deck.
Every so often some old fart bumps the table, sloshing warm beer
and cold coffee, raising a little higher
the fiberboard covering on the table. They're gone
by three, back to their Center and their daily Bingo game.
-III-
Barney and Jim come in every day at two.
They're retired, they're leftovers
from a dying neighborhood
and a dying way of life. Mostly
they sit and play cards.
Jim likes to cheat, but
he doesn't call it cheating.
"What have you got, you old
farmer, you?" he asks his partner
when he wants a spade.
Most of the old timers ignore him, but sometimes
Barney will slam down his cards
and stomp to the bar,
thought only if he was losing anyway.
The men from the plant never play cards with Jim.
Barney and Jim and whoever else is near
talk between hands, reminiscing about Archie's
when it was Archie's dad who ran the bar,
when beer was a nickel a bucket
and you carried it home on a summer evening.
Sometimes they tell stories, where the teller
is always the hero. "Remember
when young Joe picked a fight with me?"
"Winter, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, and when I stood up
my five-buckle boots got locked together."
"You couldn't move your feet."
"I only had time for one punch,
but I laid him out. Oh
I was fast with my hands."
Sometimes they talk about their work,
the packing plant that's gone,
the union fights with scabs
and the Pack owner finally giving
in to their demands. The stories
always end the same, with the tellers winning
the fight, the strike, or the contract.
There are no losers at Archie's.
