Donald Paneth draws a portrait of “McCaffrey’s,” one of New York’s hundreds of bars and grills where a large section of the citizenry repairs any evening for a short beer or a few beers or something stronger, a conversation or an argument, happily unaware that they have lately become objects of solicitude to the sociologists and critics of culture who worry about how we are spending our “new” leisure. Mr. Paneth, however, concerns himself only with observing and reporting the scene.
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McCaffrey’s Bar & Grill is a little neighborhood bar, on a street corner, where people gather to drink, and chatter, and watch television. In the street, a neon blinks on and off, cars, buses, and trucks pass swiftly, and men loiter restlessly on the corner. Down the street, which is lined with drab apartment houses and shabby, narrow tenements, are a laundry, butcher shop, shoemaker, candy store, and grocery. The neighborhood itself is crowded, polyglot, middle and lower middle class.
McCaffrey’s Bar is long, narrow, smoky, and dimly lit. A blind shutters the window, a few small booths are in the rear, and a juke box plays loudly. On the brown-paneled wall, a faded sign says, No Dancing. McCaffrey’s is most crowded and most lively at night, when the city is loneliest; then the drinking is heaviest, the cigarette haze densest, the atmosphere warmest. Early in the evening, while the neon blinks and the juke box blares, the regulars begin to drift in slowly.
“Hi, Bill,” the bartender, an alert, observant man in a white shirt, conservative tie, and clean apron, says. “How you doing?”
“Slow and easy,” Bill says. “Give me a little one.”
“Just get home from work?” the bartender says, as he fetches a whisky.
“Yeah,” Bill replies. “I’m working over on Lewis Avenue in Queens. You know where that is? Paint job on a two-family house; I’ll be done with it Friday.”
“Who’s fighting tonight?” someone says.
“Two bums,” says a gray-haired man down the bar. “Jimmy Wallace from Indianapolis and Tony Massaro from Chattanooga. It’s a set-up.”
“Well, here’s Clancy now,” another says. “And he’s wearing his new shoes too!”
“Hiya, flabby,” Clancy, a medium-built, neatly dressed, white-haired man says. “Buy your friends a drink.”
The door opens, and a young man in a blue jacket pokes his head in. “You know Frank?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure,” the bartender says.
“If you see him, will you tell him to hang around? I’ll be back.”
“Beer,” says a man at the end of the bar, as two men, a middle-aged woman, and a soldier enter.
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The people who gather in McCaffrey’s Bar & Grill at night live nearby, in the neighborhood. Most are Irish, Italian, Swedish, Polish, and Hungarian, some are Negro and Puerto Rican, a few are Jewish. They are tired workingmen, loud young guys, couples, soldiers on furlough, lonely women, nostalgic old men who come in to drink and talk. “It’s a place where everybody meets,” one says. “I don’t know what to do with myself. And I like companionship—somebody to say hello to—so I go down for a beer. I go down and meet my friends, relax, and get away from things.”
Most of the patrons are regulars who know each other; they joke, view boxing on TV, discuss work, baseball, women, drinking, smoke and gaze. Their relationships, their friendships and feuds, are sustained. One man is shabby, aged, and garrulous; he frequents the bar from its opening to its closing hour. Another man, who drives a cab, is young, dark-haired, stocky, and blunt. “I don’t fool around,” he chatters. “Either she puts it on the line, or I go home. I tell her straight.” Another is a longshoreman, a tall, lean, unshaven man in a plaid mackinaw and a checkered cap. “I’m time-weary,” he occasionally says, as he drinks a double. “I’ve been forty-three years on one job. A long time, eh?” One woman is short, buxom, carelessly dressed, and ill-tempered; her sagging face is heavily rouged. Another is a young, attractive, blond girl who works in an office. “Every man she goes with,” the bartender says, “she’s supposed to get married.”
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At Night McCaffrey’s is a vibrant corner, dark, intimate, and jazzy. The regulars drift in steadily, noisily, filling the bar and grill, and soon the air is stale with beer.
In McCaffrey’s Bar, after eight-thirty, the juke box blares, voices murmur and glasses tinkle, a haze blurs the figures at the bar. In dim light two men play shuffleboard, a guy weight-lifts a bar stool over his head, and a woman, dancing alone, swings her hips; the city outside doesn’t intrude. At the bar, a guy, a couple, a soldier, a girl and a gray-haired man, two women, a young guy, a Negro drink and chatter.
“I paid my state income tax today,” a guy says, “so they won’t put me in jail for a while. Everytime you look, they want something.”
“Some rain last night,” a woman says.
“The other night,” says another woman, as she drinks a beer, “Mrs. Lang came in, and called her husband everything.”
“Yesterday,” another says, “I put my hand on the frying pan. I thought it was cold. Oh-h-h-h.”
“I’m gonna ask you a question,” a man down the bar says. “I’m gonna ask you a question. What’s a half of a half of one-and-a-half?”
“Ed,” says a thin guy in a brown suit, “come over here. Want to ask you something.”
“Yeah, sure,” the bartender says, standing opposite him, listening patiently. “What is it, Johnny?”
“I got enough money?” he says, gesturing to some change on the bar in front of him. “Can I pay for another drink?”
“Sure, Johnny,” the bartender says easily. “You can pay for anything.”
He fetches a whisky, and then Johnny says, “Ed, are you mad at me?”
“No, Johnny,” the bartender says. “Drink hearty. Everybody’s happy.”
All at once, Johnny pounds the top of the bar, and smashes a glass to the floor. “You know the last time I wrecked this joint?” he cries. “Six years ago. The windows went out.”
“I wasn’t here, Johnny,” the bartender says, watching him imperturbably.
“Ed,” Johnny says a moment later, contritely, as the patrons stare with curiosity, “you want me to leave? I’ll leave.”
“Look, Johnny,” the bartender says, “take it easy. Forget it.”
“Then, give us a drink!” Johnny says. “And you take one too.”
Ed, The night bartender, is short, thickset, and dark-haired. He is forty-eight years old, and married, the father of two boys, with another child coming; he lives around the corner in a three-family house. Ed works five nights a week, Thursday to Monday, from 6 P.M. to 4 A.M. Smoking a cigar, he fetches a beer, mixes highballs, answers the telephone, nurses a drunk, tunes television. His manner is friendly and tolerant, but watchful and skeptical.
Ed works alertly behind the bar. He doesn’t gossip, he refuses to cash a check for a stranger, and he puts a drunk in a taxi, after taking away his car keys. He is a patient, good-natured barman who listens to the baseball game, and drinks a whisky himself. “Sometimes, I get to feeling pretty good,” he says. “Happy and gay. As long as I don’t get sloppy the boss doesn’t mind.” He is a reliable bartender who doesn’t ignore anyone, argue, meddle, eavesdrop, or tap the register. He is a sports fan and a churchgoer. He has a good memory for faces and names—”If I remember a guy’s name,” he says, “he’ll stumble past a dozen places to get here”—and he evaluates people quickly and shrewdly; he senses their personality. He is generous with a drink or a dollar. “Suppose a guy comes in,” he says, “and tells me, ‘I was in this morning. I got drunk, and spent all my money. I need a couple of drinks.’ Well, you know he’s a phony, but any bartender will give him a drink. You have to be a regular guy, a good fella; that’s how you do a good business.”
He is sociable with the regulars. On payday, he buys them a drink, and now and then, he goes to a ball game or the race track with them. “Have a little fun,” he says. “Eating and drinking, and throwing a few away on the horses.” He is candid about bartending and the people. “It’s a soft job,” he says. “But an interesting job. Most of it’s psychology, common sense. I only have to mix a few drinks—a Daquiri, a Tom Collins, a Manhattan; I pour the rest. I’m nice to the people who are nice to me. I don’t serve drunks. I say to a drunk, ‘You’ve got enough.’ And he says to me, ‘I’m coming over the bar.’ But it’s a lot of b.s. I get all kinds—mean, dopey, worried, psycho. They come in and bend my ear: they hate their job, or they got a torch for something, or they need a hundred bucks, or they’re married, and in love with something else. I don’t hear it. I gotta laugh and cry with them—that’s the job—but it’s like the juke box playing. I don’t hear the song. Once, I had a guy who wasn’t even drunk come in and throw a beer at my head. I just ducked. Sometimes, I gotta clout a guy; I can’t let them crap all over me. I clout them, and they loosen up. You know, because of this, I can’t get insured. They say it’s a dangerous job.”
His trade is steady and plentiful. “Some guys,” he says, “drink all the time, all day. ‘What the hell,’ they say. ‘I don’t want to think any more.’ Or, ‘You know who’s against me? The president of the U.S. is against me.’ A drink picks them up, and they feel all right—until it wears off again. But, the average drink is three drinks a person; most guys don’t get drunk unless they’re celebrating. They come in to have a beer, and pass away the time. They have nothing else to do; they have no other place to go. They want to be friendly, so they hang around.”
Ed likes bartending, although he says he someday would like to buy and work a small farm. “With cows and chickens,” he says. “If I can get a couple of bucks together.” Ed has tended bar since he was nineteen. “It was like this,” he says. “I was walking down the street one day, and a friend called me into a bar he had just bought. ‘Let’s clean it up,’ he said. First thing, I was tending bar.” (Ed worked in a paper-box factory until he became a bartender; his father died when he was eight, and he went to work before he finished 7A.) Since then, he has tended bar in many neighborhood bar-and-grills—Otto’s, Bogan’s, The Dew Drop, The Owl, The Crossroads; he worked in each of them from four months to five years. “I quit,” he says, “when the boss got on my nerve, when I just felt like quitting, or when another place offered more money. Sometimes, when I was single, I’d lay off six months before going back to it.” Two other brief intervals occurred fifteen, twenty years ago: in 1928 he operated a speakeasy until he and his partner quarreled, and in 1936, out of work, he dug sewers and repaired streets for the WPA. He has worked in the same bar now since 1947.
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Through the evening, the regulars crowd the bar, drinking, talking, laughing, smoking, flirting, while a program flickers on television; through the evening a soldier drinks and looks about, a couple talks softly, a young girl hums, a drunk mutters wildly, a gray-haired man sits and muses and stares. The juke box plays, “A Petal from a Faded Rose.” A little brown and white mongrel barks and wags his tail furiously, scurrying the length of the bar, from the booths to the door. The telephone rings, and one of the regulars answers quickly. “Hello,” he says. “Hello! Who? Georgie Holzman? No. He just walked out two minutes ago.” A flower peddler, a short man with an eager, deferential bearing, enters, and circles the bar, calling softly, “Carnations. Red and white carnations. Thirty-five cents.”
Smiley, a crippled beggar, wheels into the bar. His legs are amputated at the thigh, and his torso rests on a low dolly, which he moves skillfully. His hair is dark, and his face is deeply lined and tough; he is about forty-five years old. A sign on the back of the leather jacket which he is wearing says, “Keep Smiling.”
Smiley sings a cowboy ballad, and begs mock-pathetically with a pencil box. Then, he rolls up to the bar, shouting hello to the bartender who nods.
“Ed!” he says, rapping the floor with his box. “A glass of beer! Let it run ten minutes, get cold. And put the night game on!”
Ed fetches a beer, and dials the radio. “Well,” the announcer is saying, “the Yankees need a long fly to tie it up. A base hit to win. They’ve got bases loaded, one out, in the last half of the ninth. Mize is batting for Martin. Now, the wind-up, the pitch. And there’s a fly to short center, the catch. Berra tags up, but he has to hold. So it’s two away.”
“Christ!” Smiley shouts. “Make the game louder! I can’t hear the goddamn thing.” Instead, Ed lowers it. “Never mind,” Smiley says reproachfully. “Don’t say a word. I’m the guy that’s guilty. Not you.”
“I hope they give you life,” Ed says.
“Rizzuto steps in,” the announcer broadcasts. “And Berra—he’s the tying run—leads off third. Now, the pitch. Strike one, across the chest. Hunter rubs up the cover of the ball, and tosses it out to the mound. Thompson goes to the rosin bag, then hitches up his pants. Now, he throws, and it’s a hit down the right field line! Berra crosses the plate, and McDougald rounds third to score.”
“And the Yankees win 7-6!” Smiley shouts. “That’s the way to win a ball game.” He sings exuberantly. “Oh, I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you.”
“You’ll be dead, Smiley,” Ed says. “You’ll be dead.”
Smiley ignores the bartender. “Hey, soldier!” he says. “You wanna buy me a drink?” The soldier looks right at him. “Well,” Smiley says. “I was just asking.” He rolls abruptly towards the door.
“I’m getting myself a pencil box,” Ed says to Clancy, as Smiley leaves. “And I bet I make $22 a day, just like Smiley. You know, you wouldn’t recognize him on Sunday. All dressed up, in his artificial legs. He comes in here on Sunday, and lots of people don’t.”
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Each night, at ten or eleven o’clock, the proprietor picks up the cash. Joseph McCaffrey bought the bar three years ago from George Donohue, an ex-warrant officer who went back to the navy; Donohue himself had bought the bar after the war from a man and his wife and another woman—they had opened it in 1938.
Joe McCaffrey, the proprietor now, is tall, well built, good looking, and blue-eyed. He is thirty-four years old, a quiet, capable man with a youthful smile, but a steady gaze. He and his wife, a Swiss girl from Geneva, live between Eighth and Ninth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, where he was born. Joe, one of five children, was the son of a pastry cook. He attended Commerce High School, and then worked as a pin-boy, a mail-order clerk, and a machinist. He worked in an aircraft factory until 1942, when he studied communications at a U.S. Maritime Service school and shipped out as a radio operator aboard an Atlantic freighter; he shipped out for seven years to North African and Mediterranean ports. “During the war,” he recalls, “German planes grabbed us every time we passed Algiers. They came close but never hit us.” In 1948, he met his wife, Françoise, and a year later, bought the bar and grill from Donohue. “It looked like a good deal,” he says. “All that money coming in the till.”
His bar is open twenty hours a day, from 8 to 4 A.M., though the morning and afternoon are slow. “We get an early morning trade,” he says. “Janitors and businessmen. People who usually come in a couple of times a day. If we weren’t open, they’d get used to going somewhere else.” Joe employs four persons in his bar and grill—a cook, two bartenders, and a porter. The day bartender, Andy, is an easygoing, stocky, gray-haired man who was once a lightweight boxer. The cook—in New York, a grill is a prerequisite for a license—is a woman who serves simple, hearty food: veal cutlet, filet of sole, spaghetti and meatballs, roast chicken. And the porter is a neighborhood hanger-on who cleans up, washing glasses, sweeping out, after the bar closes. Joe himself works behind the bar three days and one night a week, and orders the beer, whisky, and ice cubes (two bushels a day, seventy-five cents a bushel).
He checks his invoices and reads trade journals too. He doesn’t drink.
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In Mccaffrey’S there is a lull between eleven o’clock and one, as many people depart for home. Those who remain talk quietly, while a guy makes his way unsteadily to the washroom and someone introduces a young boxer, the Golden Boy of Ozone Park, and a cop drinks a quickie.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha,” a drunk laughs.
“I came out of the army,” a guy says, “and worked one job two months, another job four months. Been on this job five years. What the hell? No use to change. All the jobs are the same.”
“I got no money, I got no gripes,” another says. “I drive a cab, and work when I feel like it. This is better than working, isn’t it?”
A boy circles the bar, calling, “Paper! News, Mirror. All the latest! Whatdya read?”
A woman approaches the bartender. “Do you know Tom Maguire?” she says. “No,” the bartender says. “I don’t know him.” “I’m looking for him,” the woman says. “Been up and down the street.” The bartender fetches a beer.
“You’re cute, you know,” a short man with a round face says.
“Who?” a girl in a white blouse says.
“You, baby. What’s your name?” She doesn’t reply. “What’s your name? Lilly? Cecilia? Dottie?” She lights a cigarette.
“I don’t know if I should touch you,” he says, putting an arm about her waist. She grabs his other hand playfully, and he suddenly twists her arm, almost toppling her from her stool.
“Hey, you bastard!” she cries. “Whaddya trying to do?”
“I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
She goes petulantly to a seat down to the bar. “I wouldn’t even sit next to you,” she says.
“Now honey,” he says, following her. “Now, baby.”
“Get out of here.”
“C’mon, you wanna go to a place where we can dance?”
“Shut up. I have no time for crumbs.”
“Have a drink, sweetheart,” he says, patting her arm.
“What do I need a man for?” she says.
“Ah, honey,” he says.
“All right,” she says at last. “What’ll you have?”
“Rye,” she says, as she combs her hair. “Soda chaser.”
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After one, until near closing, McCaffrey’s is blurred and restless. The juke box blares, match sticks and cigarette butts litter the marble floor, the telephone rings. And sometimes, intoxicated quarrels occur between strangers, a man and woman, or two friends, and punches are thrown, or a knife wielded. Sometimes, a hold-up man appears in the doorway, leveling a pistol, startling the barman and the people, demanding the money in the till.
After one, night wanderers drift in.
Drunken men and women are the most numerous. Within the bar, they sing and fight and dance and shout, they chatter and argue and mutter. Outside they frequently sprawl in the street, cracking their heads, or flop in a draughty hallway, where they are rolled. “The women are the most trouble,” the bartender says. “You can’t just grab them by the back of the neck and seat of the pants and run them out.” Dutch is a drunk, a short, gray-haired, shabbily dressed, very thin man. “Sometimes,” he chuckles, “I don’t know how the hell I get home. I don’t remember nothing; they tell me I get in a cab, and I won’t sit on the seat, but on the floor. Goddamn. Once, I left a bar on Saturday night and woke Monday morning in the West 4th Street subway station; I had no watch, no ring, no money, and I didn’t know how I had gotten there.” Soldier is another. “He’s a veteran,” the bartender says. “He gets drunk, and wants to throw chairs. You’ve got to take it from him: he was decorated with the DSC, and has a hundred per cent disability.” And Charlie is another. “He began hitting the booze a few years ago,” the bartender says. “Lost his job, and hung on the street corners needing a shave. One day, the local bookmaker came up to him. ‘You wanna work for me?’ he said. ‘The cops need an arrest, and I’ll point you out. They’ll pick you up, but you’ll be out in fifteen minutes. It’s routine, pal.’ Well, Charlie said O.K., the cops picked him up, and he got sixty days. Now, he says he’s working in a lunch wagon but I don’t believe him.”
Among the nighthawks are eccentrics too. One middle-aged guy sits alone for hours at the bar, talking to himself, answering himself back. “Well,” he says, “I couldn’t talk to a better man, could I?” Another hurries in with a small trunk, which he opens quickly, taking out a piece of rope. “I’m going to tie myself up,” he says to the bartender. “Untie me when I’m finished, please.” One woman, who is tall with a good figure, used to be a beautiful girl. “Now,” the bartender says, “she comes in here, and drinks beer, only beer, and talks, talks, talks. She’ll talk to anybody, but you can’t get anything with her. I’ve seen men offer her $20, but she lives with a house painter, and goes to bed with him—for nothing.” Another woman, a nurse, sits with her blouse open, exposing her breasts, while she drinks. When the bartender tries to give her a safety pin, she says, “No, no. I want it this way.”
In the early morning, a few bookies and prostitutes also linger. The bookies spend their money then. “They’re little guys,” the bartender says. “Plain guys who don’t want to work, who want to make an easy buck. They’re all right. They play happy all the time, and buy their customers a drink.” The prostitutes come in for a nightcap. “Some are young girls who will go with anybody,” the bartender says. “Some are older women who have steady customers; they are very careful: won’t go with strangers. Then, some are broken-down girls who didn’t get introduced to the right people. Most are nice, and give you a good time, but a few are bad, and work with a gang which cuts you and steals you.” They are young and old, white and Negro, pretty and plain, full and part-time. “One girl,” the bartender says, “is fifteen; she’s been working a year. Another girl is twenty-six, blond, attractive. She came to New York three or four years ago from a small town in Pennsylvania. Decent girl, poor parents. No education, but nice-speaking. She was picked up a few days ago, and given ninety days; when she comes out, she’ll start all over again. Another goes only for girls now. I don’t know. Maybe she got tired, or maybe she got all the variety she wanted.”
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Near closing, McCaffrey’s Bar & Grill is crowded but reposeful. A radio plays softly, the people at the bar chatter familiarly, and a drunk sleeps quietly in one of the booths; on the radio, a vocalist languorously sings, “Here in My Isle of Tahiti.”
The bar empties slowly towards 4 A.M.
“Well, good night,” a guy says. “I’m going home to bed.”
“Good night, Willy,” the bartender says. “See you tomorrow.”
One by one, the regulars drink up and leave.
“Good night, Ed,” they call. “Good night.”
“Take it easy, boys,” the bartender replies.
A man and girl leave, the drunk awakes and stumbles out, a woman departs with her dog. Then, the bartender declares, “Last call. You got ten minutes.”
“This is one day,” a slim man says, “I can say I was a very good boy. Not even a beer. I was gonna take a beer this afternoon, but I said nah.”
“Good night,” a tall woman in blue slacks says. “I’m going home now. I got a nice apartment to go to. Don’t I, Ed? At least, I’m a decent person, no bum.”
The bartender empties the ashtrays, wipes the top of the bar, puts out the neon lights, and rolls a garbage can outside, to the curb; he counts his cash, marking the total in a small ledger. “Last call now,” he says. “I’m closing up.”
Soon the last straggler emerges reluctantly into the street, which is dark and cool and empty.
In the street, a taxicab, a milk wagon, and a police car pass slowly, and a sharp wind swirls newspaper across the sidewalk into silent doorways.
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