They’d begin in Fields Corner, the next neighborhood over, and move north up the avenue. The idea was to see which man could remain standing long enough to cross the border into South Boston, less than two miles north.
My father was a hell of a drinker, as were most of the men who signed up for the pub crawl, but in all the years of its existence, not one man ever made it to Southie.
Most of those bars are gone now, replaced by Vietnamese restaurants and corner stores. Now known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this four-block section of the avenue is actually a lot more charming than many of my white neighbors seem to find it. You drive it early in the morning, and you often find old men leading fellow senior citizens in tai chi exercises along the sidewalks, see people wearing their native dress of dark silk pajamas and wide straw hats. I’ve heard about the alleged gangs, or tongs, working down here, but I’ve never encountered them; mostly I’ve seen young Vietnamese kids with spiked, gel-saturated hair and Gargoyle sunglasses, standing around trying to look cool, trying to look hard, and I find them no different than I was at their age.
Of the old bars that have survived the latest flux of immigration into our neighborhood, the three that front the avenue itself are very good bars. The owners and their clientele have a laissez-faire attitude toward the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese treat them in kind. Neither culture seems particularly curious about the other, and that suits both just fine.
The only other bar near the Ho Chi Minh Trail was off the avenue, at the end of a dirt road that was stunted when the town ran out of funds to complete it in the mid-forties. The alley that remained never saw the sunlight. A trucking company’s hangar-sized depot loomed over it from the south. A dense thicket of three-deckers blocked it from the north. At the end of this alley sat the Filmore Tap, as dusty and seemingly forgotten as the aborted road it sat on.
Back in the days of the Dot Ave pub crawl, even men of my father’s ilk-brawlers and boozers all-didn’t go in the Filmore. It was stricken from the pub crawl map as if it didn’t exist, and in my entire life I never knew anyone who frequented the place on a regular basis.
There’s a difference between a tough working-class bar and a sleazy white-trash bar, and the Filmore epitomized the latter. Fights in working-class bars break out frequently enough but usually involve fists, maybe a beer bottle over someone’s head at worst. Fights broke out in the Filmore about every second beer and usually involved switchblades. Something about the place attracted men who’d lost anything worth caring about a long, long time ago. They came in here to nurse their drug habits and their alcoholism and their hate. And while you wouldn’t think there were a lot of people clamoring to get in their club, they didn’t look kindly upon potential applicants.
The bartender glanced at us as we came in from the sunlight Thursday afternoon and adjusted our eyes to the sallow dark green ambience of the place. Four guys huddled around the corner of the bar closest to the door, and they turned slowly, one by one, and looked at us.
“Where’s Lee Marvin when you need him?” I said to Angie.
“Or Eastwood,” Angie said. “I’d take Clint about now.”
Two guys shot pool in the back. Well, they were shooting pool. And then we came in and somehow messed up their game, and one of them looked up from the table and frowned.
The bartender turned his back to us. He stared at the TV above him, intently focused on an episode of Gilligan’s Island. The Skipper was hitting Gilligan on the head with his cap. The Professor was trying to break it up. The Howells laughed. Maryann and Ginger were nowhere to be found. Maybe that had something to do with the plot.
Angie and I took stools at the far corner of the bar, near the bartender, and waited for him to acknowledge us.
The Skipper kept hitting Gilligan. He was apparently mad about something involving a monkey.
“This is a great one,” I said to Angie. “They almost get off the island.”
“Really?” Angie lit a cigarette. “Pray tell, what stops them?”
“Skipper professes his love for his little buddy and they get all caught up in the wedding arrangements and the monkey steals the boat and all their coconuts.”
“Right,” Angie said. “I remember this one now.”
The bartender turned and looked down at us. “What?” he said.
“A pint of your finest ale,” I said.
“Two,” Angie said.
“Fine,” the bartender said. “But then you shut up until the show’s over. Some of us haven’t seen this one.”
After Gilligan, the bar TV was tuned to an episode of Public Enemies, a fact-based crime show in which the exploits of wanted felons were reenacted by actors so inept they made Van Damme and Seagal look like Olivier and Gielgud. This particular episode concerned a man who’d sexually molested and then carved up his children in Montana, shot a state trooper in North Dakota, and seemed to have spent his entire life making sure everyone he encountered had one bad fucking day.
“You ask me,” Big Dave Strand said to Angie and me, as they flashed the felon’s face onscreen, “that’s the guy you should be talking to. Not bothering my people.”
Big Dave Strand was the owner and chief bartender of the Filmore Tap. He was, true to his name, big-at least six four, with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew. Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips and dark green jailhouse tattoos on both biceps. The one on the left arm depicted a revolver and bore the word FUCK below it. The one on the right seemed to be of a bullet impacting with a skull and said YOU below it.
Oddly, I’d never run into Big Dave in church.
“Knew guys like him in the joint,” Big Dave said. He drew himself another pint of Piel’s from the tap. “Freaks. They’d keep ’em out of general population ’cause they knew what we’d do to them. They knew.” He downed half his pint, looked up at the TV again, and belched.
The bar smelled of sour milk for some reason. And sweat. And beer. And buttered popcorn from the baskets spaced out along the bar at every fourth stool. The floor was rubber tile, and Big Dave kept a hose behind the bar. By the looks of the floor, it had been a few days since he’d used it. Cigarette butts and popcorn were ground into the rubber, and I was pretty sure the small movements I saw coming from the shadows under one of the tables were those of mice nibbling on something along the baseboard.
We’d questioned all four men at the bar about Helene McCready, and none of them had been much help. They were older men, the youngest in his mid-thirties but looking a decade older. They all looked Angie up and down as if she were hanging naked in a butcher’s window. They weren’t particularly hostile, but they weren’t helpful either. They all knew Helene but didn’t seem to feel one way or another about her. They all knew her daughter was missing and didn’t seem to feel one way or another about that either. One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said, “The kid’s missing. So? She’ll turn up. They always do.”
“You’ve misplaced children before?” Angie said.
Lenny nodded. “They showed back up.”
“Where are they now?” I said.
“One’s in prison, one’s in Alaska or someplace.” He whacked the shoulder of the man nodding off beside him. “This here’s the youngest.”
Lenny’s son, a pale skinny guy with two brightly blackened eyes, said, “You’re fucking A,” and dropped his head into his arms on the bar.
“We already been through this with the cops,” Big Dave told us. “We told ’em, Yeah, Helene comes in here; no, she don’t bring the kid with her; yeah, she likes her beer; no, she didn’t sell the kid to pay off a drug debt.” He narrowed his eyes at us. “Least not to anyone in here.”
One of the pool players came to the bar. He was a skinny guy with a shaved head, cheap jailhouse tats on his arms, but none done with the attention to detail and fine aesthetic sense of Big Dave’s. He leaned in between Angie and me, even though there were a few car lengths of space to our right. He ordered two more beers from Dave and stared at Angie’s breasts.
“You got a problem?” Angie said.
“No problem,” the guy said. “I don’t have a problem.”
