Page 52 - Vol.VI#5

My father’s tavern sat on the corner of North Kresson and Fairmount Avenue, though Fair- mount was no avenue. It was a wide cinder stub of a road, flanked by the Halls family’s gritty brown house and across the street, the tavern, last in a row of Highlandtown houses. This wasn’t one of those blocks with the pristine white-marble steps you see in the Baltimore postcards. Kresson Street wasn’t pretty and never had been. The row house steps were mostly wooden, and in various states of disrepair. To walk into the tavern, or the Place, as we called it, you had to walk up one concrete step, push open the heavy door by half leaning on it, half thumbing down the latch, and walk into a narrow room with twenty-foot tin ceilings.
When I remember it now, I never imagine it as empty, the way it was early on Sunday mornings when I went to do the books. Instead, I envision
a half dozen regulars sitting at the long bar with its dark reddish brown wood and brass rail. The men are leaning over their drinks, it’s early morn- ing. There’s a grayish light coming in through the front windows over the Hotpoint grill, and only a couple of the men are drinking beer or whiskey. The rest are having coffee and breakfast, white oval platters of grilled ham and scrambled eggs, white toast. The black-and-white TV provides background noise, the Dave Garroway show. The customers ignore the television, on its shelf high above the bar, over the pay phone.
The scents of cooking ham, stale beer and diesel fuel of Blue Diamond trucks mingle. My father walks to the side door, limping in his heavy
leg brace, to take a delivery of beer. One keg is wheeled to the tap behind the bar, at nearly dead center; the others are rolled down to the cel-
lar, by the bulkhead entrance on the side street. I was never allowed down there. It’s almost
a certainty that there were rats living side by side with those cold kegs. Sometimes my father lets Freddy, the mentally retarded guy with the
peaked cap who mops up, supervise the unload- ing. Freddy is full of weird stories about mon- sters and people who scare him. Don’t pay any attention to him, Daddy says, he’s not right in the in the head, you see.
The middle room, the next one after the bar, has a large poker table with a felt top, always covered up except for Friday and Saturday nights. I real- ize now that it disappeared after a few years; it must have been leased, sent back, or perhaps repossessed. There’s a juke box, with Hank Wil- liams and Jerry Lee Lewis numbers. And there are several square tables, and in the very back, an upright piano, long out of tune. Above it, there’s
a black-and-white sign announcing No Dancing. Really, though, no one ever even tried to dance there. The sign is decades old even when I am just learning to read its words.
Through the door from the middle room lies the kitchen, with deep stainless-steel sinks and work spaces, a hamburger press (which will eventually become obsolete in the 1960’s when portion control, pre-made hamburger patties emerge from the food industry’s laboratories),
a well-used stove, and dozens of large pots and pans hanging up on a pegboard that fills the wall. This is where my father makes chili, bean soup, pea soup, and the ham, bone-in, dotted with cloves, patted down with dark-brown sugar and dry mustard, and bathed in cheap white- port wine. Years later, at a bar clear across town in Parkville, miles from Highlandtown, someone will say to my father, “Nobody could make a ham like Charlie Schmidt.” And my dad will reply, “Don’t you know who you’re talking to?”
At the end of this stunted block, little Fairmount Avenue, is a junkyard, a scrap-metal yard, and abutting it, the Blue Diamond Truck dispatch sta- tion. From the curb where Daddy parks his car at the tavern’s side entrance, I can hear the two-way radio static and buzz. Some of the men who work
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It’s the Real Thing
lynne viti