24
O’ROURKE’S WAS OUR stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago’s Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning potbellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out back. From the day it opened on December 30, 1966, until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.
The Front Page era had a halfway rebirth in the 1970s, centering on O’Rourke’s and the two other nightly stops in the “Bermuda Triangle,” Riccardo’s and the Old Town Ale House. The triangle got its name, it was said, because newspaper reporters crashed there and were never seen again. Riccardo’s, equidistant from the daily newspapers, was for after work. The Ale House had a late-night license and was for after O’Rourke’s. Few lasted through the whole ten hours. People would ride awhile and jump off. Billy Goat’s was for when you wanted to drink with Royko, who had been eighty-sixed from Riccardo’s after calling Bruno, the maître d’, a Nazi.
The regulars mostly knew one another. There were maybe a hundred members of the “O’Rourke’s crowd,” perhaps fifty or sixty of them lasting the whole duration at that address and many following the bar when it moved to Halsted Street, across from the Steppenwolf Theatre. It was driven west by rising real estate prices, the victim of the gentrification it introduced. Jay Kovar, the manager from day one, the co-owner in later years, received a loan from the actor Brian Dennehy to finance the move. Actors had always been part of the mix, many of them from the nearby Second City. And folk singers from the Earl of Old Town: Larry Rand, John Prine, Ed and Fred Holstein, not so much Steve Goodman. I was invited for opening night in 1966 by Nan Lundberg, an editor of the Daily Illini, who’d married Will Kilkeary, its owner. Will was a friendly little guy who sometimes late on St. Patrick’s Day would climb onto the shelf above the door for a nap. A call from McHugh woke me one March 17: “Ebert, I think Willie is in the slammer. On the news they said a man in a leprechaun costume was arrested while trying to paint a green stripe down North Avenue.”
On a good night you might see Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, and such visiting firemen as Robert Novak, Pat Conroy, and Tom Wolfe. Nelson had an unrequited crush on Jeanette Sullivan, the Japanese-American co-owner, and was friendly enough but didn’t come primarily to hang out with the crowd. During a disagreement with Tom Fitzpatrick, he and Fitz pelted each other with shot glasses. Royko appeared one night after midnight, supported by two volunteers, his trench coat a shambles. He was scheduled to appear the following morning on the Phil Donahue Show. I made it a point to watch. He was lucid and didn’t seem hungover.
Few of the regulars often seemed hungover, although many must have been on some mornings. Michaela Tuohy, “Mike,” accounted for that by the practice of “recovery drinking,” which was how you got your act together enough to be taken onstage at O’Rourke’s. As a general rule, most of the people in the bar were having a good time. There was a lot of laughter. Groups formed and shifted.
The bar’s Sydney Greenstreet was Alcibiades Oikonomides (Al the Greek), a mountainous man who would head-butt friends as a gesture of solidarity, chanting, “To the ten thousand years we will drink together.” Hank Oettinger, the most-published letter-to-the-editor writer in Chicago, would turn up night after night with his pockets stuffed with letters that either had just been published or were about to be published. These he would read to us. Hank was a retired Linotype operator, then in his seventies, a fervent leftist, a regular at every protest march, a confidant of Dick Gregory’s. His black hair slicked back over his big German-American head, he always wore a jacket and tie and ordered a beer. One beer. He had been making his rounds, sometimes composing his letters on a bar, since midday stops in the Loop. But only sipping beer. Making his way nightly through the mean streets.
Years prior to his present position as a professor of antiquities at Loyola University, Al the Greek said, he had been an aide-de-camp for Haile Selassie in the Ethiopian-Somalian border wars, and he had a much-creased photograph of himself in uniform, standing next to a horse, to prove it. He claimed to be a member of an ancient Greco-Venetian trading family that still owned a palazzo on the Grand Canal and also a partner in a bookshop on Shaftesbury Avenue. About Selassie I was not sure, but I met the cousin in the palazzo and stood under a Tiepolo ceiling, and when he took me to the bookshop his name was on the door.
What brought Al the Greek night after night to this obscure corner of Chicago? O’Rourke’s was not boring and embraced eccentricity. Ordinary yuppies, those who frequented the bars on Rush Street and in Old Town, did not blend in. For one thing, they were unimpressed by the booths and tables, knocked together from plywood, shellacked, caked by smoke and sweat. For years the bar no more had air-conditioning than central heating. O’Rourke’s was the ultimate singles bar, it was said. You went there with a date and came home alone. Cabaret could break out at any moment. Bagpipers drank free. Everybody knew the words to all of the songs on the jukebox, some of which had been on the machine when it was new. When Jerry Lewis would sing “Come Rain or Come Shine,” it was not unknown for a customer to climb up on the bar and sing along. The songs of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem played again and again, and customers would sing with them: And always remember the longer you live, the sooner you bloody well die. Press agents would bring visiting movie stars to view the local color, and they were good sports, Charlton Heston one night autographing Natalie Nudlemann’s bra while she was wearing it.
Many of us at O’Rourke’s became fake Irishmen, swayed by the Clancy Brothers and the big blown-up photographs of Behan, O’Casey, Shaw, and Joyce. I was one-quarter Irish but submerged the other three-quarters and assured strangers, “Your blood’s worth bottling.” Fund-raisers allegedly from the IRA would visit and we would naïvely give five bucks to the cause, probably not funding any terrorism because they were con artists preying on boozing Irish wannabes. Above all we drank. It is not advisable, perhaps not possible, to spend very many evenings in a place like O’Rourke’s while drinking Cokes and club soda. Sometimes I attempted to cut back by adopting drinks whose taste I hated (Fernet-Branca) or those with low alcohol content (white wine and soda). Night after night I found these substitutes relaxed me enough to switch to scotch and soda. For a time I experimented with vodka and tonic. I asked Jay Kovar what he knew about vodka as a drink. He told me, “Sooner or later, all the heavy hitters get to vodka.”
I studied Jay as he worked behind the bar, trying to figure out how he did it. A saturnine, compact man, fit, looking a little like Jason Patric, he steadily drank half shots of whiskey and smoked Pall Malls. I never saw him clearly appear to be drunk. Indeed I saw relatively few of the regulars when they were drunk, although that could happen after hours at the Ale House. Some people, like Al the Greek, could drink terrifying mixtures of drinks to little apparent effect. Others were more reasonable drinkers, but steady.
We had our own Sun-Times delivery truck. Red Connolly would make O’Rourke’s his last stop of the night. Red, whose brother was the Hollywood columnist Mike Connelly, would deliver bundles of the early editions for us to study. The day’s Royko column might be read aloud. Editors were libeled and publishers despised. Red sometimes used the Sun-Times truck to ferry us from one bar to another. One night Cliff Robertson was in the bar and had fallen under its spell. Red offered to give us all a lift to the Oxford Pub on Lincoln Avenue, which was a late-night joint. We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Bad Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.
We tied the canvas flaps closed on the back of the truck, because of Red’s theory that what we were doing was not technically legal. Jake took off her belt and began to flog Good Sydney. We passed around the Dew. The bagpipe player began “My Bonnie Lassie.” We heard the whoop! whoop! of a police prowler, and Red pulled over to the curb.
“Top o’ the mornin’, Sergeant!” he said, and handed down copies of the Sun-Times and the Wall Street Journal. The prowler pulled away.
“My last delivery,” Red said.
“Chicago,” said Cliff Robertson.
A few of the regulars, I suspect, had little identity other than the one conferred by O’Rourke’s. John the Garbage Man was a regular, displaying his sculptures made from objects discovered in the garbage. He would take discarded silverware and melt it down into jewelry that looked like blobs of melted silverware. These were sold to be worn around the neck. Jon Anderson wrote a column about him and he enjoyed a little run on business. I bought a chess set from him, but it was not a success because the pieces looked interchangeable. These I tried to use only once, while playing in an O’Rourke’s chess tournament that sprang up during the Bobby Fischer fever in Iceland. The winner, who played chess for money at the North Avenue Beach Chess Pavilion, was Andre, a stringy hippie, tie dyed and ponytailed, who explained he had been the armorer of the Luxembourg army before fleeing to America as a political refugee.
We regulars knew one another. We dated one another. We slept with one another. We went to Greektown together, with Al presiding at the head of a long table. We met on Saturday mornings at Oxford’s for “recovery drunch,” named by Mike Tuohy, who believed peppermint schnapps and Coke would snap you out of it. Tom Butkovich would pull up behind O’Rourke’s in his old Volvo station wagon and unload the equipment to barbeque a lamb. His mother, from the far Southwest Side, would bring in covered dishes of macaroni and cheese and potato salad, while his stepdad, a steelworker, would dance with his T-shirt pulled above his belly, singing It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that. We went to one another’s weddings and funerals and observed holidays together. We took collections for bail money, or helped the Jim and Mike Tuohy family to move, which they did frequently, Mike once complaining to McHugh that he had failed to move her kitchen garbage.
The 1968 Days of Rage demonstrations passed through Old Town, and Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer came in. We watched the moon landing and the fires after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. We watched after Nixon resigned. We sang, laughed, and cried. We rehearsed the same stories over and over. I said we knew one another. We knew who we said we were, who we wanted to appear to be, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing one another well enough.
Now Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, and Nelson Algren are dead, and so are John Belushi, Steve Goodman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Mike Tuohy, Hank Oettinger, Al the Greek, and John the Garbage Man. Will Kilkeary sobered up and became a poet. Jeannette Sullivan married a nice guy she met in O’Rourke’s, who became a police officer. Jay Kovar sold the location across the street from Steppenwolf and walks his dogs.