Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms by Tim McLoughlin

Author:Tim McLoughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

SURFING THE CRIME WAVE

On the eve of my nineteenth birthday, a group of friends took me out for a drinking tour of Lower Manhattan, the intent being to work our way south from Union Square until we arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge or passed out. There were about a dozen of us at the start of the evening, which, on a surprisingly civilized note, began with dinner at the Cedar Tavern. We stayed mostly on the East Side, veering as we moved downtown. Our second stop was a bar simply called the Pub, on Second Avenue below 14th Street. It was a fairly rough place back then, with a colorful clientele. I was shooting pool against a local when a fight broke out at the bar. After some shoving and shouting, the toothless female bartender ejected one man with the assistance of a few patrons. About fifteen minutes later, our game still in progress, a shot was fired from the street into the bar, shattering one of the small panes of glass in the windowed front door and lodging in the back wall behind us. Everyone threw themselves to the floor, and for a moment there was only the fading sound of the gunshot and the thumping bass of the Silver Convention on the jukebox. Then I heard a voice from above my hiding place half under the pool table: “Shootin’ pool or what?”

I slowly stood to discover that most of the other customers were returning to their seats at the bar or scattered tables. There was some discussion about the likelihood of the shot having been fired by the gentleman recently removed. The formidable barmaid resumed pouring drinks. A couple of people stepped outside and looked around, and one or two walked to the back wall and examined the bullet hole up close.

“Pool,” my opponent urged again. Though it looked as if he hadn’t moved, I was fairly sure he’d hit the deck with the rest of us and was merely taking advantage of having regained his composure quicker. We finished the game and played another. I lost both and was thankful that the wager had only been one beer per game. We drank quickly and left shortly after. Emerging from the bar tentatively, as if from a foxhole, my friends and I scanned the street. There were people and cars and neon signs, and absolutely no indication that anything untoward had recently occurred. There had been no conversation in the bar about calling the police, and no cops were to be seen outside.

Several of my friends took the incident as an omen and called it a night. The rest of us kept heading south. Sometime after midnight we arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge. Four of us, myself included, lived in Brooklyn and decided to walk over the bridge to clear our heads before going home. We’d just begun our ascent up the footpath when we noticed a flurry of activity in front of One Police Plaza. There were crowds milling and lights everywhere, and we surmised they were filming a movie.

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