Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer

Author:Norman Mailer [Mailer, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780375508745
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

SIX

After all these maneuvers on the highway, I was angry, I was curious, I was thirsty, and it occurred to me I had not been in a bar since the night at The Widow’s Walk. Ergo, so soon as I came back to my house, I parked and walked down to the town wharf. We have good bars in the center of town: The Bay State (which we call The Brig), The Poop Deck and The Fish and Bait (unofficially renamed The Bucket of Blood to honor the number of fights that take place in there), good bars, but you would not call them great, for they have none of the working-class panache that bartenders like my father bring to a place. Still, they are dark, and just dirty enough to make you comfortable. One can hunker down to drinking as comfortably as an unborn babe in a good dependable womb. Few fluorescent tubes will be overhead and the old jukebox is too feeble to blast your ears. In summer, of course, a bar like The Brig would be more crowded than a New York subway at rush hour, and the story is told—I believe it—that one summer some PR men at Budweiser or Schaefer or one of those warm-urine brews decided to run a contest for the bar-and-restaurant that sold the most beer in the state of Massachusetts. Well, a place in Provincetown called the Bay State showed the greatest volume of beer sales for July. So, on a weekday morning in August, some high executives in lightweight summer suits flew over, accompanied by a television crew, to film the presentation of the award, expecting no doubt to drop in on one of those lobster cum fish-and-chips places, large as an armory, that you can find around Hyannis, and instead encountered our dark, funky Brig with no customers rich enough to buy anything better than ale, but two hundred beer drinkers packed in standing up. Maybe The Brig was the length of a boxcar from the front door to the stinking garbage cans in the rear, and for food, you could get a submarine with ham and cheese or linguiça sausage. The TV cameras rolled and the freaks stood up and said, “Yeah, that’s the beer. Stinks. What you got that red light on your TV camera for? I’m talking too much, right? Stop! Right?”

Well, in winter it was still crowded, but you could sit down and take a taste of the marrow of the mood of what was coming down in the town that day. A lot of commercial fishing boats would return by afternoon and the crews would be drinking. The carpenters and the dope dealers and the narcs and some of the handymen for summer cottages, and unwed young mothers on Fridays with their welfare checks, and others generally scuffling for bread or looking for a friend to buy them a glass were also downing our good urine. I knew most of these people in varying

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