The Clancys of Queens (8 page)

Even on days when I don't wave two guns over my head like Billy the Kid, Dad and I always play Gene Pitney's cowboy classic, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” on the ride to Gregory's, and today is no different.

We're not even halfway through Howard Beach on Cross Bay when I start begging Dad to cue up the tape. He gives in by the next stoplight, and we take our positions—I sit shotgun with both hands on the imaginary pistols in my imaginary hip holsters. He drives, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the actual gun in his actual hip holster. Then we sing. We know the whole song from the beginning, but it's the chorus we're waiting for, because that's when we do our quick-draw:

The man who shot Liberty Valance,
BANG!

He shot Liberty Valance,
BANG!

He was the bravest of them all!

Then we play it again, and again, and maybe one more time before Dad flips the tape to play “Town Without Pity.” Part of our game here is that I feign hating this song, so he sings it loudly at me and laughs, and I open up my window all the way and try to stick my head out, which just makes him sing louder, and then I can't help myself, and I laugh and join in for the finale,
What a town without pity caaaaaaan do!
“All right, Scoot,” Dad finally says, “Howsabout a li'l Creedence now?!”

“Yeah!” After I hand him the tape, I try to kick my heels up onto the dash, but they keep falling short, and though Dad would have been mad had I made it, my failed attempt at coolness cracks him up.

After all that it takes roughly three Punch Buggy punches (“Punch Buggy yellow!
I got you first!
No, I got you first!”), a dozen License Plate Game spottings (“New Jersey!
Easy.
Arkansas!!
Whoa, good one!
”), and one round of Name the State Capitals to get to Gregory's. In other words, twenty minutes.

Since Dad started dating Jackie, two years ago now, we no longer have to hunt for a metered spot on Metropolitan. We pull right into the super-secret employee lot around back, which is neither super nor secret, and, since we park there and so do a few other regulars, it's not even employees only. Still, in my mind it is always the “super-secret employee lot,” and getting to park in there is mind-blowingly exciting, both because Dad always makes a big deal out of it—“How'd ya like that, Scoot? Door-to-door service for us!”—and because, unlike your typical suburban parking lot, this one is a Queens special. That is, it is not a flat cement square or rectangle with lines delineating spaces, but a post-earthquake-quality cracked basin of asphalt at the bottom of a driveway with such a steep drop that halfway down you feel as if you're riding on the back of Greg Louganis, mid–nose dive.

There's room for about a half dozen cars in the lot, but there are never fewer than ten in there, squeezed in at impossible angles, back to front and front to back, all of them partially blocking the others and making it inevitable that every hour someone will walk through the bar screaming out a laundry list of cars that need to be moved: “Whoever's got the red Pontiac, the blue Chevy, the black Buick, the green Olds, the tan Nissan, the gray Honda, and the white Toyota needs to move 'em, pronto!” At which time I would always take off running for the lot, pile up a couple of old produce boxes near the dumpster, and climb on top of them to watch a bunch of half-drunk regulars, big-haired waitresses, and bone-tired kitchen guys in grease-black aprons jockey their cars around and around and around, like a giant-size, real-life game of Tetris, with cursing.

While I may have been the Henry Hill of The Geriatrics of 251st Street in my subverted Copacabana scene, at Gregory's that part belonged entirely to Dad.

We hop out of the Laser and slam our doors, a bit too hard and in tandem for effect, and just before we head in, Dad crouches down, pulls his comb from his back pocket, and fixes his part and mustache in the side-view mirror. When he pops back up, he flips the keys over the hood without as much as a sidelong look in my direction and gives me the
nice one
nod when I catch them. I twirl the key ring around my finger as we walk toward the door, feeling even cooler now than I did when he cursed (in acronym) in front of me earlier.

Gregory's back door opens to a long, low-ceilinged, wood-paneled hallway. To your immediate right is the first of two kitchen entryways, and if you cut left, there's a row of pay phones and the johns. Dad smacks the shoulder of some guy on the phone, slaps the back of another one coming out of the bathroom, then pokes his head through the swinging doors of the first kitchen entrance to say hi to the cooks, “Emerico! How goes it pal?!” Then we walk five paces, and Dad sticks his head through the second kitchen entrance to do the same with the dishwashers and busboys on the other side.

We flatten ourselves against the wall as a couple of waitresses fly by, one-handing their pizza-pie-size brown plastic trays of empties over our heads as Dad gives and gets more hellos. “Sherry, my dear!”
Lookie here, Tara's Father in the house!
“And hello, Miss Katie!”
It's really pumping tonight, honey. Better tell Margie right away if ya wanna sit in the crow's nest—could be a wait!
This news gets Dad an instant elbow to the ribs. “Da, we gotta tell her now!!”

“Cool your jets, Scoot. We'll say our hellos, and then I'll tell her, promise.”

The dark, muted hall gives way to a sudden burst of clanking glasses, squawking laughs, wide white flashes of light from the TVs hanging over the bar, and eye-level blips of color from the tabletop Pac-Man machine. For me, those first few steps into Gregory's proper are no less mind-blowing than coming up from the subway tunnel and finding yourself in the middle of Grand Central Terminal…if the train station were a bar in Queens with twelve-foot-high ceilings and a nautical theme.

If you came into Gregory's through the main entrance, you had to pass under an archway made of two real whalebones, each seven feet tall and touching at the top. After that, the whole space is divided in two by a wall of stacked wooden barrels draped with dusty fishing nets and ropes and dotted with the odd pulley and life preserver.

To one side of the barrel wall is the bar, to the other is the dining room, and smack in the middle is the “crow's nest” table. This is an ordinary round table, but it's surrounded by a shoulder-high fence, perched about five feet in the air on a large “mast,” and accessible only by ladder. Naturally, it was my favorite place on Earth.

As always, I track Dad's waist from behind as he weaves through the crowd. Random hands reach down to pinch my cheeks and squeeze my shoulders as I go, and offerings from faceless torsos appear right in front of my eyes, from all angles—a dangling maraschino cherry just fished from somebody's Manhattan, a stack of quarters for Pac-Man, a handful of bar nuts. When we finally make it to the bar, we say hello to our friends stool by stool.

A good chunk of the Gregory's regulars sound like a collection of clichés: English Billy typically came to the bar after a game of tennis, wearing white short-shorts and Tretorns. Joey O'Dirt was Irish American, worked in construction, and drank too much. The hostess chain-smoked Virginia Slims and pumped gin martinis for blood; her name was Marge. The Lemanski brothers were Polish.

Another chunk of regulars escaped stereotypes by a hair. Sal wore painted-on, stonewashed jeans with tucked-in white V-neck T-shirts, and his partner, George, worked for the airlines, but as a baggage handler, not a flight attendant. Likewise, Rob was a crooked-teethed Englishman whose hobby was painting portraits, but his boyfriend, Pete, was a giant Italian American who made his living selling commercial washing machines. And of course there was my dad, a cop with aviator sunglasses and a Tom Selleck mustache but who also had one completely unique accessory: me.

The last bunch defied any and all categorization. Don Jo wore a fedora and linen guayabera shirts, but he was originally from Bombay, not Havana, and he sold high-end lace for a living. Daisy was supertall, practically mute, and had a cartoon-quality handlebar mustache—his real name was never disclosed and his nickname never explained.

But in my mind, no matter how close or far these Gregory's denizens might have come to being archetypes, they were all wholly original, if only because of the unlikely fact that they were all gathered here, forming a kind of family.

Dad sneaks up on Daisy from behind, throwing his left arm around his shoulders and jutting his right in front of his chest, fingers spread, awaiting a handshake. (A move he'll repeat on a good four or five more guys at the bar.) As soon as English Billy sees us coming, he gets up from his stool, then lifts me up to take his place. In no time Kiki, the Swedish bartender, slides over a beer for Dad and an orange and cranberry juice with at least three swizzle sticks for me. Jackie zooms through to give Dad a drive-by kiss before flying back off to check on her tables, while Joey O'Dirt sidles up next to me and puts a couple of quarters on top of my stack, announcing, “I'm gonna kick your ass today, kid!,” which gets him a quick flick to the ear from Dad. “Eh!! Watch the language, ya dope!”

Joey and I head over to the tabletop Pac-Man machine while Dad tells Margie to put us down for dinner in the crow's nest. No more than ten minutes later we climb up there to eat. After another ten minutes I have my face pressed between the fence posts with a half-eaten chicken finger clenched in my teeth, pretending I'm a nineteenth-century explorer of the high seas while not so inconspicuously looking down people's shirts. Dad is kicking back, popping fries and drinking beer, waving out at the crowd in between sips as though he's the Pope of Gregory's, and the crow's nest table is the popemobile.

Somewhere around 9:00 p.m. we pay our bill, go back out the same way we came in, hop into the Laser, and head home.

This routine happened again and again, every odd Saturday night of my life, for the next five years. And while there was never another night that was kicked off by me waving two guns over my head, there were a couple of more exceptional ones to come. That spring, just before my eighth birthday, Dad threw my First Communion party at Gregory's. And in addition to all the regulars, some combination of my Clancy family was there, too: my Grandma Alice; my uncles Gil, Arthur, Dennis, Thomas, and Michael; my aunts Margaret, Nancy, Linda, Carol, and Kathy; and some number of my twenty-one first cousins, Tricia, Little Gil, Joanie, John, Kathy, Nancy, Little Arthur, Young John, Adam, Colleen, AJ, Audra, Alice, Arlene, Butchie, Deanna, TJ, Little Thomas, Shawn, Danny, and Caitlin. Like a fairy tale, Dad didn't care that I was still wearing my white bride of Jesus dress and new gold crucifix necklace while I played handball with my cousins on the wall next to the deli out front on Metropolitan.

Those young nights weren't all quite so dreamy. More than a few times Dad had too much to drink at Gregory's and would run the red lights on Cross Bay Boulevard on our way home. Just once I said, “Hey, Da, you shouldn't do that.” And he shot me a nasty look, to which I said, “I mean, what if the police see us?” He cranked the radio, then screamed a line I'd heard before: “I-AM-THE-POLICE!” I shut my mouth and my eyes, white-knuckling the edges of my seat and taking long, deep, terrified breaths through my nose.

Those white-knuckled nights were somewhat redeemed, however, on Christmas Eve 1989. A few weeks beforehand Dad had sat me down on the couch. “All right, Scooter,” he said.

Anxiously I cut him off, in textbook nine-year-old fashion. “Am I in trouble?”

“No, no. It's something good. Do you think I should ask Jackie to marry me?”

I didn't miss a beat. “Yup.”

Everything moved pretty fast from there. Dad and I headed over to see Slim—Dad's nickname for his jeweler friend, a thin Armenian with a magnifying loupe hanging permanently below his Adam's apple. With the ring on order, he conferred with the Gregory's crew: Marge, Daisy, Don Jo, English Billy, Joey O'Dirt, the Lemanski brothers, Kiki, the waitresses Katie and Sherry, Pete and Rob, and George and Sal, who were organizing the Christmas Eve party.