The Regulars

It was the proverbial night not fit for man nor beast, black and grim and howling, with the rain coming on in sidewise sheets. But in Charley Sullivan’s place everything was as cozy as an old boot, the lights dim, the heat turned up, the neon beer-signs sputtering pleasantly, Charley behind the bar, filling them beyond the Plimsoll line, and all the regulars in their regular places. What a comfort a tavern like Charley Sullivan’s can be on a night that’s black and grim and howling!

“It was a night like this,” said the Pope to Karl Marx, “that you changed your mind about blowing up the stock exchange, as I recall. Eh?”

Karl Marx nodded moodily. “It was the beginning of the end for me as a true revolutionary, it was.” He isn’t Irish, but in Charley Sullivan’s everybody picks up the rhythm of it soon enough. “When you get too fond of your comforts to be willing to go out into a foul gale to attack the enemies of the proletariat, it’s the end of your vocation, sure enough.” He sighed and peered into his glass. It held nothing but suds, and he sighed again.

“Can I buy you another?” asked the Pope. “In memory of your vocation.”

“You may indeed,” said Karl Marx.

The Pope looked around. “And who else is needy? My turn to set them up!”

The Leading Man tapped the rim of his glass. So did Ms. Bewley and Mors Longa. I smiled and shook my head, and the Ingenue passed also, but Toulouse-Lautrec, down at the end of the bar, looked away from the television set long enough to give the signal. Charley efficiently handed out the refills—beer for the apostle of the class struggle, Jack Daniels for Mors Longa, Valpolicella for the Pope, scotch and water for the Leading Man, white wine for Ms. Bewley, Perrier with slice of lemon for Toulouse-Lautrec, since he had had the cognac the last time and claimed to be tapering off. And for me, Myers on the rocks. Charley never needs to ask. Of course, he knows us all very well.

“Cheers,” said the Leading Man, and we drank up, and then an angel passed by, and the long silence ended only when a nasty rumble of thunder went through the place at about 6.3 on the Richter scale.

“Nasty night,” the Ingenue said. “Imagine trying to elope in a downpour like this! I can see it now, Harry and myself at the boathouse, and the car—”

“Harry and I,” said Mors Longa. “‘Myself’ is reflexive. As you well know, sweet.”

The Ingenue blinked sweetly. “I always forget. Anyway, there was Harry and I at the boathouse, and the car was waiting, my cousin’s old Pierce-Arrow with the—”

—bar in the back seat that was always stocked with the best imported liquors, I went on silently, just a fraction of a second ahead of her clear high voice, and all we had to do was drive ninety miles across the state line to the place where the justice of the peace was waiting—

I worked on my rum. The Leading Man, moving a little closer to the Ingenue, tenderly took her hand as the nasty parts of the story began to unfold. The Pope wheezed sympathetically into his wine, and Karl Marx scowled and pounded one fist against the other, and even Ms. Bewley, who had very little tolerance for the Ingenue’s silliness, managed a bright smile in the name of sisterhood.

“—the rain, you see, had done something awful to the car’s wiring, and there we were, Harry on his knees in the mud trying to fix it, and me half-crazy with excitement and impatience, and the night getting worse and worse, when we heard dogs barking and—”

—my guardian and two of his men appeared out of the night—

We had heard it all fifty times before. She tells it every horrid rainy night. From no one else do we tolerate any such repetition—we have our sensibilities, and it would be cruel and unusual to be forced to listen to the same fol-de-rol over and over and over—but the Ingenue is a dear sweet young thing, and her special foible it is to repeat herself, and she and she alone gets away with it among the regulars at Charley Sullivan’s. We followed along, nodding and sighing and shaking our heads at all the appropriate places, the way you do when you’re hearing Beethoven’s Fifth or Schubert’s Unfinished, and she was just getting around to the tempestuous climax, her fiancé and her guardian in a fight to the death illuminated by baleful flashes of lightning, when there was a crack of real lightning outside, followed almost instantly by a blast of thunder that made the last one seem like the sniffle of a mosquito. The vibrations shook three glasses off the bar and stood Charley Sullivan’s frame photos of President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII on their corners.

The next thing that happened was the door opened and a new customer walked in. And you can imagine that we all sat to attention at that, because you would expect only the regulars to be populating Charley’s place in such weather, and it was a genuine novelty to have a stranger materialize. Well timed, too, because without him we’d have had fifteen minutes more of the tale of the Ingenue’s bungled elopement.

He was maybe thirty-two or a little less, roughly dressed in heavy-duty Levis, a thick black cardigan, and a ragged pea jacket. His dark unruly hair was soaked and matted. On no particular evidence I decided he was a merchant sailor who had just jumped ship. For a moment he stood a little way within the door, eyeing us all with that cautious look a bar-going man has when he comes to a new place where everyone else is obviously a long-time regular; and then he smiled, a little shyly at first, more warmly as he saw some of us smiling back. He took off his jacket, hung it on the rack above the jukebox, shook himself like a drenched dog, and seated himself at the bar between the Pope and Mors Longa. “Jesus,” he said, “what a stinking night! I can’t tell you how glad I was to see a light burning at the end of the block.”

“You’ll like it here, brother,” said the Pope. “Charley, let me buy this young man his first.”

“You took the last round,” Mors Longa pointed out. “May I, Your Holiness?”

The Pope shrugged. “Why not?”

“My pleasure,” said Mors Longa to the newcomer. “What will it be?”

“Do they have Old Bushmill here?”

“They have everything here,” said Mors Longa. “Charley has everything. Our host. Bushmill for the lad, Charley, and a double, I think. And is anyone else ready?”

“A sweetener here,” said the Leading Man. Toulouse-Lautrec opted for his next cognac. The Ingenue, who seemed to have forgotten that she hadn’t finished telling her story, waved for her customary rye and ginger. The rest of us stood pat.

“What’s your ship?” I asked.

The stranger gave me a startled look. “Pequod Maru, Liberian flag. How’d you know?”

“Good guess. Where bound? D’ye mind?”

He took a long pull of his whiskey. “Maracaibo, they said. Not a tanker. Coffee and cacao. But I’m not going. I—ah—resigned my commission. This afternoon, very suddenly. Jesus, this tastes good. What a fine warm place this is!”

“And glad we are to see you,” said Charley Sullivan. “We’ll call you Ishmael, eh?”

“Ishmael?”

“We all need names here,” said Mors Longa. “This gentleman we call Karl Marx, for example. He’s socially conscious. That’s Toulouse-Lautrec down there by the tube. And you can think of me as Mors Longa.”

Ishmael frowned. “Is that an Italian name?”

“Latin, actually. Not a name, a sort of a phrase. Mors longa, vita brevis. My motto. And that’s the Ingenue, who needs a lot of love and protection, and this is Ms. Bewley, who can look after herself, and—”

He went all around the room. Ishmael appeared to be working hard at remembering the names. He repeated them until he had them straight, but he still looked a little puzzled. “Bars I’ve been in,” he said, “it isn’t the custom to make introductions like this. Makes it seem more like a private party than a bar.”

“A family gathering, more like,” said Ms. Bewley.

Karl Marx said, “We constitute a society here. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness. We look after one another in this place.”

“You’ll like it here,” said the Pope.

“I do. I’m amazed how much I like it.” The sailor grinned. “This may be the bar I’ve been looking for all my life.”

“No doubt but that it is,” said Charley Sullivan. “And a Bushmill’s on me, lad?”

Shyly Ishmael pushed his glass forward, and Charley topped it off.

“So friendly here,” Ishmael said. “Almost like—home.”

“Like one’s club, perhaps,” said the Leading Man.

“A club, a home, yes,” said Mors Longa, signaling Charley for another bourbon. “Karl Marx tells it truly: we care for each other here. We are friends, and we strive constantly to amuse one another and protect one another, which are the two chief duties of friends. We buy each other drinks, we talk, we tell stories to while away the darkness.”

“Do you come here every night?”

“We never miss a one,” Mors Longa said.

“You must know each other very well by this time.”

“Very well. Very, very well.”

“The kind of place I’ve always dreamed of,” Ishmael said wonderingly. “The kind of place I’d never want to leave.” He let his eyes pan in a slow arc around the whole room, past the jukebox, the pool table, the dart board, the television screen, the tattered 1934 calendar that had never been changed, the fireplace, the piano. He was glowing, and not just from the whiskey. “Why would anyone ever want to leave a place like this?”

“It is a very good place,” said Karl Marx.

Mors Longa said, “And when you find a very good place, it’s the place where you want to remain. Of course. It becomes your club, as our friend says. Your home away from home. But that reminds me of a story, young man. Have you ever heard about the bar that nobody actually ever does leave? The bar where everyone stays forever, because they couldn’t leave even if they wanted to? Do you know that one?”

“Never heard it,” said Ishmael.

But the rest of us had. In Charley Sullivan’s place we try never to tell the same story twice, in order to spare each other’s sensibilities, for boredom is the deadliest of afflictions here. Only the Ingenue is exempt from that rule because it is her nature to tell her stories again and again, and we love her all the same. Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that one of us must tell an old and familiar story to a newcomer; but though at other times we give each other full attention, it is not required at a time such as that. So the Leading Man and the Ingenue wandered off for a tête-à-tête by the fireplace, and Karl Marx challenged the Pope to a round of darts, and the others drifted off to this corner or that until only Mors Longa and the sailor and I were still at the bar, I drowsing over my rum and Mors Longa getting that faraway look and Ishmael, leaning intently forward, saying, “A bar where nobody can ever leave? What a strange sort of place!”

“Yes,” said Mors Longa.

“Where is there such a place?”

“In no particular part of the universe. By which I mean it lies somewhere outside of space and time as we understand those concepts, everywhere and nowhere at once, although it looks not at all alien or strange, apart from its timelessness and its spacelessness. In fact, it looks, I’m told, like every bar you’ve even been in in your life, only more so. The proprietor’s a big man with black Irish in him, a lot like Charley Sullivan here, and he doesn’t mind setting one up for the regulars now and then on the house, and he always gives good measure and keeps the heat turned up nicely. And the wood is dark and mellow and well polished, and the railing is the familiar brass, and there are the usual two hanging ferns and the usual aspidistra in the corner next to the spittoon, and there’s a dart board and a pool table and all those other things that you find in bars of the kind that this one is. You understand me? This is a perfectly standard sort of bar, but it doesn’t happen to be in New York City or San Francisco or Hamburg or Rangoon or in any other city you’re likely to have visited, though the moment you walk into this place you feel right at home in it.”

“Just like here.”

“Very much like here,” said Mors Longa.

“But people never leave?” Ishmael’s brows furrowed.

“Never?”

“Well, actually, some of them do,” Mors Longa said. “But let me talk about the other ones first, all right? The regulars, the ones who are there all the time. You know, there are certain people who absolutely never go into bars, the ones who prefer to do their drinking at home or in restaurants before dinner or not at all. But then there are the bar-going sorts. Some of them are folks who just like to drink, you know, and find a bar a convenient place to get their whistles wetted when they’re en route from somewhere to somewhere else. And there are some who think drinking’s a social act, eh? But you also find people in bars, a lot of them, who go to the place because there’s an emptiness in them that needs to be filled, a dark, cold, hollow space, to be filled not just with good warm bourbon, you understand, but a mystic and invisible substance that emanates from others who are in the same way, people who somehow have had a bit of their souls leak away from them by accident and need the comfort of being among their own kind. Say, a priest who’s lost his calling or a writer who’s forgotten the joy of putting stories down on paper or a painter to whom all colors have become shades of gray or a surgeon whose scalpel-hand has picked up a bit of a tremor or a photographer whose eyes don’t quite focus right any more. You know the sort, don’t you? You find a lot of that sort in bars. Something in their eyes tells you what they are. But in this particular bar that I’m talking about, you find only that sort, good people, decent people, but people with that empty zone inside them. Which makes it even more like all the other bars there are, in fact the Platonic ideal of a bar, if you follow me, a kind of three-dimensional stereotype populated by flesh-and-blood clichés, a sort of perpetual stage-set, do you see? Hearing about a place like that where everybody’s a little tragic, everybody’s a bit on the broken side, everyone is a perfect bar-type, you’d laugh; you’d say it’s unreal; it’s too much like everybody’s idea of what such a place ought to be like to be convincing. Eh? But all stereotypes are rooted firmly in reality, you know. That’s what makes them stereotypes, because they’re exactly like reality, only more so. And to the people who do their drinking in the bar I’m talking about, it isn’t any stereotype and they aren’t clichés. It’s the only reality they have, the realest reality there is, for them, and it’s no good sneering at it, because it’s their own little world, the world of the archetypical saloon, the world of the bar regulars.”

“Who never leave the place,” said Ishmael.

“How can they? Where would they go? What would they do on a day off? They have no identity except inside the bar. The bar is their life. The bar is their universe. They have no business going elsewhere. They simply stay where they are. They tell each other stories and they work hard to keep each other happy, and for them there is no world outside. That’s what it means to be a regular, to be a Platonic ideal. Every night the bar and everything in it vanishes into a kind of inchoate gray mist at closing time, and every morning when it’s legal to open the bar comes back, and meanwhile the regulars don’t go anywhere except into the mist, because that’s all there is, mist and then bar, bar and then mist. Platonic ideals don’t have daytime jobs and they don’t go to Atlantic City on the weekend and they don’t decide to go bowling one night instead of to their bar. Do you follow me? They stay there the way the dummies in a store window stay in the store window. Only they can walk and talk and feel and drink and do everything else that window dummies can’t do. And that’s their whole life, night after night, month after month, year after year, century after century—maybe till the end of time.”

“Spooky place,” said Ishmael with a little shudder.

“The people who are in that bar are happier than they could possibly be anywhere else.”

“But they never leave it. Except you said some of them do, and you’d be telling me about those people later.”

Mors Longa finished his bourbon, and, unbidden, Charley Sullivan gave him one more and set another rum in front of me and an Irish for the sailor. For a long while Mors Longa studied his drink. Then he said, “I can’t really tell you much about the ones who leave, because I don’t know much about them. I intuit their existence logically, is all. You see, from time to time there’s a newcomer in this bar that’s outside of space and time. Somebody comes wandering in out of the night, the way you did here tonight, and sits down and joins the regular crowd and, bit by bit, fits right in. Now, obviously, if every once in a while somebody new drops in, and nobody ever leaves, then it wouldn’t take more than a little for the whole place to get terribly crowded, like Grand Central at commuter time, and what kind of a happy scene would that make? So I conclude that sooner or later each of the regulars very quietly must disappear, must just vanish without anybody’s knowing it, maybe go into the john and never come out, something like that. And not only does no one ever notice that someone’s missing, but no one remembers that that person was ever there. Do you follow? That way the place never gets too full.”

“But where do they go, once they disappear from the bar that nobody ever leaves, the bar that’s outside of space and time?”

“I don’t know,” said Mors Longa quietly. “I don’t have the foggiest idea.” After a moment he added, “There’s a theory, though. Mind you, only a theory. It’s that the people in the bar are really doing time in a kind of halfway house, a sort of purgatory, you understand, between one world and another. And they stay there a long, long time, however long a time it is until their time is up, and then they leave, but they can only leave when their replacement arrives. And immediately they’re forgotten. The fabric of the place closes around them, and nobody among the regulars remembers that once there used to be a doctor with the d.t.’s here, say, or a politician who got caught on the take, or a little guy who sat in front of the piano for hours and never played a note. But everybody has a hunch that that’s how the system works. And so it’s a big thing when somebody new comes in. Every regular starts secretly wondering, Is it me who’s going to go? And wondering too, Where am I going to go, if I’m the one?”

Ishmael worked on his drink in a meditative way. “Are they afraid to go, or afraid that they won’t?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not sure. But I guess most of them would be afraid to go. The bar’s such a warm and cozy and comforting place. It’s their whole world and has been for a million years. And now maybe they’re going to go somewhere horrible—who knows?—but for certain they’re going to go somewhere different. I’d be afraid of that. Of course, maybe if I’d been stuck in the same place for a million years, no matter how cozy, I’d be ready to move along when the chance came. Which would you want?”

“I don’t have the foggiest,” said Mors Longa. “But that’s the story of the bar where nobody leaves.”

“Spooky,” said Ishmael.

He finished his drink, pushed the glass away, shook his head to Charley Sullivan, and sat in silence. We all sat in silence. The rain drummed miserably against the side of the building. I looked over at the Leading Man and the Ingenue. He was holding her hand and staring meaningfully into her eyes. The Pope, hefting a dart, was toeing the line and licking his lips to sharpen his aim. Ms. Bewley and Toulouse-Lautrec were playing chess. It was the quiet part of the evening, suddenly.

Slowly the sailor rose and took his jacket from the hook. He turned, smiled uncertainly, and said, “Getting late. I better be going.” He nodded to the three of us at the bar and said, “Thanks for the drinks. I needed those. And thanks for the story, Mr. Longa. That was one strange story, you know?”

We said nothing. The sailor opened the door, wincing as cold sheets of rain lashed at him. He pulled his jacket tight around him and, shivering a little, stepped out in the darkness. But he was gone only a moment. Hardly had the door closed behind him but it opened again and he stumbled back in, drenched.

“Jesus,” he said, “it’s raining worse than ever. What a stinking night! I’m not going out into that!”

“No,” I said. “Not fit for man nor beast.”

“You don’t mind if I stay here until it slackens off some, then?”

“Mind? Mind?” I laughed. “This is a public house, my friend. You’ve got as much right as anyone. Here. Sit down. Make yourself to home.”

“Plenty of Bushmill’s left in the bottle, lad,” said Charley Sullivan.

“I’m a little low on cash,” Ishmael muttered.

Mors Longa said, “That’s all right. Money’s not the only coin of the realm around here. We can use some stories we haven’t heard before. Let’s hear the strangest story you can tell us, for openers, and I’ll undertake to keep you in Irish while you talk. Eh?”

“Fair enough,” said Ishmael. He thought a moment. “All right. I have a good one for you. I have a really good one if you don’t mind them weird. It’s about my uncle Timothy and his tiny twin brother, that he carried around under his arm all his life. Does that interest you?”

“Most assuredly it does,” I said.

“Seconded,” said Mors Longa. He grinned with a warmth I had not seen on his face for a long time. “Set them up,” he said to Charley Sullivan. “On me. For the house.”