Excerpts

There is no good reason to be sitting in a tavern long after last call but that’s where I am right now and the clock on the wall behind the bar is flirting with 3 a.m. 

Like all tavern clocks, this one is 20 minutes fast, but at least it is moving, or seems to be.  Another clock on the far wall has been stuck at six for as long as I can remember, though for all I can remember right now the clock went up yesterday.

I am in the Billy Goat Tavern, a subterranean saloon underneath Michigan Avenue and a short walk from the Chicago River. This is a lonely, empty time, these hours between last call and sunrise. I see the last customers leave, unsteady up the stairs and on their way to what I know will be uneasy dreams. But now there is cash to count, ashtrays to empty, a grill to shut down, chairs to be placed upside down on tables, and a floor to sweep, and that is why Sam Sianis is still here. He owns the place.

It is quiet, or so it seems. A tavern is never as quiet as it seems. It is filled with echoes and memories, of conversations and laughter, of faces and fights, and here there are 40 years’ worth hanging heavy in the stale air and making time matter not at all. And so, as Sam sits down across the table and says, “It snows maybe later. You want something to drink?” it is easy for me to see him across the room.

It is long ago and he is as young as spring as strong as a bull. He is wearing a white shirt and a black bow tie. He is leaning over. He is biting down on the leg of a barstool. His hands are behind his back. He stands and the stool rises with him, in his teeth, into the smoke-choked tavern air. There are customers at tables and along the bar. Their faces are familiar but it is hard to remember names. Some are so drunk that getting off their barstools without falling down would be an impressive physical feat. But they are not moving, except to turn their heads toward Sam and to bang their bottles and glasses on the tables and on the bar.

The chair is up and Sam’s face is turning red. Veins are bulging in his neck; they start to look like small ropes. Conversations stop. Someone relatively sober yells, “Go Sammy,” and someone smashed says, “Sameeslikanoxsh,” and others begin to shout until the whole room vibrates. After a minute that could be an hour, Sam pulls the chair from his teeth. He smacks it down hard on the floor. The room erupts in a hurtful noise. A glass shatters. Sam reaches for a rag. He moves toward the spill.

“It is late and you are still here,” he says sitting across from me at the table. And, as if he has just seen what I’ve seen, he says, “I was very strong when I was young.” Now I see tired in his shoulders and in his eyes and I ask him why he isn’t home. Why don’t you leave this work for your employees or your kids? You are one of the most famous tavern keepers in the world. What the hell are you doing dumping ashtrays into a trash bin?  Why are you lifting chairs onto tables? Mopping the floor? While I am saying this, I get up and grab a chair.

“No, no. What are you doing? Sit down,” Sam says, so firmly that if I hadn’t known him all these years I would think he was mad at me. Maybe he is, but he says, “Don’t worry.  This is what I do. I cannot not do this. To be a manager you have to graduate from a big college. I didn’t. I graduate from mopping the floors and all that. You need to clean the tables, you jump on the tables. You need to help at the bar, you jump on the bar. You see work that needs to be done, you take care of that work. That is what I learn when I come here. That is what my uncle, he teaches me, and I do it.”

There is an old oil portrait of Sam’s uncle on the crowded walls of the tavern. It is the largest and among the oddest of the hundred of images that fill the walls. I have seen it a thousand times, but now Sam is telling me to look at it again as he says, “Many years ago I go to Greece and I visit the grave of my uncle. I go to his grave and I plant some bushes, and then I take a bucket and I water the bushes. Then after I come back here, I fall asleep on the couch that used to be in the office, and my uncle, he comes to me and he says in Greek, ‘You put all that water on top of me. You are trying to drown me.’ He is joking that time, but I see him many times, in my dreams and in my life. He is very happy, never disappointed at the way I do things, how I keep his name up, his memory alive. I tell him, ‘You up there, I’m down here but we both still work for the Billy Goat.’  Now, you look at the picture. See? That is why he is still smiling.”