When the Sacred Ginmill Closes Read Online Free PDF Page A

delight of the waitresses who hated the kids for staying late, ordering little, and tipping hardly at all. It also kept the noise level down and made the room more suitable for long-haul maintenance drinking.
    Which was what I was there for.I wanted to keep an edge on but I didn't want to get drunk, except once in a while. I mostly mixed my bourbon with coffee, moving to straight booze toward the end of an evening. I could read a paper there, and have a hamburger or a full meal, and as much or as little conversation as I was in the mood for. I wasn't always there all day and night, but it was a rare day that I didn't get in the door at least once, and some days I got there a few minutes after Dennis opened up and was still there when Billie was ready to close. Everybody's got to be someplace.
    SALOON friends.
    I got to know TommyTillary in Armstrong's. He was a regular, apt to turn up three or four nights out of seven. I don't recall the first time I was aware of him, but it was hard to be in a room with him and not notice him. He was a big fellow and his voice tended to carry. He wasn't raucous, but after a few drinks his voice filled a room.
    He ate a lot of beef and drank a lot ofChivas Regal, and they both showed in his face. He must have been close to forty-five. He was getting jowly, and his cheeks were blooming with a tracery of broken capillaries.
    I never knew why they called him Tough Tommy. Perhaps Skip wasright, perhaps the name's intent was ironic. They called him Tommy Telephone because of his job. He worked in telephone sales, peddling investments over the phone from a bucket shop in the Wall Street area. I understand people change jobs a lot in that line of work. The ability to coax investment dollars out of strangers over a telephone line is a rather special talent, and its possessors can get work readily, moving from one employer to another at will.
    That summer, Tommy was working for an outfit calledTannahill amp; Company, selling limited partnerships in real-estate syndications. There were tax advantages, I gather, and the prospect of capital gains. I picked this up inferentially, because Tommy never pitched anything, to me or anyone else at the bar. I was there one time when an obstetrics resident fromRoosevelt tried to ask him about his offerings. Tommy brushed him off with a joke.
    "No, I'm serious," the doctor insisted. "I'm finally making abuck, I ought to start thinking about things like that."
    Tommy shrugged. "You got a card?" The doctor didn't. "Then write your phone on this and a good time to call you. You want apitch, I'll call you and give you the full treatment. But I got to warn you, I'm irresistible over the phone."
    A couple of weeks later they ran into each other and the resident complained that Tommy hadn't called him.
    "Jesus, I been meaning to," Tommy said. "First thing, I'll make a note of it now."
    He was acceptable company. He told dialect jokes and he told them reasonably well, and I laughed at my share of them. I suppose some of them were offensive, but they weren't often mean-spirited. If I was in a mood to reminisce about my days on the force, he was a good enough listener, and if the story I told was a funny one his laugh was as loud as anybody's.
    He was, on balance, a little too loud and a little too cheery. He talked a little too much and he could get on your nerves. As I said, he'd turn up at Armstrong's three or four nights a week, and about half the time she was with him. Carolyn Cheatham, Carolyn from theCaro -line, with a soft you-all accent that, like certain culinary herbs, became stronger when you steeped it in alcohol. Sometimes she came in on his arm. Other times he'd get there first and she'd join him. She lived in the neighborhood and she and Tommy worked in the same office, and I figured- if I bothered to think about it- that the office romance had served to introduce Tommy to Armstrong's.
    He followed sports. He bet with a bookie- mostly ball games, sometimes