My Friend Kenneth
By Michael Woyan
Page 6
For my first couple of years at the apartment
I enjoyed a very symbiotic relationship with
the bar and it's staff. During this period,
the bank with which I was employed saw fit
to withhold my commissions from time to time,
blaming it on the accounting difficulties
that come with a merger. Finding their cash
flow challenges at my expense a bit more
than taking one for the home team, I also
naively believed it to remain a worthwhile
opportunity; I took a job at a local nightclub
with an early liquor license as a doorman
for extra and dependable money. I would often
bring young patrons back to the apartment
for a nightcap after the bars had closed
only to find myself without sufficient reserves.
When I found myself in these circumstances,
I was able to walk downstairs through the
basement and up back into the bar after it
closed to purchase never-to-be-mentioned
six packs of beer from a bartender with whom
I had become particularly friendly.
One very late night after the Ale House had
closed, I was once again in those circumstances
with a young lady waiting for libatory relief
upstairs while I made the familiar trek through
the basement and back upstairs to the bar,
when I discovered that it wasn't my friendly
bartender cleaning up, but a huge, completely
frightening transsexual of a woman with demonic
eyes and a scream like thunder. I returned
screams in pure terror and ran back upstairs
empty-handed to my soon to be dateless apartment.
She managed to have me barred for life from
a dubious establishment that embraced any
and all of Old Town's in-between characters
but me.
Well, Ken was not going to take this one
lying down. He proceeded to march me downstairs
to the Ale House with immediate dispatch
and confronted the bartenders with a resolve
I'd not yet seen from him and an ultimatum.
He threatened to no longer patronize his
favorite, most similar to the pubs at home
place of drink, The Old Town Ale House, unless
I was reinstated. With Ken's steely stare
and their endless silence the bartender finally
cracked, allowing me to have a drink, just
this once. After this concession, of course
Kenneth was not going to stop there. They
said that if the owner said it was OK, then
I would be granted permanent reinstatement.
Kenneth stood firm, and aside from the fact
that the offended she-male in question no
longer lived in Chicago, I was again accepted
among the "Old Town Irregulars"
and allowed to drink among the chronically
over-served. In truth, the significance here
is that once again fresh possibilities were
opened up to me in terms of plugging in to
the creative community I'd denied myself
all these years. Armed with Kenneth's wide
reach of compassion for the imperfect, I
was now provided with an abundance of stories
about the lives of the often forgotten, unappreciated
and the in-between, enriching my life beyond
what I'd thought possible with conversations
of authors I'd never read, jazz musicians
I'd never heard, and art I'd never seen.
Some time had passed after this, and my friends
began to refer to me dubiously as the "Mayor
of Old Town" because I couldn't walk
down the street without being greeted by
several locals with whom I'd probably either
done business or had a drink.
Months passed as we got to know one another
better and better in that continuous state
of transfiguration one can only experience
when acutely alert in one's life, and I learned
about his family, his hopes, his ambitions
and his fears. I benefited greatly from his
remarkable sense of story and talent for
the telling of them. I introduced Kenneth
to the greats in jazz, of which Coltrane
and Miles stirred his Irish soul the most
profoundly. Once considered a great newspaper
town, we discussed the inferior quality of
Chicago's newspapers to its more international
counterparts, The London Times and The New
York Times. If it were late enough at night
and if we'd shared enough good cheer, we'd
call his sister Cora in Galway as she was
making breakfast for her children taking
advantage of the time difference and her
generous nature. I also came to learn why
he would mysteriously disappear Saturday
mornings and not return until Sunday early
evenings for Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.
It seems that Kenneth had family residing
on the south side of Chicago. In addition
to various aunts and uncles, Kenneth has
three brothers, two of whom are married,
with children and are in the contracting
business; the third, Bernard was described
as troubled and the subject dropped. Kenneth
also worked weekends for a family friend
who owned a questionable bar that will remain
unnamed, because like many such out-of-the-way
neighborhood establishments in Chicago, there
was a small book being run out of the back
room. A Chicago tradition for over one hundred
years, I never heard whether or not one could
get a game of cards there, but I doubt it.
Regardless the trivial size of the book,
the McCarthy family friend always considered
it a personal favor that Kenneth would keep
the bar for him on weekends because he could
be trusted. In fact, I knew this to be true.