The Forbidden Bar
Next to Dale’s Deli, in the Skyline Shopping Center, in my childhood town of Levittown Pennsylvania, is a bar called the “Happy Hour Tavern”. When I was a kid there was a man who lived across the street from me who was a well known alcoholic. A nice man. But a drunk. He used to hang out at the Happy Hour ALL DAY.
My parents were never big drinkers. They used to tell me that Jews don’t drink much. Maybe just a little wine at the holidays. Maybe an occasional beer for my dad during a camping trip. The Happy Hour, and bars in general, were considered by my parents to be dirty, filthy places, filled with drunks and skanks.
Because of my folks warnings and disparagements about bars and the Happy Hour Tavern in particular, I became a bit obsessed with the place, wondering what went on in there. I imagined men brawling and women taking off their clothes, and I vowed to myself that I would one day, when old enough, go in there and see what it was like inside.
My parents would never hang out at a place like the Happy Hour Tavern. If my old man hung out there he probably would have gotten his ass kicked, so it’s just as well he stayed at home tea totaling his Manhattan Coffee Soda. Short Jewish college professors like him were not really the kind of dudes who hung out in places like the Happy Hour Tavern back in the day, or these days either. I stopped to get a sandwich at the deli next door to The Happy Hour Tavern and as I sat in my car about to eat that sandwich, I saw dudes coming and going from that bar and hanging out front. These were some pretty rough lookin’ dudes.
(What is it about Levittown anyway? There always seems to have been a lot of bad-asses there. And I live in BROOKLYN, so I KNOW bad-ass when I see it.)
So, anyway, my parents whole “jews don’t drink” thing went out the window with their baby boy. I grew up and I drink. Beer, wine, tequila. Whatcha got? So much for the sober Jews theory.
So there I was. In town just for the day to get something out of storage. A grown man. No stranger to distilled spirits. Sitting in my car in front of the forbidden Happy Hour Tavern finishing my sandwich and thinking, “I could finish my sandwich, and then I could GO IN THERE and get a drink. No one could stop me, not my now dead father. Not my frail mother in Florida, NO ONE. I am an adult now and nothing will stop me from going in their to that bar and see the men brawling and the women taking off their clothes!”
So I finished my sandwich, took a deep breath…..and…then started my car and drove home to Brooklyn. We’ve got our own bars there, where I can go get a drink with the locals from my hood. I guess, ultimately, some things, and some places, maybe should best be left as mysteries. And for me, The Happy Hour Tavern will always be a place of unseemly danger and mystery, and maybe that is the best gift I can give to it, and my childhood memory of it.
Happy Hour Tavern Archaeological Site. Levittown, Pennsylvania.