Watching The Jets At The Old Man Bar
Watching The Jets At The Old Man Bar
Outside Denny’s Steak Pub, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, steps from the Church Avenue F stop, a would-be customer, wearing a Yankees T-shirt and a bit of a haunted look, shuffled back and forth, focused on the scratch-off lottery tickets that trailed behind him like exhaust. He ducked his head in every once in a while: “Six dollars!” His buddy called out, “Don’t come in,” and Scratcher nodded sadly, and waited for his pal on the sidewalk. “You’re still 86ed,” the bartender added, not unkindly. Scratcher was still a regular; he just wasn’t allowed to come in to this particular old man bar this particular afternoon.
Inside the bar it was loud, and tough to hear the football games we were watching. “Everybody got fucking jokes in this joint.” That was an accurate statement, made approximately halfway through the second quarter of the Jets game, already out of the Jaguars’ grasp. The speaker was lucky to get a word in edgewise. On the left hand side of the bar, five Latino men in their 30s stood around the one TV tuned to the Tennessee Panthers game (where Cam Newton alternately dazzled and threw picks); on the right sat two old smokes, one in a polo shirt, and one in what looked to be a Jets jersey but was actually a Brooklyn Cyclones promotional shirt in the same shade of green that the Jets use.
That shade of green was the source of the first controversy of the afternoon. As the game started, there were only four men in the bar: the bartender, Polo Shirt, Jets Fan, a silver-haired man in a windbreaker and me. The Jets were wearing throwback jerseys, in the blue and gold from when they were the New York Titans. Jets Fan was finding this a sacrilege, and how Jets Fan communicated this, and everything, was by yelling at the top of his lungs. “THEY’RE WEARING GREEN, THEN THEY’RE WEARING BLUE! WHY DO THEY FUCKING DO THIS FUCKING SHIT!” He was drinking, as the old smokes do, a mug of Budweiser with a shot of Jameson next to it, money in a little stack in between. “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” Polo Shirt offered, “They’re trying to confuse the other team. They practiced all week looking for green jerseys.”
Jets Fan set the tone for the afternoon, cheering first downs, receptions, near receptions, commercials: “THE JETS! DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT?” Every few minutes he hopped out of his stool and pranced, “J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS!” The bartender, a shop-class-teacher-looking fellow in dad jeans, started to lose his patience, amiably. “Don’t make me cut you off.” “I’m not yelling, I’m rooting,” Jets Fan responded.
Open since 1975, Denny’s is near the dead center of Brooklyn, not far from Flatbush. It’s in a working-class neighborhood, with Irish and Italian roots now mixed with Latino and South Asian communities and the even more recent Twentysomethings, pushed out of more northerly and expensive Kings County enclaves. From the inside, you could convince yourself that it was still 1975, with the drop-ceiling fixtures and the orange of the fake leather on the stools, but for the flat-screen TVs and the obligatory 9–11 memorabilia behind the bar.
According to this transcribed 1926 article from the Brooklyn Standard Union, a survey of Brooklyn bars six years after the end of Prohibition (which “takes no account of places that [were] still operating as thirst parlors or of the smaller number that have been padlocked for violations”), there were a little more than 160 bars in Brooklyn. Now, this online guide lists 156, but the Yellow Pages gives 1,378. Even though Brooklyn has a little more elbow room than Manhattan across the East River, the bar remains Brooklyn’s living room.
And Denny’s is clearly a Brooklyn bar. You’d be able to tell that with your eyes closed, as the Brooklyn accent is not dead. Jets Fan had a very loud one, Silver had it as a gravelly bass, and Polo Shirt had a silky baritone that would well suit a character actor.
The vague menace of Brooklyn is also not dead. Before the game, Silver came in, ordered his Captain Morgans, and asked the bartender, “That idiot bring back my knife? The idiot with the mouth.” Silver has a bit of a cough. “He said he was going to leave it here last night, put it in an envelope. The Spanish guy, screams a lot. He took it off my key chain. Fucking cocksucker.” This leads to a wistful conversation concerning switchblades they have known, but it turns out the knife in question is a penknife, and the Spanish guy, one of the Latinos, wearing a red sweatshirt, does indeed show up and return it. “Good thing I fucking like you,” Silver quipped.
Red was not Spanish, but Puerto Rican. This was announced by Jets Fan as soon as Red arrived: “FUCKING PUERTO RICANS!” “Stupid Micks,” Red riposted. This was a ritual greeting. Red and Jets Fan were clearly friends, and their back and forth continued for the entirety of the first half.
N-bombs were dropped too, even as a few black men stop in for a snort and some football. “Why is a white person not allowed to say nigger anymore?” Jets Fan asked. “Because you white guys have said it enough,” a black guy in a Carhart answered, which is maybe as good of an answer to the question as I’ve heard.
As if to make this an even more apt snapshot of Brooklyn at this moment in time, a few young men came in, guys who are called hipsters by the locals even if they might not be, everyone lacking a better term to describe the gentrifying agents inadvertently changing many neighborhoods in Brooklyn. One, a guy with sideburns and a soft voice, asked if the bar would be showing the game, which evoked sarcasm from the old smokes. Two came in together, and stood watching the TV over the pool table, snacking on the complimentary meatloaf left out in a chafing dish on a table in the middle of the room. (Denny’s stopped selling steak years ago, so don’t ask for it.) They got made fun of for being a black guy and a white guy together, and for the wild hair of the white guy. This was a master class in the busting of chops.
And there was me, whose chops evaded busting. I picked out this place, which is not unknown to Brooklyners both born-and-raised and recent, because it was an old man bar in a far-flung location, and because I had never been there. I intended to ask questions: how’s business, how are job prospects, how’s everyone doing? But by the second half I’m not the guy with the notebook trying to look like he’s not listening in; I’m another guy at the bar, watching football, trying to remember stats, reminiscing about decades past. I was expecting the gloom of the recession, a certain shortness of hope, a despair born of unhealthy lifestyle choices, but I found some all-right guys killing a Sunday afternoon in the way they always do. For all the chest-pounding, these men, despite their various life stories and circumstances, were friends, and if times are tight outside, you wouldn’t be able tell from inside.
The second half was relatively more sedate, mostly because Jets Fan fell asleep, and the bartender warned us to leave him that way. The bellowing back and forth gave way to game-watching and appreciation of plays. The guy next to me, about my age and Latino, was a Redskins fan growing up, and we talked about football from twenty years ago, when I was a Bills fan and therefore part of the luckiest/unluckiest fan base in the NFL. I’d planned on leaving before then, but the buyback came and the chat was pleasant, so I put the notebook away. We were not making news. We were watching football at the old man bar.
As the one o’clock games ended and I planned my departure, the bar emptied out. Now, it was just me and the bartender, Soft Voice, and a young woman in a Vikings jersey, fresh out of bed, she said. She wasn’t the only woman from the afternoon — an older woman, someone’s girlfriend, was there for a spell in the third quarter, and a few moms brought their kids in to use the bathroom — but the testosterone in the place, so thick earlier that afternoon, was cut entirely. She and Soft Voice were chatting. Maybe they were flirting? On this afternoon, once the smokes and the neighborhood guys went off back to their wives and jobs or wherever they go when they’re not at the bar, the youngsters were the only ones left at the old man bar.