A great article over here by Roger Ebert on the good old days drinking at O’Rourke’s Pub. Makes you wanna drink, if you ask me. But I’m just on cough syrup tonight. It’s been like that this week.
We regulars knew each other. We dated each other. We slept with each other. We went to Greek Town together, with Al presiding at the head of a long table. We met on Saturday mornings at Oxford’s for “recovery drunch,” spelled with a d.
The 1968 Days of Rage demonstrations passed nearby, and Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer came in. We watched the moon landing and the protests after Martin Luther King was killed. We sang, laughed and cried. We rehearsed the same stories over and over. I said we knew each other. We knew who we said we were, who we wanted to appear to be, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing each other well enough.
Speaking of drinking, I was stopped at a light tonight and saw a guy on Fullerton with a boot on his car floor it. He dragged the car down the street and around a corner in a smoky, screechy mess, it was hilarious.