By means of an inheritance my mother received in 1961, which he managed to wangle out of her, my dad became part owner of the Gay 90’s Bar on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This notorious and enduring gin mill has gone through several metamorphoses in the last 75 years. It is currently a rabid gay bar -- but when my dad bought into it, it was a classy establishment featuring ‘exotic dancers’ who also waited on tables with fine wines and swingeing big charbroiled steaks.
Dad had now become one of the high rollers of the Twin Cities. His ship had come in, and the vessel continued to plow further inland when he won a pink Cadillac at a Fraternal Order of Eagles raffle. Disdaining his Ford Galaxie, he cavalierly gave it away to Skeets -- a neighbor who supported his family on a railroad disability pension that barely covered their beer tab. Now dad tooled around in his pink caddy, with a Sinatra trilby rakishly tilted over his crewcut. Unfortunately, since he was pretty broad in the beam, it made him look more like a kiddy TV show host than a swinger.
Looking back, I sympathize with his folie de grandeur. He had grown up on a dry farm near Vienna, South Dakota, that blew away during the Dirty Thirties. His parents split -- his father became a game warden in Wyoming, Minnesota, and his mother ran a boarding house for U of M students in Minneapolis. His career trajectory was not exactly that of Horatio Alger. He’d been a dishwasher and on-call bartender at Aarone’s Bar & Grill on East Hennepin for a dozen years prior to buying into his own establishment. Suddenly he no longer had to take orders from rum blossoms -- now he was the one giving the orders. And he reveled in it. In our neighborhood being part owner of your own business put you in a class with sophisticated luminaries like Mel Jass -- the uber-pitchman and announcer on WTCN TV.
According to my mother, dad conceived of his responsibilites down at the Gay 90’s as primarily to sit on a stool behind the bar by the beer taps and pull Hamm’s or Miller’s High Life for thirsty patrons, and then bring home his share of the swag each night. This worked remarkably well for several months; it’s where dad created the reputation that would stick with him like a barbeque sauce stain for the rest of his life -- the Man Who Never Moved. If a customer requested a mixed drink or wanted a bottle of wine decanted, dad fixed his beady eyes on the hapless barfly and let loose with a string of profanities, all of which emphasized the fact that he couldn’t be bothered to move -- so if the customer wanted a Hamms or Miller dad would oblige; otherwise, the customer could go straight to hell.
Dad felt it encumbent upon himself to practice some noblesse oblige, so he hired my half brother Leonard as a bouncer. Leonard was at the tail end of a ferocious divorce, in which his Mormon ex-wife not only took him to the cleaners but refused to even let him have a single wire hanger. He worked as a bank guard, but needed plenty of extra cash to pay rapacious lawyers as well as his grasping ex. So dad had him come in nights to keep the peace, and paid him generously under the table. At six foot eleven and 255 pounds, Leonard had no need to carry a gun or blackjack -- his sheer intimidating bulk stifled the most raucous drunk. The place became known as one of the quieter and safer saloons along the Hennepin tenderloin, and business flourished.
But then dad unwisely decided to let a number of questionable characters use the Gay 90’s as a business office for what was called back then the ‘Italian Lottery.’ The numbers racket. In return, the penny ante crooks gave dad a wad of greenbacks each week that would, my dad bragged, choke a horse. Unfortunately, dad neglected to grease the proper palms down at city hall -- and so the Gay 90’s was raided and padlocked for the first and only time in its frowzy history. They didn’t open again for several weeks, and by then dad had been forced to divest himself of his part ownership in a shakedown engineered by his fink business partners. Or so he always claimed to me. Mom, on the other hand, simply said that dad had become a beer sodden liability and was tossed out with only a token payment to keep him quiet. He went back to Aarones Bar & Grill, where he stayed washing dishes and dispensing suds for the rest of his working life, until a stroke felled him in 1994. After that, he had to be put in the New Brighton Care Center -- where he drove the staff crazy by smoking in the bathroom and slowly starved himself to death, passing away in 1995.
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