"Robinson, Spider - Callahans Crosstime Saloon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Callahan seldom has to replenish the cigarbox. He orders glasses in such
quantities that they cost him next to nothing, and he sweeps out the fireplace
himself every morning.
Another heresy: no one watches you with accusing eyes to make sure you take no
snore quarters than you have coming to you. If Callahan ever happens to catch
someone cheating him, he personally ejects them forever. Sometimes he doesn't
open the door first. The last time he had to eject someone was in 1947, a
gentleman named Big Beef McCaffrey.
Not too surprisingly, it's a damned interesting place to be. It's the kind of
place you hear about only if you need to-and if you are very lucky. Because if a
patron, having proposed his toast and smithereened his glass, feels like talking
about the nature of his troubles, he receives the instant, undivided attention
of everyone in the room. (That's why the toast is obligatory. Many a man with a
hurt locked inside finds in the act of naming his hurt for the toast that he
wants very much to talk about it. Callahan is one smart hombre.) On the other
hand, even the most tantalizingly cryptic toast will bring no prying inquiries
if the guy displays no desire to uncork. Anyone attempting to flout this custom
is promptly blackjacked by Fast Eddie the piano player and dumped in the alley.
But somehow many do feel like spilling it in a place like Callahan's; and you
can get a deeper insight into human nature in a week there than in ten years
anywhere else I know. You can also quite likely find solace for most any kind of
trouble, from Callahan himself if no one else. It's a rare hurt that can stand
under the advice, help and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that
care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around
long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.
It's that kind of a bar.

I don't want you to get a picture of Callahan's Place as an agonized,
Alcoholics Anonymous type of groupencounter session, with Callahan as some sort
of salty psychoanalyst-father-figure in the foreground. Hell, many's the toast
provokes roars of laughter, or a shouted chorus of agreement, or a unanimous
blitz of glasses from all over the room when the night is particularly spirited.
Callahan is tolerant of rannygazoo; he maintains that a bar should be "merry,"
so long as no bones are broken unintentionally. I mind the time he helped Spud
Flynn set fire to a seat cushion to settle a bet on which way the draft was
coming. Callahan exudes, at all times, 'a kind of monolithic calm; and u.s. 40
is shorter than his temper.
This night I'm telling you about, for instance, was nothing if not merry. When
I pulled in around ten o'clock, there was an unholy shambles of a square dance
going on in the middle of the floor. I laid a dollar on the bar, collected a
glass of Tullamore Dew and a hello-grin from Callahan, and settled back in a
tall chair-Callahan abhors barstools-to observe the goings-on. That's what I
mean about Callahan's Place: most bars, men only dance if there're ladies
around. Of one sex or another.
I picked some familiar faces out of the maelstrom of madmen weaving and
lurching over honest-to-God sawdust, and waved a few greetings. There was Tom
Flannery, who at that time had eight months to live, and knew it; he laughed a
lot at Callahan's Place. There was Slippery Joe Maser, who had two wives, and
Marty Matthias, who didn't gamble any more, and Noah Gonzalez, who worked on
Suffolk County's bomb squad. Calling for the square dance while performing a