Neal Pollack

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“Ah, the natural inquisitiveness of youth has surfaced at last,” Francis said. “Boys, shall we lift the veil of ignorance from his eyes?”

Francis stood in front of the screen, lecturing without a pointer.

“The only thing more intoxicating than the free flow of drink,” he said, “is the free flow of ideas. On the rare occasions that the two combine, it’s possible to know the face of God. Once, philosopher-kings who worked for a living, men who knew their way equally around a factory floor and a lecture hall, ruled Chicago. Their era was short but glorious. The city could barely build enough taverns to hold them all. They loved their learning and their drink, and the platonic joys of sophisticated male friendship. I was one of those men.

“So was Marty Halversen, the finest man I ever had the privilege of knowing, a scion of the Navy and a veteran of the slaughterhouse, and the holder of a degree in English literature from DePaul. He was a man truly worthy of the title tavern keeper, a great poet, a lover of women, and a friend to the neighborhood. I revered him more than my own father.

Much more.

“Marty believed above all things, as do I, in the enlightenment of the human soul. To that end, we chose the finest thinkers of all the fine thinkers we knew, and we formed Marty’s Drink or Die Club. We were young then, so the club’s idea seemed fanciful. There would come a time, we joked, when our doctors would tell us that we had to stop drinking or else we would die. But not to drink is, in essence, to die anyway. Therefore we made a pledge, forged at the bottom of a glass: If one of us received the Hippocratic word, then the rest of us were bound by fraternal duty to make it come true.”

At that, Francis held a glass as if for a toast, and everyone in the room drank on cue. He continued: “For twenty-five years, the club met happily. We formed a protective shell of ideas and camaraderie around ourselves, our intellects serving as a shield and a balm against the bitter shocks of the wider world. Then one day Marty came in the bar with his face ashen yet resigned.

“‘Gentlemen,’ he said to us, ‘I have heard the bad news. According to my doctor, my liver is Dunkirk. He’'s told me that I’'ve downed my last. He even brought in a specialist, who confirmed the toxicity of my X-ray. It’s all gone to shit.’

“Oh, we thought, the shame! Our leader, the owner of our resting place, had been stopped from drinking by diagnosis. But what he said next sealed our fates in the afterlife: ‘I expect you to honor our pact,’ he said, ‘and to honor it this afternoon.’

“We laughed. Death to us, though we certainly found ourselves aging, was still a metaphor. But not to Marty, who had us in years and in gallons consumed. He produced four vials from his pocket and placed them on the bar.

“‘Three of these contain tap water,’ he said. ‘The other is pure tetraethyl pyrophosphate. Colorless, odorless, and generally fatal. You will each take one vial and empty its contents into my last glass of Bushmill’s, which I will now pour.’

“He did so, a double.

“‘Within an hour,’ he continued, ‘I'’ll be dead, and you’ll all be culpable. Yet none of you will be. It’s not murder if you have the consent of the murdered. Or maybe it is. Regardless, we need to assume we won’t get caught. But once this pact is sealed in embalming fluid, you must all promise to follow me when your own day comes.’

“We promised what Marty asked, though not without some subtle tears, because we understood that a strange combination of whimsy and duty had now bound us all to the same end. But before that happened, we agreed that the club shouldn’t die with us. For every light extinguished, another would flicker on. Our shining white city of the mind would burn for generations. Marty downed his final whiskey, patted us each on the back in return for the favor of merciful death, and walked slowly toward the door. He turned and waved, silhouetted in the arch by the late-afternoon sun, and went home to his bed. Ronald was there at the bar

”

The guy with the ponytail said, “Yes, I was.”

“Stopping in for a shot after band practice. We knew him to be a young man of the neighborhood, resolute in character and ethical in judgment. He had discovered our club, as sometimes secrets slide off drunken tongues, particularly when trusted bar regulars are talking. He agreed that day to take Marty’s place. And two years later, when Mickey Lasker got the news from his doctor, Will, our monkey-film expert, took the night off from spinning records at Medusa’s and became one of us. He, too, had learned of the club late one night, by accident, and he, too, is a forgotten genius of the North Side. Scott Silverstein joined the fold soon after upon the unfortunate demise of Leonard Loveless, former drama critic for the lamented Chicago Daily News. The papers all said that Leonard passed of natural causes. But we knew that he had drunk and died.