The Treaty Stone
The Treaty Stone was my college bar. It’s gone now. It became a bunch of different bars after I graduated, all of them far cleaner and with more upscale clientele than the bar I drank in during my lager days. I’m not even sure if the building exists anymore.
The Treaty Stone made your average McAnn’s look upscale. The Treaty Stone was one of those places people with more money would walk right past. The Treaty Stone was the kind of place where I wouldn’t dream of drinking anything but beer straight out of the bottle today but freely drank tap beer and shots decades ago. The urinals were filled with ice and the kitchen had been closed years before and now served as a free bedroom for any homeless guy willing to clean up the place at closing in exchange for a table to sleep on.
So who drank there? Poor college kids and homeless guys. The bums would cash their welfare checks at the pawn shop next door (a pawn shop complete with brass balls hanging out front) and drink it. The poor college kids would plunk down cash earned from God-knows what crap jobs they were working on the side while in school. Together, we made a hell of a team Daytime drinking at its finest. The kind of boozing where you’d walk out of the bar and the sun felt like someone was firing a giant staple gun into your eye sockets and you’d wobble, gain your bearings and bluff your way through that Thursday afternoon literature class. I got an A, which may explain my predilicition for having a few while enjoying good fiction.
Every so often, a trust fund case from NYU would venture far enough north of the village to slum. We loved those guys, really. They got drunk and bought rounds and pretended to be real people for a while. Then they went back to spending their parents’ money on high-end pot delivery and we stumbled back to class or our student activity clubs or our night jobs.
The jukebox was an amazing relic. It had five slots for CD which were usually occupied by rock. The rest was still old 45s. The Treaty Stone was the first place I learned to appreciate the work of Frank Sinatra. And I’m convinced that a young Mike Myers was in there one day because we used to do air guitar karaoke renditions of “Bohemian Rhapsody” years before Wayne’s World existed.
The bartenders were uniformly Irish and changed frequently. The big rumor was that IRA members came over and worked there while they were hiding out waiting for the heat to blow over from some incident. This was probably a complete myth, but every temple needs a mythology. Otherwise, what’s the point? There was one bartender who hated noise and when we’d get too loud he’d hop over the bar and start yelling “Who’s doin the roarin? Who is it?” in a thick brogue while snatching a pitcher off the table and threatening to throw us out. A few extra bucks for the next round usually took care of that threat.
A bar is a great place to learn about people.
The Treaty Stone made your average McAnn’s look upscale. The Treaty Stone was one of those places people with more money would walk right past. The Treaty Stone was the kind of place where I wouldn’t dream of drinking anything but beer straight out of the bottle today but freely drank tap beer and shots decades ago. The urinals were filled with ice and the kitchen had been closed years before and now served as a free bedroom for any homeless guy willing to clean up the place at closing in exchange for a table to sleep on.
So who drank there? Poor college kids and homeless guys. The bums would cash their welfare checks at the pawn shop next door (a pawn shop complete with brass balls hanging out front) and drink it. The poor college kids would plunk down cash earned from God-knows what crap jobs they were working on the side while in school. Together, we made a hell of a team Daytime drinking at its finest. The kind of boozing where you’d walk out of the bar and the sun felt like someone was firing a giant staple gun into your eye sockets and you’d wobble, gain your bearings and bluff your way through that Thursday afternoon literature class. I got an A, which may explain my predilicition for having a few while enjoying good fiction.
Every so often, a trust fund case from NYU would venture far enough north of the village to slum. We loved those guys, really. They got drunk and bought rounds and pretended to be real people for a while. Then they went back to spending their parents’ money on high-end pot delivery and we stumbled back to class or our student activity clubs or our night jobs.
The jukebox was an amazing relic. It had five slots for CD which were usually occupied by rock. The rest was still old 45s. The Treaty Stone was the first place I learned to appreciate the work of Frank Sinatra. And I’m convinced that a young Mike Myers was in there one day because we used to do air guitar karaoke renditions of “Bohemian Rhapsody” years before Wayne’s World existed.
The bartenders were uniformly Irish and changed frequently. The big rumor was that IRA members came over and worked there while they were hiding out waiting for the heat to blow over from some incident. This was probably a complete myth, but every temple needs a mythology. Otherwise, what’s the point? There was one bartender who hated noise and when we’d get too loud he’d hop over the bar and start yelling “Who’s doin the roarin? Who is it?” in a thick brogue while snatching a pitcher off the table and threatening to throw us out. A few extra bucks for the next round usually took care of that threat.
A bar is a great place to learn about people.
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