At the Bar COPS LIFT A GLASS and toast grifters they haven’t caught yet. Men dressed in summer wool gabardine and women in silk sip and nibble as they watch the exchange. Two men hold hands and neck when they think no one is watching, and older people look on and cluck about the outrageousness of young love. Musicians and hustlers grip the curve of the bar counter for dear life, since both need a kind of reprieve they can only find inside these four walls. Everybody is listening to the saxophonist play “Yesterdays”. The song both swings and hurts at the same time. Always, there is a bite of this, a taste of that, and oysters for everyone. Women ask for peach wine and get it. Brothers call out, “Give me that hooch”, and the bartender knows exactly what they mean. All kinds of elbows touch: mailmen’s and maids’, church goers’ and choir girls’, politicians’ and their potential constituents’. Both black and white patrons taste their drinks, and every now and then, they eat Southern food at the bar and savour, since everybody knows the real world waits right outside the door. Just for a moment, the best drinks in Harlem smooth over differences between race and status. And well, if they don’t do that, they give folks enough room to learn something they didn’t know about themselves: with the right sort of music, all manner of people can groove to the same beat.
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