A green and white sign juts out from the brick façade and hovers over the side walk. “Cunneen’s” shimmers in a gold cursive reflecting the yellow and orange burn of the streetlights. It trembles in the wind off Lake Michigan, less than a mile east. Two display windows flank the entryway and exhibit secondhand church pews facing alley-found dining sets. Cunneen’s bar rests on a border. Its front and back doors open to two separate neighborhoods, Edgewater and Rogers Park. It’s a check point for anyone pacing Devon Ave. looking to belly up for an Old Style or a Schlitz after burning hours away under florescent lights, behind a gas range or at the wheel of something requiring a CDL. An ash can for the smokers, filled with sand that the bartenders sift clean with a cat-litter scoop, stands guard at the entrance, giving the slightest tobacco whiff as you walk in, a reminder from before the smoking ban. Two or three patrons huddle around the can between beers, telling stories that wouldn’t float at the bar, stamping feet to stay warm. They’ve been coming here since it opened. And when they go, they know its lights will glow on.
When you get inside, you choose your post in the window, stepping up into the enclave, where you can survey the cane-shaped bar that buttresses the west wall. The closest thing to judgment you’ll find is a Maltese Falcon replica perched next to the cash register, reminding you that those dreams, those driving forces that build life beyond your job, will cost you. Lou Reed is on the stereo singing a song about heroin. Most days, you remember you’ve got to be back on the job bright and early, shirt buttoned and teeth brushed, so that you can earn another 20 bucks to secure some beers to nurse in your off hours. It’s a place to tell stories with those you see more than twice a week. A place where Jeopardy comes on and hushes the six occupants who play along, sipping from longnecks between categories and roasting friends who guess wrong.
Between Lou Reed tracks the chatter among the regulars can’t hide in white noise. You hear every small comment and absorb every joke until the next song blends with the coughs and guffaws. They keep time by how many bottlecaps are in their pocket or how much ice is left in their double. No one orders food delivery or even asks for a bag of chips that hang next to the liquor bottles.
The bar is the new office or classroom, the place where they go every day to feel seen, be respected. The bar itself is taller than most and has a thick top rail, forcing you to rest your fore arms and lean in to catch Final Jeopardy. Old professors and retired office workers claim high-backed seats at the cane’s hook. They chart out their days and bemoan lost Sox games to the other gray-haired regulars hoping someone will bite back with an argument about whether the Guardians really deserved the win. The bartender whose swift hands crack open beers on request and pour three fingers worth of Canadian Club over ice glides like a magician, waving palms over stacks of one-dollar bills, making them disappear along with your empty bottles. He minds his business when you have a book open but will rally the grays with jokes until laughter shakes the room.
When the sun sets the grays mosey home while you belly up among the Gen X and millennial early birds. Hoping to be home by ten, you keep an eye on the bar clock that boasts a headshot of Lord Daley I, reminding you that the twenty-oners push their way in during the late hours. But the students are few. It’s the mid-timers, those who honor the grays, who appreciate that they get out of their La-Z-Boys and mix freely with us ingrates whose knees are only starting to creak and whose medication lists are still in single digits.
Cunneen’s is the place where you gather in pews but don’t worship. Everyone is their own pontiff. It’s where people grow old with the bar’s thick top rail. It’s the kind of place where you gather your friends, order pizza and tell them you have stage four colon cancer. The TVs are muted and Lou Reed is singing another song about heroin, just loud enough that your diagnosis stays within the boundary of the pews and windows. It’s a place where tears want to come but don’t. Where your Midwest sensibility overrides your physiology, and you crack jokes about the pepperoni pizza you ordered: “What? Like it’s going to give me cancer?” and make sure that all at your table schedule a coloscopy. It’s a place where you can gut your friends with news but 20 minutes later moan together about how the newest Oscar bait drips with sentimentality. You all gain a few more gray hairs and secretly hope to be retirees sipping Schlitz from the bottle and talking about tumors as distant memories, not in the present tense, like something that leisurely eats you from the inside. There are hugs. There are buses and taxis home. The tears come in bed, far from public eyes. You forget how long it takes to fall asleep.
But you return to Cunneen’s a few days later. You avoid the window pews and shuffle up next to your fellow grays at the bar. You only speak to mumble a Jeopardy answer. You exist on the borderline, between two neighborhoods, between three generations, between sickness and health. And you drink enough Schlitz for a gentle buzz, minding your spouse’s texts about chemo in the morning.
