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neither of which tasted particularly good.
    I loved the place.
    I began that memorable evening standing at the end of the bar, watching the Saturday night masses bump each other on the dance floor, and watching Irma. She was standing in front of me bouncing up and down with the kind of effortless grace I always admired and never had. (Immortal and utterly without rhythm, that’s me.)
    “Come on, Rocky, I wanna dance!” she pleaded. I was calling myself Rocky at the time.
    “You are dancing,” I pointed out.
    “With you , stupid!” She undulated her way over to me and rubbed up against my side, which made me think of doing something with her other than dance.
    I looked into her eyes and smiled. She really was beautiful. Maybe today she’d be something less than special, what with almost no chest to speak of and a figure that could be described as boyish. But her legs were long, her eyes were a fascinating green, and she had a nose that was nearly as perfect as Cleopatra’s. (Or so I’ve heard. Never met Cleopatra.) Her brown hair was cut in what might be called, fifty years later, a Dorothy Hamill style. I gave her a decent kiss, which she deserved.
    “You go dance,” I said. “I just want to watch you.”
    She put on a pouty face, pecked me on the cheek and sashayed away, all beads and feathers and silk.
    I really miss her.
    “Hit me, Looie,” I requested of the bartender and owner in his own language. Looie was a first generation Italian. He spoke with a heavy Northern accent and, despite having lived most of his life on the south side of Chicago, was far more comfortable in his family’s native tongue.
    I’m fluent in about a hundred different languages, most of which are no longer of any use to anybody. Aramaic, for instance, isn’t doing me any good anymore. Someone once suggested I had the “gift of tongues” but that’s not true. I’ve just been around long enough to gain fluency everywhere I’ve been. Since language changes far more quickly than I do, I try to practice as much as possible, to pick up on any modern nuances that might have come about since I’d last visited a particular region.
    “More the same, Rocky?” he asked, in Italian.
    “Do I have a choice?”
    He winked at me. “Just a moment.” He ducked under the counter and resurfaced a moment later with a new glass for me. I took a sip.
    “Scotch!” I exclaimed. Twelve-year-old scotch, at least. Made the bathtub gin taste like piss water by comparison.
    “Not for most,” he said. “Just for friends.”
    “I thank you,” I said sincerely.
    “It is no problem.”
    This is another good reason to be fluent. I’d known Looie for only about six months, but the minute I first greeted him in Italian I was his favorite customer.
    Plus, I did do him a favor once. Looie’s sacramental wine came via the usual channels (i.e., a faux Rabbi with an imaginary constituency. The Rabbi’s name was Frank and he was about as Jewish as I am) but the bathtub gin was a homemade affair. When Looie first opened his little nightspot, a nephew named Santino was his mad scientist, and Santino mixed a pretty fine concoction. So fine, he was stolen by a local family for their own string of illicit bars, and Looie was forced to shut down temporarily because he knew nothing about making his own alcohol. So, I gave him a few tips. Actually, I built a still for him, a slightly modern version of what an alchemist named Aloysius showed me back before the Enlightenment. Except where Aloysius used sheep intestines, I used rubber tubing.
    “Where did you get the scotch?” I asked him.
    “I made some new friends,” he said mischievously, giving me a sly wink.
    That could have meant anything. In Chicago, in the Twenties, it almost never meant anything good.
    On the dance floor, all race and class distinctions had broken down completely. I saw that Irma was swinging with two very limber black men and a white woman wearing a fur stole that looked, to my