I step from blazing 100-degree heat into the dark cool of O’Connell’s Pub and let my eyes adjust. It’s only 11:15 a.m., but the banter’s already flowing, hands coming down hard on the scarred wood tables to make a point, heads thrown back in laughter. The political arguments are worn smooth as river stones; the talk of books and plays is fresher. I want to slide onto a bar stool, order a Guinness, abandon this project altogether. But bartender Leonard Voelker directs me through the glass door and up the stairs.
Jack Parker is seated at his desk in a pool of golden lamplight, drifts of tobacco smoke blurring the fine, Joycean features of his face.
“So why,” I blurt, “do you hate interviews?” No point dancing. Jack Parker doesn’t suffer fools, I’ve been told. He’ll give you his honest opinion on anything, but he won’t waste—or mince—his words. He’d rather think than hear himself talk.
This reserve would surprise no one if he were, say, a serious novelist—but he’s a quiet man in the world’s most gregarious job. He owns O’Connell’s Pub. Unchanged for five decades, it’s been a sanctuary for lawyers, cops, writers, and construction workers because, like its owner, it’s exactly what it purports to be.
I wait.
“Well…obviously…the Gaslight Square connection has been a subject that has just been done and done and done.” He exhales smoke, staring into the distance. “It’s gotten repetitive.”
Without looking down, I slowly slash a diagonal line across my first 10 questions. Too bad. Gaslight Square was the most romantic period in St. Louis’ history, next to that damned World’s Fair. From 1957 to 1967, our prim, stuffy city kicked over the traces. Race and age stopped mattering; everybody who came to those few blocks in midtown felt young and smart and sophisticated. And Parker, rootless and in his twenties, was at the heart of it all, tending bar at the Left Bank and the Golden Eagle, falling in love with a rebellious debutante who’d lived in the Village in New York, going home to his cheap apartment at 3 a.m. to pore over the Shakespeare and Thomas Wolfe he’d ignored in high school and the Kerouac and existential psychology his customers dropped so lightly into conversation. Jazz and cocktails and easy bohemian intellectualism rubbed away Jack Parker’s rough South Side edges and brought his mind alive.
But we won’t be talking about that. Instead, we go to the racetrack.
A friend’s horse is racing in a dinky little claiming race at Fairmount Park, and the real-life stakes are high. “The poor filly, she got mistreated or something,” Parker explains. “She was up in Chicago, and they couldn’t even put a bridle on her.” He suggested his trainer, Don Bentler, who’s calmed her down a lot. But if she doesn’t do well tonight, the owner’s got a tough decision to make.
The filly’s called No Direction—not a great name, I suggest, and Parker nods. But he’s seen glossy, perfect, gloriously named horses burn up a bloodline, years of training, and their owners’ high-staked hopes with a single lousy race. He’s also seen dark horses rise from the ashes and fly.
He turns the ignition in his SUV, and Tom Russell sings “…the fastest horse for miles around.” An omen, he hopes. He drives to one of the dilapidated barns behind the racetrack to meet the 3-year-old’s groom, John Brown, a laconic guy who’s seen human nature at its best and worst—and prefers horses. They stand admiring No Direction, who’s “put together really nice,” Parker points out, well-muscled and perfectly proportioned, her coat gleaming.
“She’s come a long way in the last two months,” he tells Brown.
“She’s come a long way in the last two weeks,” Brown rejoins. “She was a total fool. She’s no cupcake now, but she’s just a little nervous.” Her gaze is steady tonight, though, her stance relaxed. She’s the second favorite in her race, with 15-to-1 odds.
Parker stops in the track office, where he’s greeted (“Mister Parker”) with the sort of mock formality that works best in seedy places, like a bum doffing his tweed cap. Back outside, we pass racetrack habitués; a young woman in short shorts, a pink tee, and cowboy boots; a young guy in a sleeveless gray T-shirt and jeans, harness slung across his body, Panama hat tipped low.
“Right about this time, if you have a horse in the next race, you’d be up there close to the finish line,” Parker says, pointing. “You hang out, shoot the baloney. Some people, I have no idea what their real names are. Guy by the name of Steamboat, he worked the barges. Another guy’s called The Golden Patch, because he always bet on the No. 4 horse, who wore a gold saddlecloth.
“You could go up and sit in the Black Stallion Room,” he adds. “White tablecloths, nice meal.” Without warning, his volume triples, and his voice turns rough: “BUTCHA DON’T hear the THUNDER when they come down the tracks!”
Walking toward the stall where No Direction will wait to race, we pass a horse with ribs so pronounced, they make a glistening, striated pattern in sundown’s slanted light. “She could stand to gain a hundred pounds,” he murmurs. He hates what’s become of this racetrack.
No Direction’s owner approaches. The first words out of his mouth: “This horse is gonna come in last.”
“I’m bettin’ heavy,” Parker says.
“She’s afraid of other horses!” the owner retorts.
“Now lookit, when you get excited and you start running down to the winner’s circle, don’t stumble,” Parker advises dryly.
Walking away, his pace quickens. “Let’s make a bet.” He puts $20—$10 to win, $10 to place—on No Direction, balancing out her owner’s lack of confidence. Then he takes a seat in the bleachers.
A few minutes later, the loudspeaker blares and crackles: For the third race (No Direction’s), the favorite has been scratched. “Woohoo!” Parker yells.
The second race finishes uneventfully. As the horses start walking toward the gate for the third, there’s another staticky crackle: “Number 3,” which is No Direction, “has been scratched.”
It takes me a minute to comprehend what’s happened.
“Son of a bitch,” Parker says slowly and deliberately. “They aren’t even close to the gate! Either the jockey complained or—man. Things happen, but—” He stares straight ahead, glum as kid who’s been sidelined. He bet on redemption, and it was a nonstarter.
We run into the groom on the path alongside the quarter-horse race. “Jockey said he didn’t like her,” he drawls. “That’s all he said. We were gonna find another rider, but then the vet scratched her, said she was sore in back. Yeah, she had some muscle soreness, but she walked out of it on Wednesday, and Saturday when we breezed her, she was fine. I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” He mimes how he walked back to the barn with her, his body twisting backward to check her hoof prints’ evenness. “That’s racing,” he sighs. “You gotta play by their rules, and they change ’em as they go.”
On the way to his SUV, Parker sees a woman with whom he co-owned Professor Hennessy, who made them both a lot of money. She asks about his 2-year-old and his filly. Eavesdropping, I realize he’s also got an interest in a horse called Limehouse Dancer, “who’s really showin’ some stuff.”
“Just how many horses do you have?” I ask as we climb into his car.
“Well, I have a brood mare I’m trying to sell—or give away, to tell you the truth. Carmella Maria. John Dee bred her with a brood mare from Ireland. Then a yearling, Mister Anonymous. A 2-year-old who hasn’t started racing yet either, Jack’s Big Fella. A 4-year-old filly, John D’s Valentine. Plus a quarter interest in Limehouse Dancer and a half interest in 4-year-old Crypto Gulch.”
Ten years ago, Parker flat-lined during surgery for colon cancer. He didn’t come back with any dramatic stories of white light beckoning. But he did decide that if he made it out of the hospital alive, he’d buy himself a racehorse. Now, he’s closing a circle that opened when he was 16.
Jack Parker grew up in a little house on the corner of Dover Place and Colorado Avenue in south St. Louis. “I was born in 1937, so it was the tail end of the Depression,” he says, “and by the time I was cognizant, it was the second World War.” His father sold batteries and spark plugs, first at a garage, then from the back of a panel truck. Jack’s mother, a first-generation Czech immigrant, quit school after eighth grade to work at a shirt factory, then went back to learn bookkeeping for her husband’s business.
“She was quiet, not really talkative,” he says. “Hers was a life that was filled every day with work. I had three older sisters and a younger brother, and every day, she cooked, sewed, cleaned, did laundry, darned socks on one of those little wooden things. She did a lot of good old-fashioned pot cooking, traditional mid-European. Chicken and dumplings, and you used the backs and necks. That was Sunday dinner, and she would never sit down, because she made drop dumplings, and she could only make four at a time.”
For respite, she grew deep red roses, carefully saving coffee grounds and eggshells to feed them. “When you have troubles,” she told Jack, “just put your hands in the dirt.”
He went to Cleveland High School, where he pledged Delta Psi Kappa—a frat more famous for good times than good grades. “I was kind of a goof-off, and I didn’t apply myself,” he says. “Without getting too much into the negatives of upbringings, I had a few problems. My father was never mean or harsh, but drinking beer every day had its effect.”
He did read Tom Sawyer aloud to his son, “which took a long time.” And Jack remembers his mother poring over Reader’s Digest and taking the “Word Power” quiz. He paid no attention to books himself, and no ambitions for college or career crystallized.
His first love was Dolores Springer: “I never actually went out on a date with her, but I was her escort at the football prom.” She was tall and beautiful, he says dreamily, with long, dark hair.
So why didn’t he ask her out?
“Shyness, no self-assurance of any kind,” he says. “No car, no money, no nothing.”
He envied the panache of his friend John Dee, a classmate who’d gotten kicked out of Catholic school. “His father was one of those great first-generation Irishmen who loved to drink beer, bet on horses, and recite Irish poetry,” Parker says, his voice so warm with teenage admiration, he’s oblivious to the parallel.
When Dee got a job as an usher at the racetrack, “got to wear a uniform and everything,” Parker pawned his saxophone—he’d never practiced anyway—and took a job as a groom, sleeping in an old bed in a tack room and mucking out the stables. “It’s rough, it’s endless, but it’s a world unto itself,” he says. “I found I really enjoyed taking care of the horses. It was simple, it was direct, and there was a definite connection. Because—” he quotes, booming into D.H. Lawrence, “far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances.”
After his stint at the stables, Parker took a job selling DeSotos. “God, I even sold Fiats. Then John Dee had another deal going on, a horse called Take Him Out.” On the turn, Take Him Out used to head toward the grandstands. Dee and Parker “‘bought’ the horse for $100. I don’t even think the check was good, to tell you the truth.” The deal, in other words, was “on the cuff,” predicated on the sharing of possible future profit. It took place in a world where, as Jaimy Gordon writes in Lord of Misrule, “all cash was notional, future, moiling in the clouds like weather, until some horse ran in; and nobody ever wrote down a number or forgot one.”
But Take Him Out didn’t go far. Next, Parker met a trainer with a 2-year-old named Sidetrack and started grooming him. “He was just magnificent. God, the spirit, the energy! I traveled with him, and he won a nice little handicap race in Detroit, then we went to Chicago.”
When he came home, he moved into a cheap apartment on Olive Street and got his first good bartending job, at The Opera House, where Singleton Palmer played. At the other end of the street, The Quartette Trés Bien played at the Dark Side. Bagpipe bands would wander in and out of the bars and sometimes lead the customers down the street. SLM food writer Joe Pollack remembers people strolling up and down Olive Street, cocktail glasses in hand: “The next day, owners of the various saloons would meet at the drugstore on Boyle Avenue, eat their sandwiches sitting on the high curb, and exchange glassware.”
Pollack knew Parker in the earliest days of Gaslight Square, when he was “a little less couth, a little more rowdy.” Slowly, Parker educated himself, determined “to be able to discuss Albert Camus with the guy next to me on the bar stool.”
He was also taken with Patricia Gross, who’d gone to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, then lived in the Village. “She was a great rebel,” he says. “Well-read, a free spirit.” He didn’t ask her out, exactly, just drank with her at the Gaslight Bar, talked about everything in the solar system, said, “Hey, let’s go to New Orleans” and drove there in her Volkswagen. Eventually, he wound up living in her small apartment, and Dee said, ‘Hell, if you’re going to do this, why don’t you just get married?’
“I think she went through her old wedding bands and found one,” Parker says wryly. “I never knew her real age, but she was roughly 10 years older than I was.” He wound up adopting her two sons, and they had two girls and a boy themselves.
Parker was tending bar at O’Connell’s Pub when they married. In 1965, when profits started to fall and the pub’s owners decided they wanted out, he arranged to take over the business.
Gaslight Square emptied almost as quickly as it had sprung to life, and by 1972, Parker knew he’d have to move. He found what he could afford: a 1905 Anheuser-Busch tavern on an isolated, industrial stretch of South Kingshighway. Interstate 44 wasn’t yet complete, the Missouri Botanical Garden was still a sleepy little green space, and Banner Iron Works shadowed his new pub on two sides.
He packed up everything, even the dark paneling, and all the mirrors and signs that had come straight from Dublin pubs that were hoping, in postwar romance, to turn themselves into American cocktail lounges. “You’re nuts,” his regular customers kept saying. “Nobody goes to south St. Louis.”
They did, though, crunching their big Chevys and Fords onto the gravel parking lot and wiping the grit off their windshields after Banner blew its stacks. Parker added to the menu judiciously, holding out for quality and consistency. He dressed salads with the Mayfair Hotel’s original recipe and refused to serve tomatoes, because their quality was not consistent.
The burger was his mainstay, introduced by a guy who’d tended bar at P.J. Clarke’s in New York. All the other burgers in St. Louis—even Medart’s—were flat-grilled. The O’Connell’s burger was thick, made with top-grade beef, and it could be ordered rare.
While Jack ran the pub, Pat did social work, volunteered with Meals on Wheels, worked in the soup kitchen at Trinity Episcopal Church. She’d been born to money, and she got her husband into a coat and tie maybe once a year at Easter, but she didn’t want to live in the country-club world. She’d go to Balaban’s for a cocktail, and when she stepped onto the sidewalk, one of the homeless guys would call, “Hey, Patricia!”
Neither race or class felt like barriers, even in those tense years, to the Parkers. Pat grew close to Mary Cotton, an African-American housekeeper who helped her raise five kids and keep up with a rambling old house on Pershing Place. Young John went to gospel services with Cotton’s grandson Pee-Wee. When some of the power brokers on the South Side said, “Jack, you got some black guys in the bar—what’s going on?” Parker answered pointedly, “Anybody who behaves in a civilized manner is welcome in my establishment.”
Pat and Jack drank too much. After she brought up divorce, he quit drinking, but a year later, she hadn’t changed her mind. Afterward, sober and alone, Parker started learning about art and antiques to fill the void.
“Boy, talk about a learning curve,” he groans now. “The first thing I bought was a truckload of beat-up furniture for $200.” Then he got interested in American Indian art and the spirituality behind it. He wanted to learn about each piece “not only as an object, but as part and parcel of a culture. That is where learning becomes bigger and fuller and much more fascinating.”
The same thing happened when he moved from Americana into Arts and Crafts. “A couple of guys from New York would come to town and say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for this.’ Well, at that point in time, you’d say, ‘Oak furniture? No way.’ It didn’t have any cachet locally yet. But I started paying attention. Once you can distinguish a Gustav Stickley chair from a reproduction… The quicker you learn ‘good, better, and best’ in any field, the better off you are.”
It’s good he dove into antiques when he did, because when his teenage daughters became a handful, Pat sent them to live with their father. Young John soon followed, and in time, the chaos of parenting took on a sweetness.
Parker had no intention of remarrying. But there was a woman he’d known years earlier, when she waitressed for him. She’d married and moved to California. In 1988, he got a call from McGurk’s, asking for a reference for Mary Ann—now divorced and back in St. Louis. “So I went to McGurk’s, and all my intentions went out the window.”
They married in his backyard. One officiant was the Rev. Dan Appleyard, an Episcopal priest who’d strengthened his soul by working as a cook at O’Connell’s and enduring Parker’s tirades about food prep. The other officiant was a Comanche spiritual leader who shook Appleyard’s hand and asked him, smiling, “How could such a young man be a spiritual leader? We do it a bit differently.”
After the marriage, Appleyard watched Parker relax. “Mary Ann seemed easier with herself than Pat had been,” he says.
Mary Ann had a fierce mind, though; she loved science and ordered a license plate that read “SKEPTIC.” Raised Catholic, she distrusted the church, but she sent her son, John Peckham, to Christian Brothers College High School anyway, for the education and the discipline. She raised him with such single-minded devotion that Parker sometimes felt “like a bit of an outsider,” but he never complained. When Peckham graduated with honors and went off to the University of California, Davis, Mary Ann enrolled in nursing school. “In another life,” Parker says, his voice tight with regret, “she could have been a doctor.”
He and Mary Ann cared for her feisty mother, Blanche, for 20 years. In 2006, at age 98, Blanche died. Mary Ann flew to California for a long-overdue visit with her son, by then a biomechanical engineer with six full or partial patents to his credit. One day, while she was waiting for him to come home from work, the phone rang. A marathon cyclist, Peckham had gone for a training ride in the mountains on his lunch hour. An unlicensed driver, high on meth and beer, had slammed into him on one of the winding back roads, killing him instantly.
Mary Ann bought a double lot in a California cemetery. She buried John on one side, and on the back of the gravestone, she had her own name engraved. Below her name was a single phrase: “She died of a broken heart.”
Parker couldn’t believe how insensitive people were, in their clumsy attempts to help. “Three weeks after he died, it was, ‘Now, Mary Ann, you have to go on with your life, why don’t you volunteer?’ Why do we always have to give advice?
“Good friends abandoned her because she was so frantic and depressed and talking about suicide even then,” he continues, the anger gone, his voice tired and flat. “It scared the shit out of them. For three and a half years, she said, ‘You know, sooner or later, I’m going to commit suicide.’”
It took two of those agonized years for her to carefully disburse her son’s $500,000 life-insurance payout: a whopping scholarship to the University of California, gifts to Jane Goodall and Doctors Without Borders, not a penny for herself. She was a huge fan of David Foster Wallace, and she read his Kenyon College commencement address over and over, three years before he killed himself. She was following the same trajectory.
Did it sting, knowing her husband wasn’t reason enough to want to live? “No,” he says, “I think I understood that pretty quickly. Erich Fromm once wrote that you should never try to compare romantic love with the love of a mother for a child; you should never evaluate them against each other. I accepted that, because I felt it was true.”
The days passed in a surreal haze. “Just taking the dogs across the street to play ball was a sense of normalcy every morning,” he says, relief still in his voice. “We met this mother with a son, and he had a haircut just like Mary Ann’s son had when he was little. Whenever we met them, she would brighten up, just for those fleeting 10 minutes, and I’d think, ‘Why couldn’t this last?’”
Did he realize she was serious about suicide—and if he did, how did he endure those three years?
“The thing about my dad is, you can’t bullshit him,” says his son John. “He’s thought about everything, especially to do with the human condition. He’s seen decent people overdose on heroin, get a divorce, go crazy, go from crazy to sane and become a physician. He knew. Did he know she had a gun? No, she hid that. But he knew. What he did for her was just unbelievable. His patience and tolerance were eternal.”
Early in their marriage, Mary Ann had suggested that Jack sell the pub, so they could move out to Colorado.
“Uh…no,” he replied. He’d gone for years without taking a vacation; if you subtracted his kids, the pub was his life. He’d come to like being grown-up and responsible and predictable. When he was at the pub, he knew where he was.
The irony is, he’s not even Irish. His mother was Czech, his father English, and the two guys who started O’Connell’s in 1962 were Jewish. But who’s heard of a Jewish pub? They named it for Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell. And Parker understood.
He used to stand behind the bar in a starched white shirt, narrow tie, and apron. “I’ll use an old-fashioned term: public house,” he says. “It was drinking as a social event, politics and poetry and singing and camaraderie—in a very public forum. A place where you don’t have to be a member of the club. Truly democratic.”
The walls of O’Connell’s are the dirty yellow—like watery, coal-smudged sunshine—of the traditional Irish pub. On one, a huge framed certificate, done in ornate calligraphy for the Irish Nationalists of New York City, honors The Hon. Charles W. Jones, a U.S. senator from Florida, for his “eloquent services to the cause of his native land.” It’s a gift from a pub regular, a police officer who was Jones’ last living relative.
Parker eventually put a TV in the bar—an act akin to setting up market stalls in the temple—but it’s used only for sports, and everyone’s adjusted. Waitresses still write the tickets out and slide them under a rubber band. Nothing is cheesy or repro; nothing tries too hard. Customers walk in and relax instantly. Reviewers gush that the pub’s “authentic,” a word Parker finds as pretentious as “ambience.”
“You get an idea of—sincerity,” he says instead. “I think that’s a good word to use.”
Now that he’s turned the day-to-day management over to his nephew, he comes in around lunchtime, sips a glass of iced tea, glances through The New York Times, and makes a few circles of the bar, greeting old friends, before climbing the stairs to his books, antiques, and racing forms.
One Friday, I stop by and chat with a man named Ted Fischer, who’s sitting at the bar eating his usual fish sandwich. “I used to take my ex to the O’Connell’s in Gaslight Square,” he mumbles. “And I had my first date with the lost love of my life here five years ago.”
Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan hangs out at O’Connell’s, too; so does Jack Carl, who used to own Two Cents Plain. Vince Bommarito comes on Saturdays, has a hot dog, sits at the far end of the bar. Bob Costas used to bring his wife and daughters.
In—what? The dining room? The name’s too formal for a space presided over by Irish rebels and whiskey jugs. But there sits Sig Langsam, a minor-league ballplayer before his World War II injuries, licking the juice of a burger from his lips. “They just raised their prices for the first time in years,” he says. “I begged them to do it. I don’t want them to go out of business! They fry the fish in olive oil; the meat’s got no gristle, no fat. Have you seen how they toss the hamburgers? Nine ounces of beef!” Parker comes up, overhears, and says it’s actually five-eighths of a pound, or 10 ounces.
“It’s always been that way,” he explains, “but for years, I would lie and say ‘half a pound,’ because then if other places did half a pound, it wouldn’t be quite the same.”
He leaves again, and Langsam pronounces him “modest but brilliant. He can discuss ancient history, modern history, anything! And he’s slightly shy, which is a good attribute. I don’t like bigmouths.” He does a little tactful reconnaissance, to see how much Parker’s told me. “Mary Ann was one of the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen,” he says. “She was so depressed. I sent her all kinds of things from Zabar’s in New York, finest deli in the world. They have this chocolate layer cake—” He shakes his head. “After the suicide, Jack turned pale as a ghost for three weeks. I didn’t think he was going to make it.”
O’Connell’s turns 50 next spring. Thomas Crone, a St. Louis writer who tended bar there for years, is writing the pub’s history, and Kevin Belford is illustrating it. The storyline will come from the people who landed there and never left, because Parker doesn’t set much stock in management theory. He likes to give his employees plenty of room to express themselves.
Take Norah.
Norah McDermott grew up in Tanzania and wanted to become a game warden. She became a waitress at O’Connell’s instead. She used to scare me, I remember—until I showed up bleary-eyed with a cold, and she brought me a hot toddy made with brandy instead of whiskey and gave me a sharp lecture on its superiority.
Parker met McDermott in 1966. She’d graduated from boarding school in Kenya and come to St. Louis looking for—don’t snort your beer—adventure. She lived with her uncle in Normandy and completed a course at Miss Hickey’s School for Secretaries. Then she moved to a tiny apartment above Le Jazz Hot and started waitressing at the Gaslight Bar. Parker hired her, and she worked for him until her long red hair turned white.
“There were so many complaints about Norah!” Parker laughs. “She was ‘aloof.’ That was her nature. I’d prep customers. I’d say, ‘Look, here’s what you do: You just be a regular customer for three or four years and have good manners the whole time, and sooner or later, she’s going to be your best friend.”
Then there’s Leonard Voelker, a white-haired giant of a man who’s tended bar for O’Connell’s since 1967. A member of Mensa, he recommends books about the Holy Roman Empire to lawyers deep in their cups. “I never hired him,” Parker grins. “My first employee, Larry Reynolds, would come in and work 11 to 2. Leonard was a customer. He and Larry would exchange books. One day, Leonard walks in and puts on an apron. I said, ‘Hi, Leonard, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘Larry said to tell you he quit and I’m taking his job.’”
“So many great conversations,” sighs Parker’s friend Gerry Ortbals, a lawyer at Bryan Cave. “St. Louis lore, law, politics, crime, religion, philosophy, art… You can get a sandwich and a beer at a lot of places. You go to O’Connell’s for something more.”
It’s the art of conversation, fostered by a man who’s quieter than most. “He speaks when he thinks it’s appropriate,” says Ortbals. I can’t recall any conversation I’ve ever had with Jack where he was at a loss for words—or thoughts. And he also knows how to cultivate solitude.”
One of Parker’s poker buddies, Tom Fettig, has a daughter who calls him “Jumpin’ Jack Parker.” She walks up to him and demands that he jump. And he does. “He jumped up in the air and did a full twist just last week,” Fettig reports. “They’ve been playing this game 10 years now. It’s a side of Jack Parker that hardly anybody ever sees.”
Another poker buddy, Nick Bendas, says, “He’s like the right amount of everything,” serious and funny, shy and outspoken. “If you want to come to the point on something, just listen to the way Jack does it. He doesn’t fill in with a lot of nonsense. And if he doesn’t have anything to say, he won’t say anything.”
The only thing self-indulgent about Parker is his love of ice cream. His kids used to press him to buy new clothes, to no avail. His house has always been Spartan; he loves beautiful objects, not stuff. “He’s got this crappy little kitchen,” John groans, “and he only got a dishwasher eight years ago.”
In his drinking days, Parker kept jugs of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey behind the bar: “Whenever it would strike my fancy, I’d say, ‘Well, let’s have a touch of the Dew.’” Then he stopped drinking—while still surrounded by the Dew and its imbibers. “It wasn’t easy,” he says. “There were periods of nervousness, desire. In all honesty, there were times I’d just go home and get into bed at 3 in the afternoon. But you find out that you’re not alone, that there are a hell of a lot of people in the same fix, and some have suffered a lot more. And once you start feeling like you’re a human being, without any guilt, for several days—there are little moments of euphoria. You get rid of that thing that controls way too much of your personality, and your personality starts developing in a new way.”
He brightens: John D’s Valentine won a race the previous weekend, and No Direction has a new direction as a polo pony. He talks a little more, and then I hear him say, “At one point, Bill Inge was writing a story about racetracks, and he hung out at the Crystal Palace.” He’s talking about Gaslight Square. I lean forward.
“I remember a poker game with Bill Inge, Professor Irwin Corey, The World’s Foremost Authority”—yeah, the guy Lenny Bruce said was one of the most brilliant comedians of all time—“and Crystal Palace owner Jay Landesman, and Jack O’Neill, the bartender. It was just a riot, to see guys like Professor Irwin Corey just screwing up the game. O’Neill was serious about money; he wanted to win. I remember we sent a cab for 100 White Castle hamburgers at 2 in the morning.” He shakes his head. “It was a scene.”
Four sentences, and it’s all there: music, wit, horses, whiskey, drama, celebrity, and ambition. The tensions of class and money, the ease of friendship, the spontaneity of life lived outside the rules, and the comfort of ritual.
’Nuf said.
