The House That George Built

illustration by James Bennett

Puffing slightly, Henry Louis Mencken paused outside of George’s Restaurant. He’d walked a little more than a mile from the red-brick house on Hollins Street to the corner of Eutaw and Lombard. Along with masonry, walking was the only kind of exercise he cared for. Tennis and golf and other so-called diversions were to him nothing but a waste of time. He wished his wind were better, but he’d turned sixty the summer before. He carried more weight than he had as a younger man. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. At his age, who could hope for better than that?

He chuckled as his gloved hand fell toward the latch. Every tavern in Baltimore seemed to style itself a restaurant. Maybe that was the Germanic influence. A proud German himself, Mencken wouldn’t have been surprised.

His breath smoked. It was cold out here this February afternoon. The chuckle cut off abruptly. Because he was a proud German, he’d severed his ties with the Sunpapers a couple of weeks before, just as he had back in 1915. Like Wilson a generation before him, Roosevelt II was bound and determined to bring the United States into a stupid war on England’s side. Mencken had spent his working life taking swipes at idiots in America. Somehow, they always ended up running the country just when you most wished they wouldn’t.

The odors of beer and hot meat and tobacco smoke greeted him when he stepped inside. Mencken nodded happily as he pulled a cigar from an inside pocket of his overcoat and got it going. You could walk into a tavern in Berlin or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco and it would smell the same way. Some things didn’t, and shouldn’t, change.

“Hey, buddy! How ya doin’?” called the big man behind the bar. He had to go six-two, maybe six-three, and at least two hundred fifty pounds. He had a moon face, a wide mouth, a broad, flat nose, and a thick shock of dark brown hair just starting to go gray: he was about fifteen years younger than the journalist. He never remembered Mencken’s name, though Mencken was a regular. But, as far as Mencken could see, the big man never remembered anybody’s name.

“I’m fine, George. How are you?” Mencken answered, settling himself on a stool. He took off the gloves, stuck them in his pocket, and then shed the overcoat.

“Who, me? I’m okay. What’ll it be today?” George said.

“Let me have a glass of Blatz, why don’t you?”

“Comin’ up.” George worked the tap left-handed. He was a southpaw in most things, though Mencken had noticed that he wrote with his right hand. He slid the glass across the bar. “Here y’go.”

Mencken gave him a quarter. “Much obliged, publican.”

“Publican?” George shook his head. “You got me wrong, pal. I voted for FDR all three times.”

Mencken had voted for Roosevelt II once, and regretted it ever after. But if arguing politics with a bartender wasn’t a waste of time, he didn’t know what would be. He sipped the beer, sucking foam from his upper lip as he set the glass down.

Halfway along the bar, two cops were working on beers of their own and demolishing big plates of braised short ribs. One of them was saying, “So the dumb S.O.B tried to run away from me, y’know? I got him in the back of the head with my espantoon”--he patted the billy club on his belt--”and after that he didn’t feel like runnin’ no more.”

“That’s how you do it,” the other policeman agreed. “You gotta fill out all kindsa papers if you shoot somebody, but not if you give him the old espantoon. It’s just part of a day’s work, like.”

Hearing the familiar Baltimore word made Mencken smile. He took a longer pull from his glass, then raised his eyes to the big plaque on the wall behind the bar. Mounted on it were a baseball, a bat, and a small, old-fashioned glove. He caught the bartender’s eye and pointed to the bat. “There’s your espantoon, eh, George?”

“Damn straight,” George said proudly. Then he raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Never heard before you was a baseball fan.”

He might not remember Mencken’s name, but he knew who he was. “I used to be, back in the Nineties,” Mencken answered. “I could give you chapter and verse--hell’s bells, I could give you word and syllable--about the old Orioles. Do you know, the very first thing I ever had in print was a poem about how ratty and faded the 1894 pennant looked by 1896. The very first thing, in the Baltimore American.”

“Them was the National League Orioles,” George said. “Not the International League Orioles, like I played for.”

“Yes, I know.” Mencken didn’t tell the bartender that for the past thirty years and more he’d found baseball a dismal game. He did add, “Everybody in Baltimore knows for whom George Ruth played.” As any native would have, he pronounced the city’s name Baltm’r.