Liar’s Saloon
By Michael Domino
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Domino

First Impressions
There’s a legend out in Montauk, on the easternmost tip of New York’s Long Island, that a city dude who wandered into the Liar’s Saloon, a hard-core fisherman’s bar, was roughed up and shot at just because he entered the gritty hangout wearing a pink shirt.
As the story goes, he was shoved to the floor, and one of the regulars pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and fired a single bullet that passed directly between his legs and bored red-hot lead into the blackened wood flooring, just inches from his groin. The terrified, overdressed New Yorker lurched up and ran from the bar at lightning speed, the back of his expensive and fashionable yet feminine-looking pink shirt dirty from rubbing against the filthy floor. With his manhood miraculously still intact, he never looked back as he tore out of the gravel parking lot in his shiny, late-model Mercedes coup, leaving clouds of dust in his wake.
On a recent dreary December Saturday afternoon, I entered the Liar’s Saloon wearing a crisp new black pullover shirt with a small, bright red polo player riding a horse embroidered just above my heart. It stood out noticeably against the jet-black fabric, projecting a clear message: City boy. I felt all eyes move to my shirt and the one-inch emblem become as large as the bull’s-eye on an archer’s target. No one looked hostile enough just then to shoot at me, but still, I self-consciously crossed my arms in front of me as I propped my elbows on the small U-shaped bar. I tried to make the thumb on my left hand inconspicuously drift up to conceal the diminutive fashion symbol from the view of the tough-looking customers, who wore rugged clothing.
“I’ll have a beer, please—one of those.” I pointed to the Killian’s Red draft dispenser handle while trying my best to avoid making eye contact with anyone in particular.
The bartender, a large woman with a protruding belly and wide hips and backside, wore her grayish brown hair in a ponytail, which seemed girlish on someone probably in her mid-fifties.
Behind her, just above an antique-looking mechanical cash register, were two signs. The wooden one hung precariously on a nail and simply said: no whining. The other, a typical hardware store plastic notice, was yellowed with age and nicotine and read: thank you for not smoking. Ironically, just about everyone at the bar, including the bartender, had a lit cigarette, or at least an open pack of smokes in front of them next to their drinks—beer in bottles, drafts in tall plastic cups, liquor in shot glasses. It was obvious that the state’s new ban on smoking in bars was not even remotely enforced way out here. This was a place with its own rules, and most of them were posted clearly about the room in one form of wacky signage or another.
From my seat I could see out the large window set in the wall behind the bar. Though the window was badly in need of a good washing, the view was pleasing and consisted of row upon row of commercial fishing boats with nets and gear on board and tied down with heavy lines to docks in the cold gray harbor that spilled into the wintry Atlantic Ocean just past the granite-boulder jetty.
An outdated TV with knobs for controls was mounted on bare metal brackets above the liquor bottles. It played a college football game. The sound of the game could barely be overheard over the vintage rock ’n’ roll (the Stones, Joplin, Hendrix) blaring from old stereo speakers. The screen’s colors were muted and bled into one another, making everything very orange and fuzzy. But no one was paying close attention to the game. It was just a backdrop. Everyone was talking, and no one seemed to be drinking alone. I was grateful that the old set was on, because it provided me with something to gaze at while the barroom absorbed my presence. There were no menus and no daily specials scrawled on a blackboard for me to ponder. No chips or peanuts for snacking were anywhere in sight. There were just drinks and cigarettes.

Conversations
“Hey . . . there’s Johnny! Look, everybody, it’s Johnny. Johnny, you haven’t been in for a long time. Where’ve ya been?”
“I’ve been working, Annie.” Johnny was tall and sturdy-looking. A maroon fishing cap was pulled tightly over his reddish hair, which matched his beard. He’d just entered the bar and was now standing over my left shoulder as he spoke to the bartender. The chilled salt air that had followed him into the room from outside wafted over me before it dissipated and mixed with the smoke in the room.
“Fishing must be good,” Annie replied.
“Oh, yeah. We’ve been chasing squid from Nova Scotia to Virginia, up and down the coast. We’ve taken some long trips, but you know how it goes, Annie—you’ve gotta follow the fish.”
“I know. You bet,” Annie said, seemingly quite familiar with the vagaries of fishing. “I remember being off of Scotia back in the winter of ’85, and it can be nasty up there this time of year, but in that big new boat of yours, you guys were probably okay.”
“Yeah, no problems with the boat. It’s a great boat. It takes the swells easy, and we average twelve knots in rough seas.” It was apparent that Johnny, who looked to be in his late thirties, was the proud owner and captain of a commercial fishing vessel.
“What can I get ya?” said Annie, warmly smiling as if she were making an offer to a close family member.
“First things first, Annie. I need to get a T-shirt for my nephew, who just got back from Iraq.” He shook his head slightly and pursed his lips.
I could tell from his raised voice that he wanted to broadcast to the others, who seemed to know him as well as Annie did, the pride he felt in his nephew’s military service. I took advantage of his declaration as an opportunity to break out of the isolation of pretended interest in the football game and get involved in the developing conversation.
“Did you say your cousin just got back from Iraq?’’ I said to Johnny.
“No, my nephew.”
“Oh, okay.” I think I knew he’d said nephew, but I’d said cousin fully expecting to be corrected. “Is he all right?”
“If you mean is his body is all right, then yes, I guess he’s all right in that way.”
“That’s good.” I didn’t know if he wanted to pursue this line of conversation, so I waited and glanced up at the college game.
Then he got started. “He saw stuff over there that no eighteen-year-old ought to have to see. He’s just a kid, and he’s not the same guy now that he was before he left. You wouldn’t believe half the shit that’s really going on over there that the media won’t show us over here. It’s really fucked up over there. The place is a mess.”
I managed to get in a quick “I think I can believe it” just to let him know that I was paying close attention and was genuinely interested in what he had to tell me.
Annie the bartender called to him, “Johnny, which shirt do you want for your nephew? We’ve got four different kinds.”
Johnny nodded to Annie that he’d heard her, but he continued talking about his nephew and Iraq to me. Annie turned her attention to a white-haired, white-bearded Ernest Hemingway of a man seated at the opposite end of the bar. Behind Papa, as I began to think of him, were dozens of framed pictures of giant fish caught, hauled off of boats, and hoisted up and onto the very same dock I was looking at through the grimy window. Their conversation was related to fishing.
Captain Johnny continued. “Yeah, he came back so bitter, and he feels used. He did one tour and he made it out of there. He was into some very heavy fighting in his first tour. He was lucky to get out, after what he told me we went through. A lot of his friends didn’t survive or were badly injured. So he came back, and the army stationed him somewhere down in Georgia at a base down there, training other kids, since he had been in so much combat. His battle experience was needed to try to teach the new guys just going over how to keep themselves alive and not get shot up.”
I was glad to get this real-world report by way of a man who appeared to care for his nephew deeply.
“After a few months working as a trainer,” Johnny said, “the army offers him a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus to return to Iraq. He accepts that offer and he goes back. This time it’s even worse than before. Two of his buddies get blown up by roadside bombs; another takes a hit in the head by a sniper while they’re driving together in a Humvee. Everybody’s carrying weapons; you don’t know who to trust. Let me tell you, the media isn’t showing us anything about how bad it actually is in Iraq. They hold back the truth and the big events from us, no pictures, no reports—nothing. And the biggest insult was that the army paid my nephew only twelve hundred of the twenty thousand dollars they’d promised him to go back to Iraq. He’s very bitter about that. A lot of things are bothering him now and eating away at him. He was never like this before he went over there.”
Annie brought him his beer, placing the bottle in front of him. He stopped talking as he began digging into his pockets.
During this pause, I saw that the seat to my right changed occupants. A woman who had been sitting next to me, smoking all the while, got up and left, and her spot was instantly taken by a large bear of a man with a shaved head. He was dressed like a hunter, wearing an olive drab insulated vest over a long-sleeved flannel shirt. I figured he was definitely a local by the way he threw his heavy chain of keys and well-worn wallet up on the bar. “Is anybody watching this football game? There’s a good basketball game on right now. A big Top-Ten game, Duke and Michigan State. Yeah, a big game.” No one answered him. Annie looked over at the grandfatherly Papa, a question in her eyes, and Papa looked down, a silent no. The football game remained on.
Captain Johnny’s big claw of a hand came out of his deep pocket with a catch of crumpled dollars bills, assorted change, and a balled-up piece of white paper with printing on it. Annie stood by patiently as he threw the mixture onto the bar in front of him. “Here we go. I knew I had it in here somewhere.” Annie instantly knew what the paper was as he unfolded it and handed it to her. Much to my surprise, I saw that it was some sort of gift certificate redeemable at the Liar’s Saloon. I could hardly believe that this shack of a pub that offered no food and only a thirty-year-old TV for entertainment actually issued gift certificates.
The bar was lively. The salty but distinguished Papa was jawing away with young women wearing fishing caps who sat on either side of him. The Hunter started talking with a patron who wore his shoulder-length hair in a loose ponytail and had adorned his right earlobe with a quarter-sized black onyx earring. The lobe had stretched to accommodate the unusual black disc. From the way they looked, I’d have expected them to talk about hunting and fishing. But they were discussing ever-increasing Montauk real-estate market prices. The man with the earring was saying that he was doing real-estate brokerage, something I found hard to believe coming from a ragged old hippie.
“Thanks for the beer, Annie,” Johnny said.
“No problem. Have you decided which shirt to get for your nephew?”
“Yeah. He told me he wore the shirt I got him last year so much in Iraq that it fell apart, and he asked me if I could pick him up the same one again. Give me the one that says montauk, a quaint little drinking village with a big fishing problem. Yeah, he told me his buddies over there in the war loved it.”
“You got it, Johnny—coming right over. What color?”
“Red.”

Thanks for Sharing
As Johnny held up his nephew’s new shirt, checking its size and admiring it, a dark-haired man who had been seated down near Papa got up, said a quick good-bye, and took a slow, wobbly, deliberate walk toward the front door. Then he was gone. Up until that point, Annie had been very calm, polite, and friendly, so no one at the bar knew that something had been brewing deep inside the large frame of the former North Atlantic fisherwoman. Without warning, her demeanor became as violent as a nor’easter blowing in hard off the ocean, whipping calm waters into frenzy. Like those unpredictable storms, no one could tell how long her anger would last.
“That little fuck.” She snapped her bar rag at the newly empty seat. “He sits there drinking all day and then has the nerve to get up and not tip me. I’m talking nothing, not a single dollar, not a fucking red cent.”
Everyone got silent as her tirade built up a full head of steam.
“And the worst part is that the little prick drinks on Vinnie’s dime. He doesn’t pay for the beer he drinks, and the little fuck can drink like a fish too. I was here one Saturday a few weeks ago, and he sat there all fucking day and put away a case by himself, and I didn’t get a fucking tip after it was all over. I’m tired of this shit. I don’t give a fuck who the fuck he is and if he’s related to the owner or not. I’m telling Vinnie when he gets back from fishing in North Carolina that this shit is gonna stop. It’s over—no more.”
Annie ferociously threw her bar rag into small sink, pulled a cigarette from her pack near the register, lit it up, and breathed in the smoke deeply. It was over. The storm had passed almost as abruptly as it had struck, and the conversations around her started up again.
The Hunter asked once more if the channel could be changed to the one showing the basketball game. This time Papa just said no, and that ended that. Papa’s laid-back dominance in the smoky room was becoming more evident to me. He was the senior man on this beached little ship. Annie might be at the helm, pouring the drinks and collecting the money, but Papa was the captain of the crew.
Johnny rolled up the Montauk T-shirt, tucking it under his arm, and then took a gulp from his frosty longneck. He started talking again, just as if we’d never left off. “It’s the same thing as Hurricane Katrina down in New Orleans.”
I looked across my left shoulder and up, as he was still standing, even though there was an empty stool positioned directly front of him. “How do you mean?” I asked.
“The media didn’t show the American people how bad the damage from that storm was. I’m telling you—it was, and still is, total devastation. I mean, mile after mile of nothing, and for hundreds of miles in all directions. No people, no homes, no trees; everything is gone. The ones who are left are still waiting for money from the government so they can get out of trailers and rebuild or move on or do something. It’s unbelievable. I was down there getting my boat fixed when it all happened, so I had to hang around and stay with my boat, so I’m telling you it was unbelievable—and still is.”
“I know what you’re talking about.” I said. “Just the other night, I was watching a home movie on the weather channel. This old man filmed Katrina’s three-foot tidal surge as it came roiling toward his house from the Gulf of Mexico. He recorded the whole thing with his video camera as the water kept rushing into and past his home. You could see a huge wave and then the water rise past the second floor of his home. He survived by escaping to his rooftop. The next day, by luck, he was rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter. I thought that wave looked as big and bad as the ones in the films I had seen of the tsunami wave that struck Sumatra.”
Johnny couldn’t wait to speak. “That’s exactly right. That’s the point. It was as bad as the tsunami, but people up here and in the rest of the country never got to see how bad it truly was. I mean total and absolute devastation. Dead bodies all over the place, dead animals, people wandering around in a daze for weeks. It stunk; it was horrible.”
And then he switched back to Iraq. “Same shit as what’s happening over in Iraq. It’s such bullshit. Eighteen-year-old kids getting lied to, shot at, and blown up. They come home like zombies, and all for what? My nephew was given four days of voluntary postwar counseling at a veterans’ hospital. What a joke. Two years out on daily patrols in total chaos in a world turned upside down, and they give him four days to fit back into society before they cut him loose.”
“It’s all based on a big lie, and now they can’t stop it,” I said.
Johnny lifted his beer and finished off the bottle. He seemed as drained as it was, and he finally sat down on the stool and took a load off his feet. Like Annie, he seemed to have had a great deal of pent-up thoughts in his head, and the Liar’s Saloon was the place to get them all out. When his personal storm of emotions had subsided, a calmness set in, and then everything became all right again, just as it had after Annie’s outburst.
Maybe the Liar’s Saloon was more than just a bar. It occurred to me that I was precariously perched in the middle of a fisherman-style group therapy session. After all, the bar was semicircular and everyone was taking turns sharing while others politely listened, nodding in agreement. Other than the ongoing tug-of-war between the Hunter and Papa about what sport to watch on the TV, people seemed to be supportive of one another. I surmised that when fishermen and fisherwomen are out at sea for long stretches at a time and sharing cramped quarters, they say what has to be said, then move on and get back to work.

Wireless Gadgetry
The Hunter occasionally glanced up at the TV as if he could somehow magically make the channel switch from football to basketball by sheer willpower. But that was not going to happen as long as the Papa–Annie chain of command remained unbroken. I wondered how the dynamics of the Liar’s Saloon would change once the owner, Vinnie, got back from spending the winter fishing in North Carolina. Would Vinnie defer to Papa when it came to matters such as choice of TV stations? How would Vinnie have reacted to Annie’s curse-filled outburst about his mooching, beer-guzzling relative? I’m not sure if I’ll ever be back to find out. There are subtle winds of change beginning to blow into the township of Montauk, winds that may remake it in ways that will keep me away.
The Hunter surprised me when he took out a new-looking wireless communication device—a phone, an e-mail tool, and Internet browser, all in one. He typed on it at a snail’s pace with his oversized thumb tips. I have the exact same model. But why did he have one? Why did he need one? To me, he definitely looked like a Montauk local, a fisherman or a member of the trades hunkering down for the winter. But wait—maybe this was the device I’d glimpsed him using during his discussion with Old Hippie. I became curious.
“How do you like your BlackBerry?” I asked him. “I have one just like it.”
“Oh, it’s great. I use it for everything. I can’t imagine life with out it. As a matter of fact, I used it when I came out here a few years ago looking to buy a piece of property.”
I knew it. The moment I’d seen that BlackBerry, I’d known that he wasn’t a local like Annie and Captain Johnny and Papa. He was a nonlocal who looked and dressed like a Montauker. He wasn’t from New York City, either. City people stand out like sore thumbs, with their designer winter coats, flashy sunglasses, and wealthy swagger.
“So you bought some property out here. You were very smart. I bet it’s gone up in value,” I said.
He whispered to me out of the side of his mouth: “Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars is what it’s worth today.”
I just said, “Wow,” though I had no idea what could be had in Montauk for that kind of money. I thought, Probably not much house or property, but I figured that it was the Hunter’s turn to share and my job to listen and agree, so one more time I said, “Wow,” and waited for him to continue.
He did, right on cue. “I’m from across the sound, Connecticut, and I bought this place right up the road three years ago for five hundred thousand dollars, and the price shot up so fast I could hardly believe it. My wife and I and our two kids take the ferry over on weekends. It’s nice; we love it over here.”
Our conversation, like all others in this place, was not as private as we thought. When the topic is money, all ears generally perk up no matter where you happen to be. The ears in the Liar’s Saloon were no exception.
Old Hippie chimed in. “For five hundred thousand, what you bought in Montauk was a postage-stamp lot, and you were lucky to find one at that.”
Maybe Old Hippie knows the real-estate business after all, I thought.
The Hunter seemed a bit put off by Old Hippie’s description of his treasure, but the discussion continued anyway, heading off onto the money to be made trading in postage-stamp-sized lots.
Though the other locals around the bar listened to the conversation between two out-of-towners and one of their own, I began to sense that Captain Johnny, Annie, and Papa were feeling excluded because we were discussing matters of no significance to them. As a bartender working mostly for tips, how would Annie ever manage to acquire the money needed to buy even the smallest house in her own town? Papa seemed too old to want to stop telling fishing stories so that he could debate the intricacies of real-estate transactions. He seemed content to be a pillar of the Liar’s Saloon. Captain Johnny had on his mind the screwing over of Americans by the news media and the government while he was chasing squid so that he could pay his boat loan, insurance, and taxes.
I noticed Papa shoot a cold glare at the high-tech BlackBerry with its little color screen so much clearer than the screen of the ancient TV flickering away above our heads. Was it just my imagination, or had Annie and Captain Johnny become withdrawn and sullen along with Papa as they too focused their attention on the BlackBerry, tool of outsiders? Maybe things began just like this a few years back, when the city slicker with the pink shirt almost got his balls shot off.
I could feel the tension in the air become thick, and I slowly withdrew from the conversation. My eyes returned, once again, to the safety and comfort of the college football game on the TV. As I watched the soundless screen, I wondered whether Annie, Papa, or Captain Johnny were capable of pulling out a handgun and firing a shot at one of us to preserve a lifestyle they’d moved to Montauk many years ago to preserve, back when fishing and not real estate was the main attraction in town. Actually, Old Hippie looked to be the craziest of the bunch, but then again, Annie had shown a temper that I imagined could have led to gunplay if that bar rag she’d so effectively wielded in her fury had been replaced by a pistol.
Were they all starting to feel the strain of an ever-expanding suburbia pushing out their simpler way of life and maybe even pricing them out of their own homes? Will Montauk one day soon become just another chichi resort and playground for the rich where places like the Liar’s Saloon will be torn down and replaced by a gourmet coffee bar or a veggie restaurant or a cute little boutique or art gallery with a view of neat-as-a-pin sailboats and yachts moored out in the harbor where hardscrabble fishing boats once ruled? Where would they go? What would they do? Who would replace them? Would I have to drive to upstate New York when I needed a respite in the near future?
Were they all capable of shooting? Would the BlackBerry be the new pink shirt?
“So what brings you out here?” Captain Johnny’s deep voice snapped me out of my trance of endless speculation.
“To tell you the truth, I come out here once in a while to clear my head.”
It was the first time I had seen him really show his teeth and laugh. I didn’t know what to make of his reaction, so I just said, “What?”—as in What the hell is so funny? But I didn’t dare complete my question.
He pointed to the beer I had been slowly sipping for almost an hour. Finally, he explained: “It’s funny that you come here, to a bar, to clear your head.”
I understood then why he’d found what I’d said so amusing, but I wasn’t sure if he understood the meaning behind what I was saying—that my head-clearing trips had little to do with drinking beer and much more to do with the people I met and what I heard and saw and felt when I went to Montauk.
I suppose it was finally my turn to share, because he didn’t quarrel with me. He just began to listen and bob his head politely as I spoke. For just a few moments in time at the Liar’s Saloon, I felt like a Montauk local, and it felt very good.