The man is a phantom now, a blurry memory of beard and brawn barely visible after sleep deprivation, two beers and the passage of eight months mostly banished him to the subconscious.
I only remember his name was Dan.
The bar is more memorable since it’s now a personal staple. Open doors. Wood panel walls. Barstools beside an “Attack From Mars” pinball machine and a shelf of vintage figurines like E.T. and the Pillsbury Doughboy. The sort of people who host karaoke on a bartender’s birthday and will heat up a frozen pizza for you after the kitchen closes if you ask nicely.
Fishtown, some might say. Port Richmond, others. Another neighborhood tavern on another street corner of endless row houses and precariously parked cars. Phillies flags still flew though the local nine had fallen just days before Halloween. Parents later cracked beers on nearby stoops and mourned the lost season while little ghosts and skeletons held out their sacks.
Dan was hurting, too. Sure, the Eagles won. But their second-half comeback against the lowly Commanders still warranted a steady stream of suds. Dan clutched his beer and swiveled to educate the out-of-towner.
The mental health of a good chunk of the city quite literally depends on the fortunes of the Eagles and Phillies (and the Sixers and Flyers, Dan allowed). Dr. Lisa Corbin, a local therapist and director of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine’s counseling program, later told me some of her clients “become a bit more depressed, a bit more irritated and aggravated” when the teams aren’t doing well.
“What I’ve begun to do is try to instill that positivity,” she’d say. “But not too much. Because sometimes if I do too much people are going to be like, ‘Yeah, stop with that. Too much happiness.’”
And there’s that bite, that don’t-feed-me-any-of-that-bullsh– reflex that’s rooted in the city’s thirst for authenticity. Give it to me straight, Doc. Gimme pure, unadulterated Jim Beam with that PBR, and I better get change back from this five. That’s called a Citywide. That’s the mentality. You either won or you lost. If you gotta drink, I’ll drink with you. If you gotta climb that light pole, here’s my shoulders.
Well … Dan and I were drinking. “Give it to me straight, then,” I told him, still bleary-eyed from my road trip out of Houston. “What do I need to know about this place?”
Above the bar mirror, the TV flickered Eagles highlights on a postgame show. A bearded center cut down two defenders on a tricky end-around touchdown, a wrinkle to the offense’s infamous “Brotherly Shove.” In my memory, in similar trickery, the man on the screen and the man on the barstool look one and the same.
“If you want to get to know Philadelphia,” Dan answered. “Get to know Jason Kelce.”
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