This goes back decades when the diminutive mill city of Lawrence, its lifeline the Merrimack River, was more Irish than Latino and when Gilligan was only a few weeks in the ground, though no way in the world would you have known it at the Whippet Club, for when the sky sparked and thundered, someone would shout, “He’s back!”
A wisp of a man with a nose that could’ve been sharpened by a blade and with all-seeing eyes plugged deep into their sockets, Gilligan was an upholder of the Faith, a lifelong Democrat, and an entrenched bachelor. The Whippet Club, inherited from his father, was a dinky ill-lit tavern divided into two rooms, Roosevelt and Kennedy, so named because a picture of FDR hung in the first room and one of JFK graced the other, Republicans not allowed in either.
It was a political powerhouse, a club without dues, a publicly private place without women. It was a scrapbook of memories for men who’d known one another since childhood, so that when one died the others looked around and said, “Who’s next?” as if that were an honor, which had gone to many because the club had been around for a long time, named after a breed of dog by Gilligan’s father, who’d raced whippets for some fifty years until greyhounds chased them out.
The place was packed with South Lawrence Irish, many of whom had moved to other parts of the city or drifted to the suburbs, but they remained regular patrons, loyal subjects of the realm. They were mostly Knights of Columbus, and Gilligan was God, his presence and absence equally felt.
For decades every Lawrence politician of note was a member of the club or had its blessing, from mayors and aldermen to county commissioners, with the patron saint of the place being Jaber Burke. When elected district attorney, Jaber was thrown a party that lasted until five in the morning, with police cruisers lined up to take home the catatonic and the cataleptic, of which there were many. Backup was needed.
So the Whippet Club, more commonly known as Gilligan’s, was paramount to politicians, and it was a serious error for anyone to snub it when campaigning for state office. “Make sure you visit Gilligan’s.” That was not advice, that was an order from the higher-ups in Boston. “And make sure you behave yourself.” That was also an order.
Because Gilligan ran a respectable place, full of friends, even though some had names like Angles, Poison Tongue, Tickles, Snake Eyes, and Squawker, and you had to take what they said with a dignified demeanor, even when Governor Endicott Peabody asked Poison Tongue about the whereabouts of a prominent state representative. Poison Tongue downed his shot of rye and said, “Well, I’ll tell you, Gov’nor, he just went home shitface.”
That was the atmosphere, no distinction between peasant and prince, a true democracy, with a fifty-cent beer earning you a voice at the bar. Otherwise it was a dictatorship, and Gilligan was czar, cantankerous, opinionated, bullheaded, and hidebound. But he had a warm heart for dogs and was a soft touch for people in trouble. If there were a serious illness in the family, he’d slip you a thousand dollars, two thousand, whatever you needed, and you paid him back when you could, even if it took years, which often it did. But he never dunned you. Not in his nature.
He had a style all his own, and the Whippet Club was his life, his sanctuary, into which you could intrude so long as you obeyed his dictates. If you didn’t, you were barred for life, excommunicated, and you could be excommunicated for any number of offenses.
Angles, who had the visage of a turtle, tripped over Gilligan’s mongrel dog sleeping on the floor and made a fatal mistake. “You oughta get rid of that old mutt,” he said, and Gilligan snapped, “Dog’s been here long before you, so you get out!” And those within earshot, which was everybody, including anyone in the toilet, knew at once what had happened. Angles was out for good, and he left in shame, not a word spoken by anyone. And a week later Snake Eyes nearly went the same route when he began recounting a dream he’d had of a naked nun, but fortunately someone hushed him in time.
You could be expelled for badmouthing another patron behind his back, and you were wise not to talk politics because if yours didn’t match Gilligan’s and you were loud about it, you’d be bounced out fast. One thing you could never do was criticize the D.A. because Jaber was Gilligan’s good buddy, Democrats, the two of them, except Gilligan was a right-wing Democrat disenchanted with the Kennedy family, and though he denied it, everyone knew he had voted for Nixon over McGovern.
You could not be ungentlemanly. You could joke and guffaw and play tricks, but you had do so with taste and style and be clever about it, your laughter genuine and your humor first-rate. No fighting. No loud cursing. And no bookmaking. You could play cards, but if the stakes got too high, Gilligan grabbed the cards, game over, money in the pot confiscated for charity, any charity you wanted, as long as it was Catholic.
So it was best you behaved yourself because exile was a stigma you carried for life. Some tried to crawl back, to beg forgiveness, but Gilligan was like the stern God of the Old Testament, set in his holy ways, leaving you no way to be purged, cleansed. There was no confessional, only permanent purgatory.
Gilligan’s power came from his presence. No one really knew why it was so compelling, though most agreed that he was a kind of father figure, a priest of sorts, who could dispense favors and take them away and that he made the Whippet Club into a kind of kingdom where a mortal man felt proud to enter.
You didn’t apply for the job of assistant bartender. You were chosen. If you had been a member of the club for ten or so years and Gilligan was convinced that you weren’t a drunk and that you could be trusted and could handle situations, you stood a chance of being chosen, and the pay was good because the till at Gilligan’s was among the best in Lawrence. Another qualification was your hearing. Gilligan’s was exceptional. When a regular tapped the bar with a dollar bill folded lengthwise, he would hear it no matter how packed the place was.
Back in the real old days his place was officially classified a private club, with membership cards written by Gilligan on torn scraps of paper. Then there was a bit of trouble about the club’s license, so Gilligan had the club reclassified as a restaurant, though he never installed a kitchen and never had food on the premises except packaged peanuts and soda crackers. Nor was a telephone ever installed. He didn’t want wives calling in and contaminating business.
The club was inhospitable to women. Once in a while a woman might venture onto the premises, but if she stepped to the bar everyone else moved away; if she sat at a table she was ignored. Besides, what was there for her to drink? Only beer and hard whiskey. Gilligan never wanted women in his establishment, which was for “serious conversations,” tough-minded talk, for hard ideas, things women wouldn’t grasp. And Gilligan (who was selectively well-read) stood ready behind the bar to quell arguments by supplying missing facts (some of his own making) and settling bets.
Above all, Gilligan wanted his customers to sit around talking about local heroes from the past, such as John McNulty, who wrote for The New Yorker and produced some 20 novels now available only at the Lawrence Public Library, at least one or two of them.
He didn’t want them ever to forget Sailor Burke, who was one helluva “empire” in Lawrence’s old city league, including the time he was loaded and couldn’t distinguish a strike from a wild pitch. Nor did he want them to forget Johnny Broaca, who was Lawrence’s finest baseball player. Broaca went to Phillips Academy in Andover and on to Yale, where he was intercollegiate boxing champ and ran the 600 and upon graduation went into the starting pitching rotation with the New York Yankees when Ruth and Gehrig were still playing. For some reason Broaca hated teammate Lefty Gomez (it had something to do with a woman), and one day he abruptly walked off the pitcher’s mound, left the game, left the stadium, and never returned to baseball. He moved back to Lawrence, found work as a laborer, and became someone you’d have loved to talk with, but he wouldn’t let you. He kept to himself.
The Whippet Club was also a perfect place to question injustices, such as the time Tickles came into Gilligan’s shaking his bald head because a cat crossing the street had just been struck by a car. His wife, Tickles moaned, crossed that street ten times a day and never got hit.
The club was a place to relax in the Kennedy room and watch the Watergate hearings on television, and a place to play forty-fives (a card game indigenous to the area), no interruptions, except for that time Squawker’s wife was outside in the car and kept leaning on the horn for him to come out. Squawker got up, went out, raised the hood of the car, and tore the wires out. Then he returned to the table and said, “What’s trumps?”
Yes, it was a place to live and breathe with the likes of Charlie Conlon, Andy Donohue, Mike Regan, Jimmy O’Keefe, Arthur Flynn, Jack Hackett, Joe Fitzpatrick, Frank Casey, Buster Ray, and the names could go on, all of them dead now, though right to the end they paid homage to Gilligan as if he were still alive and all-seeing from his customary chair (throne) behind the bar.
Jaber Burke handled Gilligan’s estate, which was considerable, and Jaber’s nephew, Joe Carroll, a past exalted ruler of the Elks, managed the club, with Gilligan’s ghost (some swear) looking over his shoulder, especially when Joe was at the till.
But that was decades ago, and the Whippet Club, sold and resold, became an anonymous storefront, all its ghosts gone, all its members in the ground, except for Snake Eyes, who was cremated, a sin at the time. Some said his wife did it for spite and threw his ashes into the polluted Merrimack.
