Rumbles of Boeing 737 jumbo jet engines invade Mr. C's Bar, four blocks west of Midway Airport's runways, with a regularity as numbing as the drinks here.
Swinging the screen door shut, I spot a few familiar faces. Tonight, the weather's been foul, planes have diverted, and the ground and flight crews don't go anywhere near an airport bar after the last shift. They fly straight here - Mr. C's, owned and bartended the last four years by Andy Chilmon (left).
It's easiest to spot the rampers - baggage handlers - because they're still greased out in their faded black monogrammed jumpsuits. Christmas lights string across the plywood walls. The long faux-marble bar is stained with water marks and scratched up from the pub's thirty-five years of service in this well-groomed Polish neighborhood. A dusty baseball trophy is stashed high above the bar, next to one of the TVs. The smoke-eater whirs on the wall where an old wagon wheel once hung. A pool table sits in the back room; the walls are decked with dark wood from the days when Mr. C's was called Vern's.
I shove through some rampers buying each other dollar Jell-O shots. The crowd thickens as more planes make it through the fog, and a few pilots saunter in and plop onto stools. Blue trousers, white shirts, no wings, no epaulets - but you still know they're flyboys. They get to telling stories, stories about irregular operations.
"We got a bird in an engine on takeoff in Nashville tonight," says a pilot. "The whole cabin smelled like KFC," adds one of my fellow flight attendants, cringing over a whiskey sour.
Some other pilots mention low visibility, that they circled the airport, following a long line of planes loaded full of cargo and passengers, not knowing if they would have to divert to another city. But their luck is good tonight, and they have made their landings as the low ceiling of night fog has lifted - momentarily, at least.
Jukebox music glides in and out of our ears. Whenever it stops, someone invariably plugs another dollar in the slot - "Margaritaville" - swooning.
"It's kinda your old-style saloon, a local shot 'n' beer," says Andy. "When you sell beer for a buck or a buck-seventy-five, you tend to draw people in." It's the cheapest swill around the airport. Tap goes for a buck, a pint glass for fifty cents more, and big-seller Murphy's Irish for $2.
Someone flips a quarter across the bar toward the tip jar behind Andy. It bounces off the mirror, spins once, and settles on the edge of the bar. Andy's whipping up a sweet mix that includes Bailey's and Kahlua, the only two liqueurs he divulges from his secret recipe for a drink called "Jamaican Me Crazy."
A passenger, whose flight to St. Louis is two hours delayed, ends up walking the few blocks here, down a damp Cicero Avenue, in search of cheap drinks. A gate agent pointed him in the right direction. "It's been a long day. All I want is a cold beer. My flight into Midway, this lady broke her catheter in the plane's john. You should've seen the slicked floor." "Somehow the Midway people eventually send them over here," says bartender Sue Dempsey of the slouched, tired passengers. Before becoming such a magnet for airline and hotel workers, and the occasional stranded traveler, Mr. C's was the little neighborhood bar. In fact, the place held a reunion for old regulars a few year ago, retired guys who lived and worked in the neighborhood and stopped in for a drink in the late afternoon. They brought photos and food and stories and memories.
"About a year ago," says Sue, who has bartended nights here for the last three years, "a pilot moved in upstairs and spread the word on Mr. C's." Word spreads swiftly through Midway's terminals. "Some nights," she says, "there's not room for two more people in here." The place opens for lunch, though no food is served - it's a liquid diet only. Some airport personnel still stop in for a noontime slump over a beer. "But you know which ones have to work - they drink Coke or cranberry juice," Sue confides with a laugh.
Once in a while, a pilot comes in with his harmonica or guitar and people sing along. Tonight, it's just the tinny jukebox.
The noise inside the bar crescendos a little after 1 am. Smoke looms, nearly as dense as the fog outside. Another wave of airline workers arrives. As they hold the door open for each other, you see the probing wing lights of the last flight in, Southwest 1884, coming from Kansas City. Its landing gears spread out in preparation for another night at Midway.
(Jan Nguyen)
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