The Neighborhood Beer Emporium - Dr. Ed Iannuccilli

The Neighborhood Beer Emporium - Dr. Ed Iannuccilli

My beer-drinking education started at Collins’ Tap, a Mount Pleasant neighborhood emporium frequented by professional beer-drinking professors. It’s where the celebrants filled, clinked and emptied glasses every Friday night, sometimes as quickly as a sword swallower. And Friday was our evening.

The cherubic, jovial, flushed red-faced, smiling Mr. Collins owned the tap and slid up and down the bar as if on a hydroplane. As an efficient counter of the dimeys (ten cents a conical glass), he knew that after five fills, you deserved one on the house, and that was among the many reasons why his tap was a destination.

We were attracted to Collins’ like filings to a magnet. The familiar smell of beer infused with a heavy dose of nicotine and cigar filled the place with pub incense. And the senior barside regulars, Bibsey, Whitey, Muggsy, Sudsy, Barney, Leo, Flukie, and Jigger, became our friends.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Friday was best because I met friends ready for their end-of-week celebration with the neighborhood crew. The stop might be a final destination for the evening or an interval on our way to another stop or, if it was not at the Yankee Clipper Diner (credit to your patience, Laura), our end-of-the-evening wrap-up retreat.

No music. Two tables. No TV, no football, no entertainment save for the locals; just beer and chatter. Gourmet pickled eggs and tasty beef jerky adorned the shelf next to the streaky mirror.

The regulars took their usual seats at the bar, Bibsey fixed at the end like the chairman of the board. After a few, he looked down at us with beetle-browed, rheumy eyes. One evening, with a lean-back chug, he fell off the stool, landing flat on his back. “He’s dead,” I feared. The boys picked him up. “He’s fine. Happens all the time.”

“Chug it Whitey, fer cryin’ out load.” Whitey was the rare one who never did and thus the reason they egged him on. A taciturn, patient regular, he sipped, stayed longer, lasted longer and then tapped twice or scratched his finger on the bar when he wanted another. Whitey? Why his eyebrows were white.

When I started medical school, they called me doc. “Hi, doc. Howya doin’?”

“Thanks, but I’m not a doctor yet.”

“Sure ya are. What’s it like to cut up a dead person in that anatomy lab?” If I chose to, I could have fascinated them with the marvels of the human body. I didn’t. I just wanted to continue my stint as one of the neighborhood boys. I loved that.

Business happened at the bar. That’s where I learned what a bookie was. On a rare occasion, someone might pass a slip of paper. At certain moments they talked softly and sometimes exchanged money. “How do you guys remember all those bets, keep them in your heads?”

“What bets?”

I loved the place. A neighborhood haven. Even when the day was sunny and clear, it became sunnier when I walked into that bar. It was plain fun.