Beginnings - Paying the Tab

The bar had its regulars, most good places do. Tucked under a twelve story, all brick office complex that had seen far better years, in the middle of the downtown walking district of Harrisburg, “Crackers” served an eclectic mixture of white collar suits and college frats, with an undercurrent of darker scowl-faced regular working crowds. The bar consisted of red brick interior walls, cracked leather bar stools and booths with coffee brown wooden tables. A smoke induced haze lingered below the water stained panel ceiling, swirling around a lazily spinning wicker fan and two sets of bare bulb light fixtures emitting a sickly yellow glow against the bar’s welcome dimness and accompanying anonymity.


Julian Dooran had owned the bar since the late fifties. He had purchased it in partnership with old Johnny Ashcroft, a childhood friend. Johnny had been good with numbers and Julian liked people so it seemed natural for Johnny to do the books and for Julian to tend bar. This arrangement seemed to fit and the bar did well.

People rarely met Johnny, who preferred the privacy of his back office, his desk, his calculator and his cigars. He liked the office’s personal exit into the alley behind the building where he and his occasional guests could come and go in secrecy. Julian became a real bar keep in every sense of the word. He kept the pretzel bowls filled, the music moderate and the rough crowds out. He became friend and councilor to thousands of faces. He knew how to listen, when to talk and when to forget.

The bar had originally been called JJ’s Pub, for Julian and Johnny, so that neither one would receive top billing. They had felt good about the name and it stuck. They worked hard and put in long hours to make JJ’s a success.

Women drifted in and out of the boys lives like they did the bar, short stints with no commitment or permanence. There were no real regrets, their bar was their mistress and a very demanding one.

Johnny’s health began failing in the mid seventies. The bouts of chronic coughing became longer and harder and the nausea was commonplace. Johnny took to nibbling on Saltine crackers, from a stash in his bottom desk drawer, to ease his stomach. It didn’t help that he had put on weight over the years which caused constant back pain. Through it all, he managed to stumble in faithfully every morning before the bar opened, ritualistically chatting at the bar with Julian about sports and politics, of which they never agreed, before scooting back to his office to work on the ordering and the bills.

Cancer had taken over Johnny’s body long before Julian could convince him to see a doctor. The diagnosis was grim and the time left was short. Johnny was gone weeks after that first visit. Julian suffered silently over the loss of his friend and business partner, leaving Johnny’s office closed and practically untouched for weeks. The bar paid for a quiet funeral for a few close friends and Johnny’s only surviving relative, an older married sister who worked as a librarian in Chicago. The coffin was laid to rest in a local cemetery, along the back corner under a tree, just as Johnny would have wanted. And with that, Johnny was gone.

In June of Seventy Eight, nine months after Johnny’s death, Julian renamed the bar. It took him a week to come up with something suitable. He wanted something that would make him remember Johnny. After a weeks worth of thought, he realized that his mind kept returning to Johnny’s constant pestering for thosr saltine crackers. It had always made Julian laugh. Johnny would go through boxes at a time, making sandwiches of everything. Julian had joked that if the two partners had ever taken bonuses, Johnny would have wanted his to be in crackers, so “Crackers” it became.

Years following the name change were solitary of Mr. Julian Dooran. The bar became even more all encompassing. He had the back office remodeled to include a bed and private bathroom. He would sleep most weeknights at the bar, returning to his small apartment to do laundry and collect any mail.

The game had begun during those years of the early eighties. Wednesdays and Fridays were poker nights. After hours in the rear game room, across the thread barren green felt of a dilapidated pool table, four to six of Julian’s bar friends would play until morning, often losing hundreds of dollars to each other.