Free The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy Page B

VI X (as in 6 ' 10 " ), turn on the news or the classical station, and head back to his duplex on Roosevelt Island. And that’s when Mom and I would get back into our Cutlass, no vanity plates, blast the Pointer Sisters or Donna Summer, hit the Burger King drive-thru for dinner, and go to our Monday-through-Friday home on 251st Street in Queens.

    For the other two weekends a month, I was with my dad—the two of us leaping around a ten-mile radius in southeastern Queens, from our actual home in Broad Channel to the home of hot roast beef and Skee-Ball in Howard Beach (the Big Bow Wow) to the home of my favorite cousins, TJ and Deanna, and my Pall Mall–smoking, Wrangler-jeans-wearing Uncle Dennis and—finally—to the home-away-from-home of Joey O’Dirt, English Billy, Rodger the Dodger, and my dad: Gregory’s Bar and Restaurant.

Most regulars at neighborhood bars come by their nicknames through easily distinguishable physical qualities (Curly Pat, Jimmy the Hat, Mumbling Joe, Peg-Leg). If that fails, a nickname can be created on the basis of ethnic origin (English Billy, Irish Mike, and Dutch—just Dutch, because there’s never more than one) or a profession (Eddie the Actor; Tugboat, who captained one; and Rodger the Dodger, a defense attorney). But in the entire history of nicknaming, there was only regular called Tara’s Father.
    Dad started taking me to Gregory’s Bar and Restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens, in 1986, when I was six years old. He was single with a kid in tow and looking for love. So, that same year, to really up his odds, he bought himself a white Members Only jacket, a pair of dark-tinted aviator Carrera sunglasses the size of ski goggles, the very latest nylon Nikes with the saw-blade soles, and a brand-new black Chrysler Laser hatchback that talked.
    Dad went ahead and splurged on the XE model because it was equipped with: 1) the groundbreaking all-digital dashboard (for me, the biggest thrill of having an odometer that displayed each mile per hour in speed in cutting-edge green boxy font was to scream the fast-rising count aloud every single time Dad took off from a stoplight: “Five, six, seven…eleven, twelve, thirteen…twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty five…” I never once made it higher than thirty before Dad went bananas, screaming, “ENOUGH ALREADY, SCOOTER!!!”); and, 2) the incredible new Electronic Voice Alert System, the height of technology at the time. The owner’s manual claimed the car could voice twenty-four different warning messages, though I’ll be damned if I ever heard more than two. The first seemed to be delivered completely at random. If we’d be cruising down the Belt Parkway on a sunshiney day, singing along to John Mellencamp or Tom Petty, out of nowhere the radio volume would automatically lower—pretty fucking incredible—so the car could provide us with this lifesaving bit of information: “WIPER FLUID LOW!”
    The second message I could actually instigate, and, boy, did I.
    Probably the first fifty times Dad picked me up from PS 133 in “The Laser” instead of a squad car, I’d pile in a half dozen kids and close the door, only to crack it back open again. “Shh! Listen…” I’d say, and after what felt like forever, the car would say, “DOOR AJAR!” and everybody would go batshit. “Whoa!!!!!!!! Make it do it again!!!”
    Between the new car and clothes, Dad was really going for broke in the trying-to-get-a-girlfriend department, and I was more than thrilled to be a part of this effort: “Scoot, I tell ya, there ain’t nothin’ a woman likes more than to see a guy who takes care a’ his responsibilities—you’re my closer, kiddo! Come to think of it, wouldn’t be so bad if you let the pretty ones know that I’m the one who sprays your No More Tangles stuff and combs your hair all nice like I do!”
    Tomboy that I was, I ordinarily fought off having my hair brushed as if it was torture. But I knew that my