Zay Smith
Appearances
Criminal
The Mirage
A tavern is a city, a whole city come in off the street for a beer. You know, you're caring for a community every day.
Criminal
The Mirage
We call them the Mirage Menagerie, and they range from Cheeky the gunrunner, a little old guy who suddenly came in one day, a handgun he was trying to sell, wrapped in newspaper. There was a guy named Cowboy Don. Well, Cowboy Don, you could tell from a distance that he was a cowboy. He'd have a buckskin jacket and a cowboy hat. There was a guy they named Football Hero.
Criminal
The Mirage
But I remember one moment when he looked down at a bourbon he was drinking and said, sometimes all I can remember are football plays and my serial number. And that was Football Hero.
Criminal
The Mirage
Well, Lost Weekend was the most intellectual member of the menagerie by far. He was very smart. And he said he was a writer. He said he wrote a piece for the New Yorker once, but he hasn't written anything else. And we couldn't find any record of the piece he said he wrote for the New Yorker. But he had a little problem with liquor.
Criminal
The Mirage
There had been a full-blown barroom brawl. And what happened was it started with a simple argument about, can I dance with this girl? That developed into a fistfight, and suddenly everybody in the place has a reason to punch out the person next to him. And we had a guy smashing the beer bottle repeatedly on the bar trying to get it to break, and it wouldn't do it the way it would in the movies.
Criminal
The Mirage
It was in the evening, and I was working on a story when suddenly I was called into managing editor Stu Lurie's office. And if you called into the office late at night, I was worried that this was not good news. I didn't know what it might be. But Stu's first words, and he was smiling when he said them, he said, Zay, have you ever waited tables before? And I said, yes.
Criminal
The Mirage
Everything settled down, and then we noticed that there was an old tippler sitting quietly in one of the booths, and he had somehow managed to remain unnoticed, sipping a martini throughout the brawl. And he just said, can I have another drink? The service in here is terrible. In our bar, we had a jukebox and a pinball. Our pinball was an Evel Knievel pinball.
Criminal
The Mirage
And one night, I looked up from the bar, because I heard some commotion at the pinball, and there was this young fellow just shouting at the pinball machine as he played, you scurvy dog, I hate you. I had to go over and check out the scurvy dog, and I made his acquaintance.
Criminal
The Mirage
and found out that he was a young man who just about turned 22, very respectable young man, but he had this thing about pinball machines, and he couldn't rest until when he met a new pinball machine. He could not rest until he'd beaten the high-posted score. I posted score on this pinball was 242.050, 242,000.
Criminal
The Mirage
And he was a very good pinball player and he said, for some reason this machine, I hate it, I hate it. I could see something was developing because he was back every night for hours on the machine trying to conquer the 242.050. I made friends with him, and he started teaching me about pinball. People would gather because they realized what was going on, the drama.
Criminal
The Mirage
And he'd come close, and the ball would go down the chute, and we'd hear the shout of, you scurvy dog. But finally, on the night of September 16th, it was a Friday night, and he came in and he played a game. He had a bag with his flight suit with him because he was getting ready to go up to Naval Reserve weekend training. First of all, he said, I just missed the 620 train, but I'll get the 720.
Criminal
The Mirage
And then he, I just missed the 720 train, but I'll get the 820. And then he finally said, can the reserve, I am going after this machine. And so he did. And a crowd gathered, and he went after it and lost, and went after it and lost. And then suddenly... He was up in the 200,000th with a free ball left. And the place fell quiet.
Criminal
The Mirage
As he went with the last ball, and he did, you could tell he was just doing everything he knew how to do. Intense concentration, flipper action. And finally, bang, he was past 242.050. And his first words were, I love this machine. I go back to the line, it's a city coming off the street in need of a drink. I think that's what I would have found on any number of neighborhood taverns.
Criminal
The Mirage
And it would have been quirky in the sense that people are quirky. But the mirage was never meant to last.
Criminal
The Mirage
And they said, can you hold your liquor? And I sensed something was happening here. And I decided I was going to answer yes to every question, no matter what it was. And I said, yes. And they said, are you good at talking to people? And I said, yes. Otherwise, can you keep your mouth shut if you have to? And I said, yes. And then he asked, can you write 50,000 words in a big hurry?
Criminal
The Mirage
We ended up, when it came time to write it, which is quite a moment to suddenly have said to yourself, my goodness, I have to write this now. The pile of memoranda was taller than Pam. But you asked me whether I felt scared at the start of the project. If I felt scared at all, I felt scared at this point. There's an old saying in our business, if you've got a good story, tell it.
Criminal
The Mirage
If you don't have a good story, write it. This is a good story. All I had to do was tell it.
Criminal
The Mirage
It looked like any other tavern in the city. The beer was cold, the broth was hot, but the Mirage 731 was never quite what it seemed. I was down in the city room, and the papers came up, and hot off, well, you know, as long as it's hot off the presses, it's actually wet off the presses, because if the papers are anything off the, at least out of the press run, they're a little wet.
Criminal
The Mirage
But the papers came up, and after one story, I walked, I was walking down, it was a place, a row of desks in the city room we called Murderer's Row, because the columnists were... in a row, and they were all reading the Mirage story because the papers had just come up, and they all looked at me and gave me a thumbs up, and I thought, gee, that was nice. They really liked it. That was terrific.
Criminal
The Mirage
And I later found out they were giving me the thumbs up because I got the word ass into the paper.
Criminal
The Mirage
The blizzard of 79, which paralyzed the city in ways that it became obvious the city was not delivering services. And they say that that was the one-two punch. Corruption, yeah, it's corrupt. And now the mayor wasn't even able to keep the streets plowed. And that's why he went down.
Criminal
The Mirage
And we were part of it. We were members of the menagerie. They were generally good people that I enjoyed knowing.
Criminal
The Mirage
And I said, yes. And at that point, Stu leaned back in his chair and smiled and said, Zay, I think we're going to detach you from the city room for a while. At the end of the meeting, Stu Lurie said, do you have a nickname? And I said, well, my college friends call me Norty. And he said, all right, well, good luck, Norty the bartender.
Criminal
The Mirage
This was a big project with all kinds of things that could go quite terribly wrong.
Criminal
The Mirage
Well, aside from the fact that the cover could be blown and the whole project could just be collapsed, someone could be killed in our tavern. I mean, it's a tavern in Chicago, and you're always careful. There were so many ways it could go wrong.
Criminal
The Mirage
I remember very well one of those moments in life you remember, corner of Wells and Superior, parking my car, not really knowing quite what I'd be called upon to do, opening the screen door and going in. There's a bar along the left, some booths on the right, and a jukebox, and this is a shot and a beer kind of place.
Criminal
The Mirage
were trying to figure out what to name the tavern. And they came up with any number of, well, half-joking, like the Golden Scoop or the Sunny Times Tap. But these professional writers, we, could not come up with a tavern. Bill Recktenwald, a gifted investigator, finally just said, why don't you call it the Mirage? That's what it's going to be. And he was right. It was perfect.
Criminal
The Mirage
What the owner is supposed to say is, isn't there some way we can avoid this aggravation? That's a key word in Chicago. That sentence has been spoken so many times. Isn't there some way we can avoid this aggravation? At which point you start negotiating.
Criminal
The Mirage
In order to avoid entrapment, and if you have an inspector who's obviously fishing for an envelope of money, we just stood there like the dumbest kids on the block. We didn't make a move to the point where some of the inspectors could tell they were almost frustrated having to move this thing along and get their pay off. We looked like just dumb beginners, which is what we were.
Criminal
The Mirage
He was the most honest, dishonest man you'll ever meet. He was of the city of Chicago. He taught us you've got to follow the rules if you're going to break the law.