The Wigwam

"The Wigwam was where the indians always drunk. They seemed the most casual, the most detached of ironworkers; they worked as hard as anybody on the bridge, but once the workday was done they left the bridge behind, forgot all about it, lost it in the cloud of smoke, the bubbles of beer, the jukebox jive of The Wigwam.

This was their home away from home. It was a mail drop, a club. On weekends the Indians drove four hundred miles up to Canada to visit their wives and children on the Caughnawaga reservation, eight miles from Montreal on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River; on weeknights they all gathered in The Wigwam drinking Canadian beer (sometimes as many as twenty bottles apiece) and getting drunk together, and lonely.

On the walls of the bar were painted murals of Indian chiefs, and there also was a big photograph of the Indian athlete Jim Thorpe. Above the entrance of the bar hung a sign reading: THE GREATEST IRON WORKERS IN THE WORLD PASS THRU THESE DOORS.

The bar was run by Irene and Manuel Vilis -Irene being a friendly, well-built Indian girl born into an ironworkers' family on the Caughnawaga reservation; Manuel, her husband, was a spanish card shark with a thin upturned mustache; he resembled Salvadore Dali [sic.]. He was born in Galicia, and after several years in the merchant marine, he jumped ship and settled in New York, working as a bus boy and bottle washer in some highly unrecommended restaurants.

During World War II he joined the United States Army, landed at Normandy, and made a lot of money playing cards. He saved a few thousand dollars this way, and, upon his discharge, and after a few years as a bartender in Brooklyn, he bought his own saloon, married Irene, and called his place The Wigwam."

Gay Talese, The Bridge.