Money Makers

Pabst Blue Ribbon, Ballantine, Schaffer,
Schlitz, Budweiser—the big five. I guess
if I were out in Pittsburgh, Iron City, though
I was never further west than the Poconos.
My farther wasn’t a beer drinker.
The only times we had beer in the house
was when aunts, uncles, and my mother’s
father were there. My grandfather
could really put it down. All his beer
drinking made the brewers, shippers
sellers, and advertisers rich. “Make
the three-ring sign for Ballantine.”
That was his beer (I can see the thee-ring
logo.) It came in a gold can, and a light
green can. Was the green stronger
than the gold, or visa versa? I can’t recall
the bottles, except the three rings,
but he’d open a bottle and pour beer
into a glass that looked like an elongated
funnel. Slender at the bottom, if flared up,
wider and wider. I see him lifting a beer glass,
tie loosened at the collar, white shirtsleeves
rolled. It all went to his belly. When I got
a bit older, Terry Lee, one of the neighbor
kids, said of Dave Sullivan, one of our
neighbors, “He’s got a pretty good build
for all that beer he drinks.” Not so
with my grandfather. I wonder if he drank
as much when my mother was growing up.
My mother, aunt, and uncle’s baby sister
died. Maybe that made him drink.
But he probably drank long before he
and my grandmother married, probably
as soon as he was tall enough to reach
up to the bar and order a draft
a bartender poured from a tap, back
when there were trolleys and horse-drawn
milk wagons. The only times I ever saw one
of those was in the Delmore Schwartz
poem, "The Naked Bed in Plato’s Cave;”
it made publishers money, and would have
made poet the rich, but in one way it did.