Last Friday night, a hundred or so of Sergio Mayora’s closest friends gathered at Pop’s on Chicago, a spacious and ungentrified honky-tonk just west of Damen. The party was organized by Scott Levy, who reads poetry under the name “Squat” on Monday nights at Mayora’s family’s bar, Weeds. When Levy told Mayora the party would be at Pop’s, Mayora was excited. He’d met Tom Burton, the manager of Pop’s, on an all-night drinking binge last year.
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Until the early 80s, when Mayora, now 47, took over its management, Weeds was a workingman’s bar called the 1555 Club, after its location at 1555 N. Dayton. The Mayora family had operated it since the early 60s. But when the factories in the area began to close, the workingmen began to disappear as well.
Sergio was the artist in the family, a sculptor, not to mention a part-time lounge singer and a poet. He decided to make Weeds a permanent home for his many friends–a cavalcade of painters, freaks, cholos, rockers, and assorted bohemians from across the city. The MC5’s old manager, John Sinclair, and former White Panther Party “propaganda minister” Bob “Righteous” Rudnick, by then living in Chicago, started the open-mike poetry night on Mondays. Thursdays were for jazz, and other nights were for other things. Birth Control Night was always a popular promotion, and no one got in the door on Halloween unless he was in drag. If nothing special was going on, Sergio and his buddies would sit on the stoop and loudly pass around a bottle of tequila.
The night of the party Levy picked up Mayora a little after nine. Mayora was wearing his usual costume: dark sunglasses, multicolored poncho, overalls. He seemed desperately hungover, as he often does in the early evening. In fact, Sergio checked himself into the hospital for ten days in July with heart trouble, and has been forced to give up drinking. But that doesn’t stop him from staying out all night.
“It tastes like shit,” he said bitterly.
Mayora drank one nonalcoholic beer after another. He sat by himself for a while, listening to his friend Nicholas Tremulis play the banjo. By midnight the party had peaked, and people began to leave; the Chicago underground is apparently getting a little long in the tooth. But after Pop’s closed, the survivors went to Levy’s house for more. Mayora headed to the Ale House first, but he showed up later and didn’t leave until 7 AM.
“They don’t know no better,” said Mayora. “Except for my aunt and my sister. Everybody else is lying.”
