The Great American Saloon Series/Big Stash's
Mysak, Joe
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES
BIG STASH'S
Gus: Don't go about it the wrong way. Don't use the Democrats' approach. Don't throw money at it.
Tom: Forget it. What's the use? She 'II never go out...
...Out of my league...
...The place took us through high school, college years, and even now serves as the capper to a night's real work at Frenchy's, that other famous Union County saloon, previously described in these pages...
...It is about two miles from the Tremley Point saloons which are really nothing more than neon beer signs in people's living-room windows, and maybe a mile from the field where Parker Bagley hit a softball 350 feet over the center-field fence and into the tank farm back in 1979...
...It had something to do with cafeteria-style steam tables, and whether or not you worried about the unwritten rules...
...They might see in it a perfect symbol of the middle-class quicksand we are desperately trying to escape, of all the little polyester things we are ashamed of, and try to hide or deny, usually to no avail...
...Big Stash's: home of fabled, thick pea soup...
...Routes 1 & 9, now at what must be their most scenic, what with softball players dodging oil tankers and semis to field balls hit out of Wheeler Park...
...for some of us, the first restaurant we ever went to...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES BIG STASH'S Gus: Don't go about it the wrong way...
...She's first class...
...Murderous blue eyes, and this great hair, so blonde it's greenish, you know...
...It had something to do with pictures of Authentic Slavic Dances on the walls, fat men in Hawaiian shirts, and beehive bubble hairdos...
...Gus: Sounds your type...
...More dispassionate observers, of course, would just say that Big Stash's is a damned fine saloon and restaurant, and leave it at that...
...Tom: Oh, perfect...
...Stash had as much to do with personal style as it does with the place...
...I mean, I can't believe it, it's hilarious...
...About so high, likes sports, yet an intellectual, a real intellectual...
...Big Stash's: a piece of pure Jerseyana unchanged since the 1950s, a saloon and restaurant that has even given its name to a concept, as in a line first uttered in Mr...
...Tom: It doesn 't make a difference...
...Every time I talk to her it's like looking over a hedge at this incredible Brueghel-esque scene, filled with people with tons of money...
...kielbasi and kraut...
...I said the place has not changed since the 1950s...
...Big Stash's is on South Wood Avenue in Linden, just down a ways from Tucky's Pizza and the live poultry store with the Rhode Island Reds and other such gobblers in the windows, just across from U.S...
...As I recall.it had to do with formica-topped tables, carpet dusty with sand from The Shore, plastic pitchers of beer, and polyester leisure suits...
...Nevertheless, Big Stash's remains substantially unchanged...
...Bierals's first-period algebra class, about a kid who has since gone into politics: "My God, is he stash...
...it had something to do with being on the prom committee, slick pompadours, driving your parents' Pontiac, and being the kind of guy who would wear a corduroy sports jacket into the 21 Club-and not on a dare, either...
...Gus: Not the kind of girl you'd take to Big Stash's...
...With all that, the kind of girl who blushes the first time you meet her...
...the best kind of place to bring your wedding party after a tuxedo-sizing, the kind of place to discuss current affairs, politics, softball, and the old days, like the time the nuns taught the glee club "The Ballad of the Green Berets," which went on to become the hit of our grammar-school Christmas Assembly, just behind "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window...
...Gus: Really cute, eh...
...On the scale of money, this guy has Money That Buys Things...
...It is cheek by jowl with the largest refinery on the East Coast and its tank farm, part of which blows every few years, knocking out windows for miles around, sending bystanders running for cover, and causing mothers to soothe their tender babes with "There, there, it's only one or two of the tanks...
...Our entire lives are dark secrets: "Hey, I'm cool, I went to an Ivy League school, I'm okay, really, no big deal," we say to rich girls, and of course it all is a big deal...
...Way over my head...
...Her old man is loaded...
...Psychiatrists and other such charlatans, I suppose, would say that Stash's represents something we all fear, a reminder of just how fragile the veneer is...
...Pabst on tap...
...This is not exactly true...
...I ask her about what she's going to do on the weekend, and she talks about tennis, shooting, sailing-My God, her father owns a 54-foot sailboat...
...Oh, yes, Big Stash's, site of first loves, first beers, first real drinking bouts...
...She 'II never go out with me-/ mean on a date...
...huge overstuffed sandwiches...
...just a few years ago Stash added banquet rooms for weddings and doubled the size of the bar, paneling parts of it with smoky, gold-veined mirror, the kind called Venetian and apparently standard issue for all homes on Staten Island...
Vol. 16 • September 1983 • No. 9
