Dunleavy on Wagon
Can Langan’s bar survive his dry spell?
“I haven’t had a drink in three weeks,” says Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who’s such a good customer that Langan’s, the paper’s local tavern, had a picture of him etched in a glass divider by its bar. “Do I miss drinking? To plagiarize Jimmy Breslin, it was my freakin’ sport.” So think of his bleeding ulcer as a sports injury. He hasn’t been able to drink since he was diagnosed last month. He says it wasn’t from overdoing it. (Nor did Rupert Murdoch order him to sober up.) He got the ulcer reporting in Florida during the hurricanes. “Six weeks ago or whenever it was,” he says, “I was in a dingy hotel in Stuart. There were these families with us, not homeless, but fleeing from their mansions. The kids were hungry. We got a whole bunch of food and brought it back to the kids. My first two beers in three days.” It’s not clear what the meaning of this story is, beyond setting the semi-heroic scene followed by the rewards of a cold one, but around the same time he ate a three-day-old barbecued-pork sandwich he’d bought “for some reason from an Arab store,” a convenient scapegoat which gets us back to the ulcer. “As soon as I ate it, I knew that it was a mistake,” he says. A few weeks later, he got sick. Now that he’s (at least temporarily) a teetotaler, “I physically feel better, amazingly so. I’m even putting on weight. I went for a bike ride. I’m even lifting little weights,” he says. “But that is little consolation.”
—Carl Swanson