Audio By Carbonatix
M&M’s (2621½ Welton Street) ain’t the sort of place you just wander into for a drink. Not that it’s hidden from street view or entirely without signage — a small, circular Budweiser emblem juts out above the door. But these days, almost nobody wanders along Welton Street in Five Points looking for a drink unless they’re also looking for live music (at Cervantes’) or a DJ (at Pure, formerly the Roxy).
Were you to attempt to wander into M&M’s (or seek it out intentionally), you’d first need to climb a steep case of wooden stairs starting at the street, turn left past the locked men’s bathroom and proceed through a white door with no window. Your entire ascent would be broadcast on closed-circuit television inside, thanks to an eye in the sky at the peak of your climb. But once inside, you’d find a close-knit and loyal group of regulars, and, most likely, Thurman or Georgia behind the bar.
Before I ever visited M&M’s, I’d heard stories. The best involved two friends who shot their whiskey “all wrong,” according to Francis, a former bartendress. As punishment, they received follow-up shots on the house — which they also shot incorrectly. So on and so forth and so many free shots later that one of the friends put his face on the Formica (and to this day has trouble recalling the night’s events), they finally cracked the code: tap, shoot, tap, turn upside down.
Tonight, when a friend and I trek up Mount M&M’s around 10 p.m. and into the cramped quarters of the main room, we find Thurman already packing the contents of the cash register into a zipper bag bound for the bank. He eventually turns around and reluctantly serves us $2 Bud bottles, though it’s obvious he was hoping to go home. But we tip well — excessively, really — so he serves us another, and another, and then an overflowing one-ounce shot of our choice on the house.
Tap, shoot, tap, turn upside down. Wait. Relax.
Thurman serves us one final Bud, throwing in a complimentary seven-ounce Bud pony for our female friend, until it’s well after 11 p.m. and he mumbles something about closing time. At which point he helps Sam, the only other customer this whole time, down the stairs, arm in arm. We watch the slow descent on the tiny black-and-white tube in the corner. “You’re a good friend, Thurman,” I tell him upon his return. “Sam’d do the same for me,” is his response.
Though this space has only been M&M’s for the last five years, it’s been a club since at least ’58, when Thurman remembers coming in as a young man. If the fire marshal had been up here in the past five years — or ever — I doubt he would hang a sign declaring an occupancy code any higher than 25 or 30. Dollar bills, personalized for posterity with pen and marker, hang by the dozens on the wall behind the liquor bottles, some so old the price-per-drink is still scrawled on the label (photocopied price lists have been posted for almost a year). Pork rinds hang from metal clips on a rack beneath the sole television, which shows syndicated reruns of The Wayans Bros. A sign dangling from the ceiling tiles reads: “Men are on this planet because vibrators can’t buy drinks.”
In the minutes before Thurman escorts us down the stairs and locks up behind us, he dances by himself in the small side room — first to an R&B number popular in the ’90s that I can’t place, then to a Little Milton track I’ve never heard. With the lights off and his eyes closed, Thurman’s balance isn’t much better than Sam’s was a few minutes ago. Still, he manages to steer clear of the jukebox and the handful of padded booths while shuffling and sliding in a lopsided circle. It don’t matter.
It’s not like anyone’s going to just wander in.
