Oscar’s: Come for the Pizza, Stay Because You Slipped on the Floor

The door on Ford Street, with its little porthole window, always reminded me of something out of Lewis Carroll—like a crooked portal to another Wonderland... or a broken nose if you timed it wrong.

   Opening the squeaky door threw you into a cloud of cigarette smoke, fryer oil, and whatever song the jukebox had on repeat that week—usually something by BTO or Journey, depending on who fed the machine. The light inside was always a few notches dimmer than you remembered, like the bar itself was trying to keep its secrets. More often than not, you’d hear the schwing-schwing sound of the bowling game and its mechanical reels ticking off scores on the fly; a casual look at the game told you this old girl had been going strong since the ’50s. People were talking rather loudly—a verbal stew of gossip, food orders, and laughter. You didn’t so much enter into Oscar’s; it entered into you.

   To your right: the bar, long and lean, with a half-dozen guys you recognized and three you didn’t want to. A few were trying to pick up the sole woman wedged between them. Red vinyl barstools—patched with duct tape and pride—had seen more butts than the ashtrays at a Saturday night Catholic bingo. A Schlitz clock ticked crooked above the register, a prize musky, the biggest fish in the St. Lawrence, looking like it could still put up a fight, mounted above the booze bottles, and glasses clinked like a rhythm section.To your left: the kitchen, its swinging door smacked open every few seconds by a waitress—sometimes even the owner, when help was tight. Inside that noisy, bustling kitchen was “Diesel,” the world’s fastest short-order cook, who somehow kept a cigarette dangling from his lip while juggling pizza paddles and playing a game of dare with the mouth of that infernal oven—an oven so blindingly bright, it had a staring contest with the Sun... and won.

   Straight ahead, you had decisions to make—shuffle bowling? Pool? You’re here for a bite, so you head back to the dining room, where the floor sloped so noticeably you could do the Electric Slide just by standing still. You grab a table, already set with a white placemat featuring various local businesses—Cameron’s Cleaners, Woods Bag and Canvas, George Robillard Auto Sales, Sprague & Duffy Realtors, and several more. But you’re not here to read. You’re here to eat.

   The waitress comes over, slaps a glass of ice water down on your table, and offers a menu. You don’t bother—you know why you came here. And what else? Pizza. The spaghetti was also very good, but tonight, it was pizza. If Oscar’s was known for anything, it was the pizza—thin crust, curled pepperoni, and a sauce so tangy your tongue practically smiled.

   But the salad was what caught people off guard. Not the iceberg lettuce, which was mostly just structural support—an uncredited cast member—but the blue cheese dressing. Thick, white, and generously speckled with real chunks of the good stuff. People still talk about it like it was some secret recipe handed down from the gods—or at least from Ethel Anderson, who ran the place with her husband, Jim. She had a way of calling you “hon” while also suggesting she knew every bad thing you’d ever done and wasn’t impressed. Rumor has it, if you know the right people, you can still get jars of it today from the family—hidden under your jacket as you run off into the night.

   Oscar’s wasn’t a bar, not really. It was more like a clubhouse for anyone who’d ever played softball, needed to talk through a breakup, or just wanted to sit somewhere where nobody expected you to be anybody else. It was our Cheers. The trophy cases along the back wall gleamed with years of dusty triumphs: beer league softball, bowling teams, and one particularly contentious darts championship that ended in a shouting match and a broken Budweiser mirror. But that’s another story.

   If you grew up in the Burg, Oscar’s was part of the natural order of things. Like shad flies, or the way everyone had an aunt named Shirley. At eighteen, it was the first place you went legally. At seventeen, it was the first place you snuck into. You didn’t “go” to Oscar’s—you returned, like a ball finding its glove.

   There was a rhythm to the place. You could feel it in the thunk of the shuffle puck, the clack of the pool balls, the dull roar of laughter from the regulars. Labber brought in foosball during the Carter administration, and for a while, you couldn’t get near it without risking a bruised ego—or a chipped molar. Someone always claimed they had a cousin who went pro. Who goes pro at foosball?

   In earlier years, a band would squeeze into the back near the dance floor—*Oscar 5* was the house favorite, though I’m pretty sure there were only four of them. The music would start up, couples would make their way to the floor, and for a minute the whole place shimmered—beer in hand, hips swaying, someone yelling, “Turn it up!” even though it was already rattling the ceiling tiles. Plenty of couples met at Oscar’s—my own parents among them.

   It’s gone now, of course—and not just gone like a place that closed. Gone like a place that took a piece of the town with it. But I can still feel it. If I close my eyes, I can hear the jukebox cue up Fooled Around and Fell in Love, see Diesel bang the oven door shut, and smell that sweet tang of pizza sauce hanging in the air like a memory you can’t quite name. I can see the women at the table when the pizza was nearly gone, just scraps of crust left—and their eyes darting around, each waiting to snatch her favorite piece before someone else did.

   I’ve been to fancier places. Cleaner places. Places with artisanal menus and reclaimed wood tables. But none of them had the soul of Oscar’s. None of them had that exact blend of blue cheese, burnt edges, and bad decisions. None had that late-night soul—that after-the-softball-game, gotta-be-with-the-guys feel. Oscar’s had it, and we all knew it.

   And none of them ever will.

   You don’t build that with branding, or hashtags, or marketing hotshots. It happens by accident. And when it does—you know.

   They say only people have souls—that animals, objects, and places don’t. But I’m not so sure.

   Maybe an essence forms out of all the energy people leave behind. The laughter, the voices, the music, the smells—it soaks into the walls, into the floor, into the very air, until the place carries something soft and invisible you can’t hold, can’t measure—but that somehow finds its way into your back pocket when you aren’t looking.

   You tuck it away in a dark little trunk at the back of your mind, and every once in a while, you open it up—blow the dust off—and there it is again. Like an old toy your mother found in a box in your childhood home, suddenly back in your hands, making you smile in a way you forgot you could—blowing away the grating sands of today’s problems, if only for a minute.

   That’s what Oscar’s was. A place with a soul. And I’m lucky to have known it.