The Old and the New  Just up from the Bloomfield Bridge, directly next to a dentist’s office and across the street from an orthodontist’s sits a three story green and white building. On the ground level, there are glass cubes forming a partially-transparent window, through which one can barely make out neon Iron City, Budweiser, and Miller Lite signs. Dividing the first and second stories is a cursive script that reads Pollack’s Café and over the front door is written the word Bar.                It’s a Wednesday night, warmer than it should be for early March in Pittsburgh, but there is a drizzle of rain that keeps the temperature from drifting too high. The rain is also making those on the streets of Bloomfield walk a bit quicker, or shield their heads with their hands, or else hold their jackets a little bit closer to their bodies. I duck into Pollack’s (pronounced “Pah-Lucks” or “Poe-Locks”, depending on whom you ask) and I am happy to see only six others sitting at the bar, and behind the bar, Mike.               Mike is dressed in a white button-down shirt, black slacks, a black zippered vest, and a black belt with a large silver buckle. His gray and black hair is slicked back. “Hello, hello,” he says when he sees me approaching the bar—there’s something about his tone that reminds me of my grandfather. He throws down a Camel napkin and asks, “What can I get ya’?” I order a Pabst draft, and Mike says it’s coming right up. There’s a sign over Mike’s head that reads, “All bartenders go directly to heaven when they die.”               “That’ll be $1.25,” Mike says, and I fish some money out of my wallet. Mike thanks me, makes change, and walks to the end of the bar, where he sits down on a stool with a breath of relief.               Pollack’s is a well-lit bar. There is a large Steelers banner up against the neon signs of the front window, but there are neon signs throughout the bar adverting IC Light, Budweiser, Bud Light, Coors Light, MGD, and Rolling Rock. There are Christmas lights strung around the bar’s first room, which, in all actuality, is not much of a “room.” The place is laid out as more of a hallway than a bar, really, consisting of a corridor that runs a straight line from the front door, past the long counter, past a small game-alcove, past the men’s room, past the jukebox, past the women’s room to the back door. On the wall across from the long counter are wooden coat-racks, a Three Stooges poster, and various Pittsburgh memorabilia, including a large poster of Bill Mazeroski. In the game-alcove, there is a table with chairs, a dart board, and a pinball machine.               Over the bar, there are three televisions, spaced out along its length. Tonight the t.v. in the front corner of the bar is playing an old James Bond movie while the other two feature college basketball. The wall behind the bar is wood-paneled and there are shelves and drawers lining the wall. The shelves are lined with commemorative beer bottles and cans, large inflated baseball bats and footballs, and framed Steelers pictures. Next to the cash register are various snacks—Slim Jims, bags of potato chips, candy bars. Once, when I brought a friend here, she pointed out the Clark bars they have for sale. “This is probably one of the last places in town that still sells those,” she said, “they were originally made here, you know.”               Around nine o’clock, a middle-aged guy wearing a walkman comes in. When Mike sees him, he says, “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby come’stai?”               “Salue,” says Bobby.               “Salue d’Signor,” Mike says.               Bobby orders a glass of pinkish wine and asks Mike what kind of chips he has. Mike pulls down a bag called “Party Mix.”               “You know who passed away?” Bobby asks Mike.               “Who?”               “Chocko.”               “Who?!?” asks Mike.               “The ice-cream guy!” says Bobby, sipping his wine.               “Chocko, Chocko,” Mike says to himself, trying to remember the ice-cream guy. He shakes his head, looks my way, notices my glass is empty, points at it, and asks me , “Another?”               “Another,” I say.               I first came to Pollack’s one evening last summer. I’d been meaning to try it out for years, so one night, when JM—just back from his wedding in Houston—asked me to meet him for a drink, I suggested meeting at Pollack’s. I liked the place right away—for its cheap drinks, for Mike, for its very-Pittsburgh clientele, and for its jukebox (which featured an eclectic mix of oldies, classic rock, 80s hair-metal, and 90s/00s top-40). I introduced myself to Mike and he began calling me by name immediately.               At one point, our friend TK joined JM and I up at the bar, and the three of us sat there, catching up, drinking PBRs. There was a group of middle-aged regulars at one end of the bar. Maybe I was being paranoid, but it felt like they were giving us three youngsters skeptical glances—especially this one long-haired, mustachioed and bespectacled guy in a flannel shirt, who was sitting at the very end of the bar, in a seat I could only think of as “the power-seat.” From that chair, he had a view of nearly the entire place—the front door, the long, bar, the game alcove. Plus, he was situated directly next to the door to the men’s room.               I told TK he should check out the juke, which he did, putting in two dollars and choosing seven songs. As he came back to sit with us, one of his songs came spilling out of the house speakers—it was “Crazy Train,” by Ozzy Osbourne. There was a cheer from the regulars end of the bar. The guy in the power-seat didn’t cheer, but nodded his approval.               “You’re a hit, man,” I said to TK.               TK’s seven-song set played on, much to the liking of the end-of-bar regulars, who must have realized who’s set it was, since not far into it, Mike came over to us and gave each of the three of us a free drink token—a little poker-chip-like-thing with a cartoon of a frothy beer mug in the center, POLLACK’S CAFÉ written over the top, and FREE DRINK written along the bottom.               “From the guy at the end of the bar,” Mike said, gesturing to Power-Seat Guy. We all three turned to that end of the bar and nodded thank yous, to which Power-Seat Guy nodded a cover-all your welcome.               “Well,” TK said, “I guess this calls for shots.” TK ordered us three a round of Jagermeister shots, toasted to JM’s happy marriage, and we drowned the shot glasses.               “Mike,” TK said, “now, would you get that gentleman a drink on me?”               “Sure thing,” Mike said.               The guy with the walkman—Bobby—tells Mike he came up here to watch the Pitt game—“I was gonna go somewhere else, and then I said to myself, ‘Why should I go somewhere else? I’ll go to Poe-lock’s!’”               “That’s right, that’s right,” says Mike.               “We gonna win tonight, or what?” Bobby asks Mike.               “Uhhh, what do you think?”               “Guaranteed,” says Bobby, “A guaranteed win.”               Mike smiles, turns to me and winks.               A woman in jeans and a sweatshirt enters the bar carrying a garbage bag, refers to Mike as Michael, and asks him if she can keep her bag behind the bar. Mike takes it for her, she orders a Rolling Rock, and within minutes she spills half the bottle of beer all over her part of the bar. She apologizes repeatedly to Mike.               “That’s alright, Theresa, that’s alright,” he says, grabbing a stack of napkins and sopping up the beer. Theresa does what she can to clean up the mess, then settles to what’s left of her beer, shaking her head. She closes her eyes and it looks like she’s going to fall asleep.               Mike cleans up the rest of the spilled beer, throws the wet napkins away, and walks back to the other end of the bar, singing, “Moon…River…buh-buh-buh-buh-buh.”               I walk down to Mike’s end of the bar and ask if I can chat with him.               “Okay,” he says.               “How long have you been working here?” I ask.               “Well, let’s see…21 years now.”               “And if you don’t mind my asking,” I say, “how old are you?”               “Ah…If I make to April, I’ll be 81,” he says.               “81,” I say. I ask Mike what his last name is, and he says, “Now, I don’t give that out. Not even to the ladies.”               “Okay,” I say, “What about this place. How long’s it been around?”               “Well, they opened it up five years before I came along.”               “I see,” I say, “And what are the names of the owners?”               “Now, that I can’t tell you either. I won’t give no personal information.”               “That’s fine, okay,” I say.               Mike gets up from his stool to check on the other customers. As he’s heading down to the other end of the bar, he looks back at me and asks, “Who do you write for?”               “It’s called The New Yinzer,” I say.               “The what?” he says.               “The New YINZ-er,” I say.               “Oh! ‘Yinz goin’ dahn-than!’” he says with a swaying motion, “Like that?”               “Yeah,” I say, “Like that.”               At ten o’clock, four twenty-somethings roll in and grab the table in the game alcove. Just behind them come a few more, joining the others in the back. The kids order themselves a round of PBR drafts and take over the pinball machine and dart board. There’s a girl in pigtails and a wife-beater. A tatooed guy with a beard, black-frame glasses, and a too-tight t-shirt. A couple of the kids are wearing hoodies. One of them goes over to the jukebox, and soon, Pollack’s is filled with Devo’s “Whip It.” I look over at Mike, who’s walking down the bar, dancing and humming to himself.                   One of the girls of the group comes up to the bar and says, “I’d like to try one of these Iron…Cities?”               “One Iron City draft, coming up,” says Mike. He draws her beer, sets it on the counter and says, “One dollar.”               “Excuse me?” she says.               “That’ll be one dollar,” Mike says.               “Wow,” says the girl, “I’m in from DC, and nothing costs one dollar there—not even water.”               Why am I here? There are hundreds of bars in Pittsburgh, a lot of them old dives like Pollack’s. True, it’s close to my house. True, I like the bartender and the jukebox. But there’s something more.               I find myself drawn to places and things that are on the verge of becoming something else, places whose potential to alter is in the process of being realized. I guess that’s why I stayed here in Pittsburgh after I finished the degree I came here to pursue. Maybe it was just transplant-optimism, but I saw Pittsburgh as a city whose identity was changing, and I wanted to be a part of that change.               For me, Pollack’s is a small scale version of Pittsburgh as a whole today—the old steel-worker types sitting at the bar after dinner speaking Italian and watching Bond movies, the young kids coming in later to play darts and the jukebox. It’s not just these two types—the “old yinzers” and the “new yinzers” if you will—coexisting, it’s them interacting that really gets me. Older Pittsburghers have always struck me as accepting—not understanding per se, but accepting. Like Mike humming along to “Whip It” (it’s no “Moon River,” but it’s humable).               Maybe eventually Pollack’s will get taken over by the young Bloomfield kids (become another Gooski’s or Squirrel Cage), or maybe the kids will grow tired of Pollack’s and it will go back to being the Yinzer dive it’s been for years. I’m not too concerned with what it becomes, I suppose. I’m just glad to be here now, drinking my cheap beer, listening to the regulars, watching the kids in the back, and knowing that when I get up to leave, Mike will shake my hand, give me another wink, and tell me to come back again. Scott M. Silsbe was born in Detroit and now lives in Pittsburgh.  His work has been published in Notre Dame Review, Third Coast, good foot, and Kitchen Sink.  He is currently a Staff Writer for Kitchen Sink magazine and an editor at The New Yinzer.