It's Your Birthday

What happens when you spend 19 straight hours at Ray's Happy Birthday Bar?

by Chris Ross

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Published: May 26, 2009

Mark Stehle SMOKE 'EM IF YOU GOT 'EM: Chris Ross (right) took in nearly 24 hours worth of laughs at Ray's on Passyunk Avenue.

Ray's Happy Birthday Bar is cool and dark at 7:15 in the morning, and through the open door, you can hear truck engines and shouts from the Italian Market, where the air stinks of fish and the street runs wet with melted ice. At one end of the bar, Rob, a regular in an Elvis shirt, nurses a shot and a beer. Ray’s serves the same thing for breakfast as it does for lunch and dinner: a shot and a beer. Kenzinger and Jameson. Budweiser and Jim Beam. PBR and Canadian Windsor.

Pamphlets featuring a picture of the bar’s owner, Lou Cappazolli, lie around the bar. "We are going to roast you, Lou," they announce, "on Thursday, May 21!"

Morning bartender Tony Coach, who's been working here for 24 years, doesn’t expect anyone to hold back. "This is the place where everyone tells you what they really think," he says.

Ray’s Web site boasts that "you can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning" — they begin pouring at 7 six days a week. I decided to take them at their word: Last Thursday, I walked in at 7:15 a.m. and stumbled out 19 hours later, at 2 a.m. Over the course of the day, I consumed eight beers, an assortment of shots, three sandwiches and two packs of cigarettes. What I did not imbibe orally was more or less absorbed through my skin. The writer Stendhal once said that a novel is a mirror carried along the highway of life. The following account is what happened when that mirror was placed on a barstool in South Philadelphia.

At 7:30, a wiry man named Roy enters and pulls a paper and a pinch of tobacco out of his Drum pouch. "Roll my cigarettes in 7 seconds," he says, licking the adhesive. "Roll 'em up perfect, every time."

A woman stomps in the front doors at 8 a.m. "Breakfast!" she commands. Tony pours her a shot of whiskey. "Breakfast with the stars," she says, swallowing.

On the TV in the right hand corner of the room, The Octagon, a Chuck Norris action flick, plays on AMC. "You want to save the world," a character tells Chuck. "The world doesn't want to be saved. It wants to be left alone."

But Ray's, opened at the tail end of the Great Depression in 1938 by Lou's father, Anthony “Ray” Cappazolli, has always been a place where people go when they want the world to leave them alone — spouses, bills, bosses. Lou was born in 1939, and soon after, the family moved to the third floor of the building. Lou remembers eating cornflakes and milk at the bar as a 5-year-old.

"My father had a great personality," says Lou. "He could make you spend money." Why Ray wished everyone who entered his bar a happy birthday, Lou doesn’t know, but the name stuck. Lou turned 70 in April, and despite his bad knees and milk-white hair, he's aged well. He’s an intensely personable man — a born entertainer. "I’m a ham," he says. "Let me tell you the truth: I'm a fucking ham."

Before he took possession of the bar, Lou was a musician, a fixture in Vegas during that town's golden age, the days of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. He sang and played the sax with his band, the Untouchables, and performed solo comedy routines. Lou has transported the mood of that era to Ray's, a place where every man — if only for a night — can will himself into a chain-smoking, liquor-swilling, joke-peddling member of his own personal Rat Pack.

At noon, two contractors sit down and order beers and shots. One of them wears broken glasses that hang sideways across his face. "The thing about this place," says regular and local bartender Steve-O over a shot of Jager, "is it's non-discriminatory. You get people from all walks of life." Steve-O nudges John, another regular. "See, John here is, like, 86,000 years old — and I’m, like, 12."

"You like it if I come to your work and embarrass you?" cries John.

"What, you going to show up naked?" Steve-O shoots back.

Mark Stehle

At 3 p.m., Lou is worried that Joe, a regular wearing a Vietnam veterans cap, looks a little wiped out. "I am wiped out, man," says Joe. He fingers his pack of cigarettes. "Let me tell you — cancer is no joke."

A raised, tiled gulley runs along the bottom of the bar, where men used to spit their tobacco juice. "In the '40s, they didn’t have ashtrays," Lou says. "People just threw butts everywhere. That's why I got a room full of dead people." Lou likes to tell two stories of men who died at Ray’s. One stepped out the door and had a heart attack on the steps. Another man, who never drank anything but Rolling Rock, plopped down at the bar one day and ordered a Budweiser. Minutes later, he fell off his stool lifeless.

 "She’s got a great laugh, don’t she?" asks Lou of Jennifer, another regular who grabs a seat at 3:30. At this bar, your laugh is your calling card — and the owner’s is something to behold. It starts with big, rich guffaws, eyes squinted on the brink of tears, shoulders humping up and down, before settling down into throaty chuckles. Lou may laugh more in one day than some people do in their entire lives. By comparison, when nighttime bartender "Skinny" Tony Hamsley laughs (yes, there is more than one Tony who tends bar here), his mouth opens wide into a big O and the laughs burst out in gunfire-like intervals — "Ha! Ha! Ha!"

If you sit long enough in Ray's, you’ll laugh, too. If Lou doesn't get you with the joke about the urinating Eskimo, he'll get you with the one about the guy sinking in quicksand, or the stuttering man from Miami Beach.

Shortly after arriving at 4:30, Skinny Tony buys drinks for two people he recognizes, and one for a man to whom he's just been introduced. Lou hands them poker chips, which can be traded in for drinks.

At 6:15 p.m., Tony sets up the podium for the roast. "I carried that heavy podium in here this morning," says Lou. "Felt like I was carrying my own casket."

Forty-five minutes later, the doors shut and the overhead fans begin to whirl. The room continues to fill, the din of voices rising. At 7:45, all the seats in the house are taken, and Lou glad-hands around the room like a politician, pressing flesh, asking after spouses. An older man named Lenny cannot believe that two college kids three seats down are smoking Chesterfield cigarettes. "Boy, that makes my day," he says. "That really brings me back."

Ray's is, among other things, a home to old men and young men who think they’re old men.

When the room grows raucous with anticipation, Lou's son Anthony, a handsome man who owns a number of local fitness centers, begins the roast with a video introducing the faces and names of the roasters, featuring the music from Dino's classic specials. "When I was a kid, we had a Bring Your Father to School Day," Anthony begins. "So my dad's an entertainer. He showed up wearing a condom hat and carrying a rubber chicken." He waits for the laughter to subside. "I was lucky enough never to catch my parents having sex. Luckily, I wasn't home those two days."

The roasters, some of whom have known Lou since childhood, start putting him through the paces. Tony Coach, the morning bartender, gets up. "Lou, you got me a job bartending here … and ever since, I hate ya!"

More often than not, the jokes fall into a genre inappropriate for print.

When the man of the hour finally takes the stand to give as he got, he only gets one or two lines in when the door suddenly bursts open and another Ray's bartender, PaulE, enters wearing a blonde wig and a skirt and carrying a rag and a spray bottle. He gets up on a ladder and begins polishing a sign on the wall. The crowd erupts  — regulars recognize that he's dressed as Rose, Lou's compulsively cleaning wife. In a scratchy falsetto, PaulE begins his rant: "Lou! Whadya need two microphones for? Lou! Whadda all these wires? Lou! Whadda all these people doing here?" (Rose wisely absented herself from the bar that evening.)

Throughout the room, the laughter continues unabated — tears are wiped from bright red cheeks, tables are beaten with fists. A video of Lou's grandson running toward the camera, pie in hand, is cued just as Lou's son delivers a very real pie to his father’s face. The crowd stands and applauds.

Between the hours of 11 and 2, I begin to drink in earnest to speed up the last hours of my vigil. For the first time since 6:30 p.m., I vacate the bar stool I've called home since early morning. A bartender buys me a shot of Jack on the challenging condition that I not drink it till 1:55 a.m.

At 10 of 2, the lights go up. "Last call!" shouts Tony. Fifteen minutes later, he cups his hands around his mouth, speaking loud and enunciating every word: "Everybody! It is time to go!"

He shakes hands with some of the last customers. "Happy birthday," he says, smiling. "Every day is somebody’s birthday."

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Ray's Happy Birthday Bar | 1200 E. Passyunk Ave., 215-365-1169, thehappybirthdaybar.com. Open Mon.-Sat., 7 a.m.-2 a.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-2 a.m.

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