Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (12 page)

At the time, I was all too eager to tell people that I considered myself a Muggletonian. Muggletonians were a radical Protestant dissenting sect of the seventeenth century, and the great historian E. P. Thompson argued that William Blake's mother might have been one. The Blake connection alone might have been enough for me. But there was more: Instead of worshipping in churches, which they considered pointless and hierarchical, the Muggletonians instead are said to have “worshipped” in taverns, going from public house to public house praying and singing and making political trouble—and drinking. I'd first heard about them in college, when one of my professors ID'd me as a Muggletonian. I could see his point, so I readily claimed Muggletonianism as my true faith and happily preached its dissenter doctrines to anyone who'd listen. At Puffy's, people were ready to be converted.

Will was more than a skillful conversationalist. He was an intellectual and a lover of history. He'd spent a lot of time in the former Czechoslovakia and, although a nonbeliever himself, he felt an affinity for the Hussites—the Bohemian followers of Jan Hus, who was burned for heresy in 1415. We must have talked dissenting Christians and poetry and politics until three or four in the morning, with some of the other regulars occasionally contributing their two cents, or making fun of the highfalutin and vaguely religious content of our conversation.

Although Will had been drinking at Puffy's since the seventies, he wasn't blasé about it. He knew that here, here, we had something rare and special. “Café society,” he said with a sigh, and we clinked glasses. And at its best, that's exactly what Puffy's was: a distinctly American, distinctly New York version of European café society, replete with thick smoke and friendly argument and laughter. Where else could two drunks talk fervently about early modern religious movements, and politics and life, and God knows what else, all night, laughing, occasionally shouting, having a ridiculously good time? Until then, I hadn't found it—at least not since Dublin. From then on, the tall one—Jimmy—frequently announced, in his booming voice, “It's the Muggletonian!” on my arrival at the bar. Jimmy and Will had lived in the neighborhood since the mid-1970s and had been friends since they were in their twenties.

Very soon, they were my friends, too. There was no hazing period at Puffy's. I fit in right away, although, in one significant way, I was not like them: Like many of the other regulars, Will and Jimmy were painters. The place was crawling with artists—even among the bartenders. Some of them had done well for themselves in the previous decade's art boom. Some had managed to hold on to at least some of the money, some of the success they'd earned. Some had lived it up and partied like crazy and lost it all. Most were somewhere in between, still painting, still showing their work, but doing construction, proofreading, anything to stay afloat. What made Puffy's so inviting, what made it work so well, was that here the painters and poets and designers and ironworkers and occasional academics and even lawyers all found common ground.

The days of abstract expressionist heavyweights like de Kooning and Pollock and Rothko holding court at the Cedar Tavern were long gone, but this had to be the next best thing. I was twenty-four at the time and holding my own just fine with these fortysomethings. At least I could teach them something about Muggletonians. Because, for me, Puffy's was itself a classroom—a protracted, whiskey-soaked lesson in art history and New York culture, a repository of downtown lore and legend. I cared about politics. Hey, I cared about art. I had grown up in New York, going to museums and galleries and theater and concerts. Maybe the problem was that I'd taken all that for granted. In college, so many of my friends were painters and sculptors. But at Puffy's, even though I could match those art guys drink for drink, I quickly discovered—to my mild horror—that
I did not get all the references
.

One night pretty early on in my time there, the guys were talking about something—God knows what—and laughing. “Like a Robert Ryman painting” was the punch line. Robert Ryman.
Who?
I quietly cursed myself for not having taken any art history classes. But even as my ignorance embarrassed me, I was excited that here, among these painters, these drinkers, these talkers, I stood to learn so much. When Cory, the Southern painter, rhapsodized about Albert Pinkham Ryder, about his risky technical experiments and abiding Romanticism, I made it my business to find out who the hell this person was, and he soon became one of my favorite painters, too.

Ken, the wiry, intense guy I'd often spotted in the afternoons, also came around in the evenings now and then, and we got to talking, too. He was a poet and the publisher of a cultish little magazine of literature and art. He had interviewed Auden and Ginsberg and Creeley, spent time in the company of Bukowski, been conned by Corso. And even though I made it clear that I'd rather be reading Blake or Yeats or Wordsworth over any of them any day, I was impressed. His intelligence was swift and sharp; maybe because I knew he was, or had anyway been raised, Catholic, it struck me as Jesuitical.

“Young poets in New York write about art,” he told me, as though it were a given. I gave it a shot. But my experiences at Puffy's with the art guys had shown me that I didn't know nearly as much about art as I thought I did. Ken recommended books, including Robert Atkins's extremely handy
ArtSpeak
, an overview of art movements and ideas. I'd sit up at night reading it, absorbing as much information as I was able, so that I could better follow whatever the hell my Puffy's friends were talking about, that I might know my Art Brut from my Arte Povera, my new realism from my photorealism. (Robert Ryman: Minimalist. White paintings. Check.) One evening at Puffy's, Ken nodded in the direction of a glamorous older woman who looked European, or South American, or both. Her bearing was regal, if not downright imperious. I'd seen her before. She usually drank sake and kept to herself. “You know who she is?” I did not.

“Marisol,” he said. One of the most celebrated living women in the visual arts. I clearly knew nothing. Marisol often had two imposing dogs in tow. One was known to be good-natured; the other, vicious. She generally paid me no mind, but on one occasion she moved from one end of the bar down to the front corner, where I had planted myself for the previous few hours. “I have to talk to you,” she said conspiratorially in her high and heavily accented voice. “You zee zat repulsive man?” She gestured toward the back of the room at a burly disheveled character. “He wants to sleep with me. Zo I
must
talk to
you
eenstead.” Not exactly a compliment, but I was glad to be of service.

Not long after I'd learned who Marisol was, I showed up at Puffy's one evening, surprised and saddened to discover that a memorial service for one of her dogs (the good one) was in full swing. When I walked in, someone was eloquently eulogizing the dead Akita. I nudged a friend's elbow and whispered, “He's good.”

“I think it's Edward Albee,” she said, sotto voce.

The next day I told my father—a notorious and enthusiastic name-dropper who could seldom be one-upped—that at my bar the previous night, I'd heard Edward Albee eulogize this artist named Marisol's dog. His eyes got huge. “Do you have any idea what a big deal she was in the sixties?” By then, I had some idea. “I saw her at a party once. She was stunningly beautiful. Sinatra was also there,” he said. “And I couldn't decide who was more famous.”

I hardly socialized with my fellow students. Why would I, when I had these friends at Puffy's, who, I was sure, were giving me a more valuable education anyway? Jimmy's stories about traveling the world with the famous painter he worked for were certainly more interesting than anything in my dry American literature seminar. The collective reminiscences of seeing bands like the Talking Heads and Blondie and the New York Dolls at places like Max's Kansas City and CBGB, the all-night benders at Tyrannosaurus Rex, the openings at Mary Boone and parties with Jasper Johns were riveting. I might have been the only native New Yorker in the bunch, but my new friends had lived in a New York I'd never really known, a New York that was louder and dirtier and sexier and infinitely more interesting than the one I'd grown up in.

I not only felt understood at Puffy's, I felt valued. Moreover, I even felt pretty. Some women walk into bars and heads turn instantly. Everybody knows this. I am not one of those women. I've always been a big girl, which, without going into the complicated, fraught cultural politics of weight, always seemed to give me a literal kind of buffer in bar culture and made it possible to be accepted among men without inevitably becoming the object of romantic attention. But at Puffy's, my friends were frequently telling me I was
beautiful
. Was it something in the water? Or maybe the lighting? Was it because they were artists and saw things, and people, differently? It made me feel good. So good that I started to believe them, that when I looked into the mirror in the teeny tiny bathroom at the back of the bar to the right of the dartboard, well, I thought I looked pretty good, too. There was no shortage of sociable and largely harmless flirting among the regulars, and I happily participated. I became bold enough to flirt with non-regulars, too. And, from time to time, after a few drinks, after the talk and flirtation, I became bold enough to go home with near- or total strangers. Despite the risks, that, too, seemed better than another night at Bleak House.

Within months, Puffy's had overtaken every aspect of my life. Grad school was pretty much a bust. I fell behind with all of my schoolwork. I'd signed on with Ken as assistant editor of his magazine; my responsibilities included brandishing a hockey stick in his direction when he wasn't working hard enough (he's Canadian, so it made a perfect kind of sense), for which I was “paid” in lunches at the local sports bar or at the café at the other end of Harrison Street and drinks at Puffy's. We'd cut and paste, old-school style, and talk poetry and art. I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday with dinner at an Italian restaurant with Sonia and some of the other women among the Puffy's regulars. Once, when Louie the bartender was in a bind, I agreed to pick his kids up from school. I'd even invited Paul—the extremely bright Irish bartender—to come talk to my class at BMCC about Irish culture and politics when I'd assigned a few stories from Joyce's
Dubliners
. It's not that Paul wasn't qualified—he was a native Dubliner, a Trinity alum, and a natural teacher—but was it, possibly, just kind of weird to invite your Thursday night bartender to come and lecture to your Monday afternoon class?

Maybe this was not a normal way for a twenty-five-year-old woman to live her life. Maybe something really
was
wrong with me.

But at least at Puffy's, most of the time, everything felt easy and good. This was not the case at school, where I was seriously fucking up. Or with my family, from whom I felt more alienated than ever—with the exception of my maternal grandmother, whom I visited every Sunday afternoon, normally bleary-eyed after a long night at the bar, not that she noticed. It was certainly not the case at home, where I proved to be a shitty and irresponsible roommate, seldom present, frequently late with the rent and other bills. The friendship I'd once enjoyed with my roommate had almost dissolved completely, and I knew it was my fault. I was living my life, and my life took place in a bar—a bar from which I'd just as soon have my old friends stay away, even the ones I used to go to bars with and drink with all the time.

Vanessa was a devoted journal-keeper; she'd kept journals forever, probably since she'd learned to write. And she was in the habit of leaving her journal, an oversize hardback black book, splayed open on the little table just beyond our tiny kitchen. This, I told myself, surely meant that she
wanted
me to read it. In my heart, I knew it was wrong to read someone's diary, even if they left it
wide open on a table you shared
. Oh, it was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. And I found it totally irresistible.

One morning, as I'm sitting at that little table, drinking my coffee, smoking a cig, slightly hungover as usual, I see the journal in front of me. Open. And the first thing that catches my eye is my name. There. In black ink, in my roommate's distinctive, cramped, jagged, anxious hand. I can't say exactly what she'd written verbatim. But I do recall that she observed, not surprisingly, what a fuckup I was in so many ways. I was aware that this was not an unreasonable assessment. She opined further that I was not, however, a terrible person. That I was, actually, a pretty nice person.
Well, that's nice.
Even really mean people, she continued, are nice when they're around me. I wasn't sure who these mean people she had in mind were, but I liked this fine, too. She remarked that for as long as we'd known each other, I'd demonstrated a knack for making myself “indispensable” at bars; she'd seen it in college at the bar in North Bennington, and to a lesser degree at the Man of Kent, and she could tell that it had happened at Puffy's, too.
Indispensable.
An interesting way of putting it, I thought, but sure, fine. All I ever seemed to do these days was go to the bar, she noted.
Well, you've got me there.
I couldn't argue with her on that point.

And one more thing.

She wrote,
Rosie has a serious alcohol problem.
Or something like that. Maybe it was even starker. Maybe it was
Rosie is an alcoholic.
Or even
Rosie is a serious alcoholic.
I managed not to spit-take my coffee across the page.

I could live with being a fuckup. I had lived with being one for most of my life. I thought that when I finished college, I was on the right track. I'd had setbacks since graduating, but surely they would pass. And, for now, I could also live with being a disappointment. I was still young, and there was hope that someday I would redeem myself. I was sort of flattered by the “indispensable” bit, and accepted it as a peculiar but not necessarily bad trait. But I wasn't so comfortable with the realization that Vanessa—someone I knew well, who knew me well, someone who was no lightweight when it came to the drink herself—considered me an alcoholic. Because—dumbly or blindly, maybe disclosing some real deficit in the self-reflection department—no matter how much I drank, no matter how many hours I'd logged sitting on my ass on a barstool in the front corner of Puffy's Tavern, the thought had never occurred to me. Not once.