Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (13 page)

Maybe something really
was
wrong with me.

What did it mean to be an alcoholic, anyway? To my knowledge, there was no precedent among my kin. My mother, fond of the occasional whiskey sour (on the sweet side, preferably) or Bloody Mary or screwdriver, was never a champ in the booze department. After two drinks, three tops, she was reliably buzzed and content to go no further. I think I'd seen her drunk, properly drunk, once, during a party she'd thrown for a friend when I was about ten. My father's drinking habits were pretty tame, too. No, I knew of no relative with a reputation for being a serious boozer, no hardcore
shikker
among the Schaaps.

But I did have one reference point for what an alcoholic was: a close friend of my mother's, with whom I'd spent a lot of time when I was growing up. Angie always had a huge bottle of cheap gin stashed in the giant satchel she lugged around. I couldn't remember a time I didn't smell alcohol on her breath, a time she wasn't drunk. I knew I wasn't like that, like her. I drank in bars, not at home. I drank because I like being in bars, and that's what you did there. You drank. And you talked. But it could not be denied that I was spending an awful lot of my time in bars. Drinking.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health tells us that alcoholism is a disease characterized by the following four symptoms:

Craving:
A strong need, or urge, to drink.

Loss of control:
Not being able to stop drinking once drinking has begun.

Physical dependence:
Withdrawal symptoms, such as nausea, sweating, shakiness, and anxiety after stopping drinking.

Tolerance:
The need to drink greater amounts of alcohol to get “high.”

I considered the facts. Yes, I was drinking almost every night. How much? Hard to say. I hadn't been counting. The liquor flowed freely at Puffy's. The buybacks were bountiful. Did I crave alcohol? No. I loved drinking, but more than anything, I craved the bar, not the booze, though of course they went together. Did I lose control? Ever since I'd blacked out as a teenager in California, I did not want to drink expressly to get drunk—though inevitably I sometimes did get drunk. I drank to feel more relaxed, certainly, but not to get wasted, and not nonstop. Did it take a lot for me to get a good buzz? It is probably true that my tolerance was peaking just around that time—I could hold quite a lot of whiskey in my twenties—but even after just a few sips of Jameson I could feel its calming and comforting effects. And yes, I was able to stop—as soon as I left the bar.

And
that
was the hard part: leaving. I frequently stayed at Puffy's for hours and hours—marathon stretches that lasted from late afternoon until early morning.
I thought back on the many long nights I'd spent there. I'd been having fun, hadn't I? Yes, I had. I'd met interesting, smart people who, in a real and undidactic way, had taught me so much. What had I been doing? Well, mostly, I drank and talked and listened and made friends. Was that so bad? No, I decided, it wasn't
so
bad.

But. But. But. There were a few nights that, on reflection, troubled me. I rarely stayed late enough to close the place, but I recall one time when I did. After four—when bars in New York are supposed to pack it in—the closing bartender dimmed the lights in the front and the few regulars who remained there moved to the back. I stepped out of Puffy's in broad daylight (it was probably nearly seven
A.M.
) and made my way two blocks north to Socrates, the local coffee shop. I downed a few cups of coffee and had a greasy, delicious bacon sandwich. In the ladies' room, I splashed my face with water. And then I walked back past Puffy's—finally shuttered until the afternoon shift—to BMCC, where I had an eight-thirty
A.M.
Intro to English Literature class to teach. All the coffee and bacon in the world really couldn't counteract the plain truth that I was still drunk. Would my students notice? Probably.
I
always did when, in college, a couple of my own professors occasionally taught under the influence—not that I held it against them. Worse: Would they notice I was wearing exactly what I'd worn yesterday? Some would. For sure. In my office I gave myself something between a pep talk and a talking-to. And then I taught. I was so anxious about my condition that I did my best to overcompensate. It was a good class. But I didn't feel good about it.

And another late night came to mind, when after a certain hour—midnight? one
A.M.
?—the mood shifted. This was often the case. Gone was the collective good cheer of early evening, when the room was alive and packed and thrumming. Later, something somber could creep in and take hold. That night, late, in a nearly empty bar, I found myself having a heart-to-heart with Cory, the Southerner, and I was taken aback when he asked me, with something that sounded like genuine concern, “What the hell are you doing hanging out here?” He took a long swig of beer. “You're too young for this shit, Rosie. It's fucking boring.”

I ordered another Jameson and tried to shrug off his question. I didn't look at him. I lit another cigarette and stared at the back of the bar, at the rows and rows of bottles that now looked so obviously
male
, so undeniably martial. For the first time at Puffy's, I felt a little ashamed of myself, and even though Cory had meant well—was candid, anyway, had gotten
real
with me, which had come as a shock in the world of the bar, where, ideally, things stay on the surface, superficial, in a good and necessary way, no matter how much you genuinely care about the people around you—I even felt slightly rejected. Did he want me to stop coming? Or was he just warning me, with some self-deprecation and even generosity, of what might come to pass if I kept this up? At the time, he certainly didn't seem satisfied with the way things had panned out for him.

I didn't know what to say. What would I have said? That I found it totally not boring? That this bar, and the people in it, had somehow become the center of my life? It was true, but suddenly I couldn't ignore that in this there was quite possibly some authentic pathos. Why—at least up to this point, at least until I was asked directly—did this feel like home, and why did these people feel like
my
people? What did it mean that I felt happier and more accepted in this place—this bar—with these people, mostly men nearly a generation older than me, than I did with my peers, than I did, at the time, anywhere else? Why was I turning down other social opportunities—dinners with old friends, concerts, readings, etc.—to sit, night after night, on a barstool in the front corner of Puffy's Tavern? By then, I was socializing with my Puffy's friends to the exclusion of nearly everyone else, mostly at the bar, but also at their homes, at restaurants, at parties, at their art openings, at their performances.

There is a particular kind of anxiety that can afflict bar regulars, and it borders on the pathological. You go to your bar night after night. And, night after night, the same things happen: The same people turn up, the same conversations are had, and, with some variations, the same stories are told. The same booze is drunk. The same songs are played over and over on the jukebox. One night is almost an exact replica of the one that preceded it. Stick around long enough, show up often enough, and you'll hear the same jokes—though you might politely pretend that you haven't. This consistency, this sameness, plays a big part in the comfort of regularhood. And yet, you worry. You worry that if you fail to put in an appearance some night,
you might miss something
. Maybe that night—the night you decided to study instead, or to go to a movie, or to take the time to cook a real dinner and stay in, or maybe to hang out with people your own age—you'd miss
something
, something funny, something moving, something important. You could be rational about it. You could assure yourself that, really, you'd miss nothing new. But something nags at you, something tells you that, if nothing else, you'd just miss the placeness of the place. Think a little deeper, and you realize that the bar has imposed a kind of order on your life, and even if it might be a destructive one, it is preferable to no order at all. And if you let yourself get personal about it, even a little sentimental, you tell yourself that most of all, same old same old or not, you'd miss the people, and you'd hope that they missed you, too. And you wouldn't be wrong about any of this.

What I could no longer deny after that night with Cory was that the unstudied cosmopolitan dissolution that had charmed me so in many of my fellow drinkers at Puffy's had a contagious quality, and I wasn't quite ready for it to claim me completely. I had not only fallen for this place, I'd fallen in love with the people in it. Fortunately, it was worth it; some of the people I met at that bar remain, to this day, among my closest friends. But it was time to move on. New York is a big city, after all. There were other bars. There were other people. Besides, even among my fellow regulars, a general weariness had set in, and everybody seemed to sense that this party—to which I'd arrived so late—was now officially over. There was talk of people moving out west. Of people taking full-time jobs with benefits. Of giving up cigarettes. Of drinking less.

And among those who still wanted to drink, who still needed this bar culture, this café society, a migration was underway—and it led just a few blocks north and east to some new place on West Broadway. More and more often, Jimmy would swing by Puffy's for a couple drinks in the early evening and then announce, clearly bored and a little exasperated, “Well, that's it. I'm heading over to No-Name.”
Traitor,
I thought. But I understood why he was tired of it.

I was getting tired, too. I felt as though, among my very grown-up friends at Puffy's, I, too, had grown up, and it had happened there. I had badly wanted to be part of this world of art openings and dinner parties, poets and painters, performance artists and playwrights, and I got what I wanted. But I also felt that I'd not only grown up, I'd also grown old, and before my time. In a year at Puffy's, I went from being a chatty young drinker who could hold her own with the big boys to a person anxiously stepping into adulthood with an aversion to responsibility and a hell of a hangover. And the small tragedy of being precocious is that, by definition, you outgrow it. A single solid year at Puffy's had aged me. I could feel it in my skin, and I could feel it in my soul. I wasn't ready for that, but I was ready to move on. Maybe just in very small steps, but at least as far as another bar.

7.

ED

Liquor Store Bar, New York City

B
ecause of the rats, in the summer of 1996, I'd get home from work and trade in my sandals for a pair of tough, thick-soled hiking boots—the scarred survivors of four Vermont winters—no matter how stupid they looked with a sundress. New York summer weather is usually miserable, but in TriBeCa, where construction projects seemed to be underway on every block—converting old loft buildings into expensive condos—the dust kicked up by the jackhammers and the power of all those generators magnified the sticky, sweaty, wretched haze and made it all feel even worse. And the construction brought out the rats in force, so I'd stomp in those huge heavy boots, lest one or two brazen little bastards dared skitter across my feet, to and from my sublet apartment all the way west on Harrison Street, along the cobbled and badly lit streets of the neighborhood, past Puffy's up at the next corner, past the restaurants Chanterelle and Nobu, where limos queued up to drop off big spenders, past the Fourth Estate, the magical store on Hudson that traded in precious Persian carpets and international magazines, where the amiable owner listened to opera on the stereo and offered visitors a glass of wine, past the Greek diner and the Korean grocer, across North Moore Street, past Walker's bar and restaurant at Varick Street.

I loved those streets. How well I'd come to know them, how confidently I felt like they were mine. I wasn't afraid of the dark alleys that shot off the side streets like rusted spokes; I was young, and on good days I felt invincible. I had fallen madly back in love with the city where I was born. One more block east, past the firehouse, and then across the street and a tiny backtrack south, to the corner of West Broadway and White Street, and there, at the end of this zigzag circuit through the neighborhood, was Liquor Store—the bar for which I'd all but abandoned Puffy's, on the ground floor of an 1825 vintage, landmarked, whitewashed Federal-style townhouse with a gabled black gambrel roof.

After a year in the apartment I'd nicknamed Bleak House, I'd lucked out in finding new quarters just a block from Puffy's Tavern, the bar where I had spent the great majority of the previous three hundred and sixty-five nights of my life. But by then, I'd started to grow weary of Puffy's. I wasn't the only one. Several Puffy's regulars had already started drifting a few blocks away to Liquor Store or, as some insisted on calling it, the No-Name Bar. (In its first few months of existence it didn't have a name, and some people preferred it that way.)

Its charms could not be denied. Liquor Store was the sunny
allegro
to Puffy's dark
penseroso
. It was well worth trekking a few extra rat-filled streets to get there, straight past many other bars to which my allegiance might have shifted. But Liquor Store stood out from the corner saloons, the taverns with dartboards and pool tables, the endless variations on Irish pubs that dotted the city. It wasn't a dive, nor was it pretentious. It was just right.

Like Puffy's, Liquor Store occupied a TriBeCa corner, but unlike Puffy's, it was a southwest-facing corner, with excellent afternoon light and, in warmer weather, outdoor tables. Inside it was equally bright and simple: white walls, an oak bar with brass fittings, simple café tables and chairs, an almost total absence of clutter on the walls. The low ceilings made it feel safe and intimate. Although many of the faces were familiar, the atmosphere was strikingly different; physically, anyway, it was a far better facsimile of European café society than Puffy's. And, as at Puffy's, there was no shortage of homegrown artists, but at Liquor Store, they were joined by European expats—designers, craftsmen, performers, architects, art dealers, English, Danish, German, Irish—making for a more international crowd, on both sides of the bar, and a better mix of young and old, men and women. And there were lawyers and law students, local rogues, a tugboat captain, a burlesque revivalist, bankers, kitchen workers from the nearby restaurants, poets—a little cross section of the world below Canal Street.

I couldn't help drifting over there, too. Puffy's had given me comfort and security, but it had become routine. And I was certain the friends I'd made there, the ones I loved most, were firmly fixed in my life. I would not lose them by drinking elsewhere—especially if many of them had already decided to drink at the same elsewhere. We needed, and found, a change of scenery. If there was any dissent at Liquor Store, any factionalism, I never felt it. Here, everyone seemed so unfailingly and effortlessly pleased to see one another, so easy, so comfortable.

Well, almost everyone. On one of my earliest visits, some time before that summer, the first person I saw was
that guy
. That wiry, skinny, sour-faced, scowling, sort-of-old son-of-a-bitch with the thick black glasses and shitty teeth, a Marlboro always dangling limply from between his lips, as though it were stuck there, part of his long, lined face. An artist of some kind, apparently. Jimmy had introduced us once at Puffy's, not long before. That night, he didn't so much say anything as just kind of grunt to acknowledge my existence. And then, when he and Jimmy moved a few barstools away, I heard Jimmy whisper to him, “She's pretty, right?”

And I heard him reply, “Yeah, but too big.”

Well fuck you, you toothless old motherfucker,
I thought.

So when I saw him sitting there at Liquor Store early that summer, I was less than thrilled, and my defenses went up. Cory and Jimmy and a couple of other, less familiar guys were with him at a table. Someone made an introduction.

“We've met,” I said coolly. He just looked at me, unblinking, cigarette dangling, eyelids heavy, nodded, just sat there and gave me a good once-over. I felt exposed and hated being scrutinized like this. What did my friends see in this guy? He sure as hell didn't say much. And all my Puffy's friends who'd gravitated to the new place seemed to swarm around him, like he was king of the goddamned universe. I'd never seen these guys, many of whom I'd been drinking with for a solid year by then, quite like this before; they just couldn't get enough of this guy. At least three of them claimed to be his best friend. I wondered why anyone would want that. Liquor Store, whatever else it may have been—an expat refuge, a peaceable kingdom—was also Ed's second living room. And I understood that if I still wanted the company of these other men, these other drinkers, I would have to put up with him.

That summer I had started the weirdest job I ever briefly held down. I worked in the library of a paranormal research organization, based in a grand brick-and-limestone townhouse on the Upper West Side. It paid next to nothing, but I didn't have to do much. A few days a week, I sat behind a massive desk in a wood-paneled, dusty, magnificently moody library that readily imparted the not unpleasant illusion of being trapped inside a Gothic novel, filed a bit, shelved and reshelved books, and fielded questions from the public—the credulous and incredulous both. One visitor, who'd been eighty-sixed by the organization previously for erratic behavior, sometimes showed up in shambolic disguises—floppy hat, pasted-on beard, trench coat, that sort of thing—to regain access to arcane texts on ESP or something. Far more poignant was the young widow, earnest in her desperate longing to make contact, somehow, with her departed husband, as though there must be some book in our collection that would show the way. Skeptics called and tried to squeeze confessions out of me: Did I really believe in this? Really? Well, I didn't know, and it didn't matter to me. It was a job, and a pretty cushy one at that, and mostly I read.

The library's holdings were all over the place. There was plenty on hauntings and automatic writing and mediums and how to bend spoons with your mental energy, but there were also books about the Shakers, about American spiritualist movements, and mythology and folklore. I particularly relished the works of one Vance Randolph, who collected Ozark songs and stories, a good many of which were bawdy, scatological, or just flat-out raunchy, with titles like “A Good Dose of Clap” and “The Prick Teaser.”

So after a day among the dead and the undead and the mystics and the psychics, I'd look forward to a few Jamesons down at Liquor Store. Most of my drinking mates knew about my job and would tease me, in a good-natured way, about it. I got used to questions like, “Hey Rosie, bust any ghosts today?” “Bend any silverware . . .
with your mind
?” And in turn I might tell them about the visiting Girl Scouts—one of whom, a pallid, dark-haired preadolescent with a disconcertingly serious countenance, seemed to have
it
, the ability to move objects with sheer psychic will. Or I'd tell them about the ectoplasm “samples” I'd seen pictures of, specimens that looked like nothing so much as gnarly swaths of snotted-up cheesecloth.

Ed seemed vaguely interested in all this. But he only really started paying attention when I mentioned that I'd been reading dirty stories from the Ozarks.

“Oh yeah?” he said, like he knew something about them. “From the Ozarks?”

“Yeah,” I answered, still a little defensive around him. “They were collected by this folklorist Vance Randolph—”

“Shit!” He smiled big, baring those insane teeth unselfconsciously, which seldom happened.
“You know who that guy is?”

Well, I felt like I'd won a prize, and in a way, I had. It's not that I really had wanted to crack this guy, to break through somehow—I saw no reason to make a special effort—but now that I had, I knew that I could feel more relaxed in his unavoidable company, and that my status as a Liquor Store regular was on more solid ground. Ed was from Missouri, it turned out, though he kept his past, his provenance, his history, more than a little mysterious. (I later learned from Jimmy that he claimed to have been conceived on a Greyhound bus, and also to have once been abducted by Gypsies.) And now it was as though Ed and I were meeting again for the first time. We'd struck on an unlikely contact point. His earlier insult, if not quite forgotten, had receded, and suddenly we were off—on a long, rambling conversation that went on until late. He had a deep voice, and after nearly thirty years in New York, he had not lost a distinct Missouri twang. But I did most of the talking.

What became clear to me that night was that what distinguished Ed from so many of the men I drank with was this: He was a listener. A great, patient, attentive listener. It didn't matter if I was telling him a convoluted story that trailed off into nowhere, or something more painful and personal that I would share with few other people. He listened. As much as I valued the light and fluid back-and-forth of bar conversation, the ensemble rhythms of Dublin
craíc
, the free exchange of bad jokes and friendly teasing and testy argument that were so much a part of my previous bar experiences and so much a part of what I love about bars, in the act of pure listening Ed gave me something different and deeper and, at the time, more necessary. What had seemed like arrogance to me at first was something altogether different: an active interest in what others were saying and doing, and a talent for taking it all in. By the end of the night, I not only felt more certain that I belonged at this bar, but that I'd gotten to know someone of unusual depth and intelligence.

And so it was for most of the summer of 1996, night after night, having put in my time at the library, I'd swing by the sublet, change the footwear, run the rat gauntlet, and head to Liquor Store. On the best nights, when there was no rain and the heat had abated and maybe there was just a little breeze, the regulars would collect at the tables outside and look down West Broadway to the luminous view of the World Trade Center. Most of my life I'd thought those buildings were so ugly, but from there, from that seat outside the bar, they were so impressive, all lit up as the sun set. And we'd watch the rats dart around the corner and into the grates under the sidewalk, like it was a spectator sport. I'd always run into at least some of my Puffy's friends there, plus the expats—supercool Adam, an English painter in skinny black jeans and skinny black T-shirts with a jolt of white hair that vee'd into a sharp widow's peak on his forehead (earning him the nickname the Prince of Darkness), the laddish British furniture restorers drinking pint after pint, the comically laconic Danish businessman always a little scruffy in his wrinkled suits, maybe even the tugboat captain with a penchant for fancy restaurants.

I loved both of the Irish bartenders, one a little gruff but also warm and funny; the other no-nonsense at first, but engaging and interested once you got to know him, and protective of his regulars. I enjoyed all of them, but as I approached the bar and scanned the sidewalk tables, or peeked through the window, there was really only one person I wanted to see. I'd walk over hoping Ed would be there, practically praying that he would be. And if he was, I was relieved and happy and all felt okay with the world. If he wasn't, well, I might just turn around and go back to Puffy's instead.

I was so uncertain then of the shape my life might take, and often fretful. I was still in graduate school, but paying it less and less mind all the time. And of course the bar was where I went to forget all that, to stop fretting, to drink and talk and put on my cheeriest possible front. At the bar, you don't so much unload your shit as set it aside. You keep the conversation light; wit is welcome, humor even more valued, but nothing too deep, nothing too serious. Of course, there is the tradition of the stranger who shows up and spills his guts. And then, having confessed all, absolved by the proxy priesthood of the barman, the stranger moves on. I have on one occasion been that stranger, at a bar I'd never visited before and never returned to after. But as a regular, that's really not what one does. There's safety in superficiality, in not letting things get too deep or too personal. The bar, usually, is a blessed refuge from the too-deep and too-personal. But my instincts told me that with Ed, I could, and should, get personal. I could talk, I could vent—about work and family and worry—and he would listen, and take it seriously, without issuing judgment or prescription. I knew that as soon as I saw him, as soon as we hugged—and he hugged with great strength and heartbreaking delicacy all at once—I would feel fine. And then I could spend the next hour or two talking his ear off; he would nod, he would focus, he would be absolutely, completely there.