Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (19 page)

Although my friend had given up the cello and didn't write poetry as often as he had when we met, he had made a living for himself as an experimental vocalist and performance artist and teacher who traveled the world—the kind of work he'd been committed to all those years before. He was a real artist, living an artist's life, and thriving at it. I'd long since given up my long-held dreams of being a full-time poet/activist. Such a life no longer felt attainable or realistic.

And now I could not help wondering: Had I failed? Had I betrayed my friend, myself, The People, Poetry, Revolution, Art, Beauty, Love—all the things we'd talked about during walks through the Vermont woods and over bottles of cheap wine in our dorm rooms, back when we were young, which now felt like so long ago, not only distant in time but in sensibility? I clearly hadn't turned out as he had expected I would. Had I disappointed him? He was joking, but jokes are never just jokes. My hurt turned into defensive anger: Was there anything wrong with being a married, grown-up person—after all, he had just tied the knot, too—with earning a living, with having a life that was stable, maybe even normal? What was so bad about that? Nothing, I told myself. There was nothing wrong with any of that.

For a very long time, I hadn't seen it coming, either. In high school, my enthusiasm for a multitude of bad habits—drinking more than I could handle, tripping, chain-smoking, shirking responsibility, hitchhiking, etc.—led more than one friend to predict I wouldn't live to be twenty-five. Well, I'd managed to get there, plus a decade, so maybe I was ahead of the game. But I'd never been one of those girls who daydreamed about her someday wedding, who longed for domestic married life, or really even gave such a life any thought at all. I knew, however, that such an existence could be more than fulfilling: Many decades into their marriage, my maternal grandparents—despite ups and downs about which I'd gleaned a few details over the years—still seemed to me to be very much in love, still great friends, still sweet and lighthearted and often adoring in their interactions.

Inevitably, though, the marriage I'd observed most closely was my parents'. I have no memories of them being happy though I am sure, in their first years together, they must have been. I only remember them fighting viciously and, it felt to me, constantly, before my father left when I was seven. I knew more about their drawn-out and painful divorce proceedings than I probably should have. I do not regard myself as a cynic in any way, but I doubt that my parents' history as a couple could not have influenced my perception and feelings about the institution of marriage. As for having children, I'd never been anything more than ambivalent—and, by my midthirties, my long ambivalence seemed like a good sign that parenting probably wasn't for me. I loved Frank deeply, and our wedding day was one of the happiest of my life. We'd not only had lots of fun together, cooking and entertaining and going to concerts and traveling, we'd also seen our share of hard times—especially 9/11 and my father's illness and death so soon after—and together we got through them. I don't think I could have weathered them alone. We got engaged a month after my dad died. Marriage seemed like the right, sensible, grown-up response to all of it. There was no proposal; we had a discussion about the matter, agreed that after having been a couple for six years it was time, and before about 175 of our nearest and dearest, processed down the aisle to “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

It also occurred to me that I was so affected by what my friend had said because he had, inadvertently, touched a very tender nerve. When Frank first took the job in Pennsylvania, I expected to be terribly lonely when I was in New York without him. We'd been together for so long. I'd become accustomed to being part of a couple. And at first, I
was
lonely and hardly knew what to do with myself. But to my surprise—and it really was a surprise, as I had not for a moment even considered the possibility that this might happen—I started to like being alone again. I felt miserably guilty about feeling that way.

Our discussion made an impression on me, but I didn't stay mad at my newlywed friend. Now it was his wedding day, surely one of the happiest in
his
life. How could I be angry on such an occasion? I was still thrilled that we had reunited, still grateful to have been invited, still happy to have been there. And he had done well; his husband could not have been more gracious, more easy to be with.

After many hours of eating and drinking and dancing and toasting, I was tired but happy when I returned to my hotel room, and called Frank to check in.

“So,” he asked, “how was it?”

“Great,” I answered, which was true, but maybe not exactly the whole truth. I told him how beautiful Montreal was, how much I knew he'd love it, too. I told him about the food I'd eaten, the people I'd met, my walk up the mountain, the lovely wedding. I did not tell him about Else's, or about the conversation with my friend. He had a conference paper to work on the next day and needed to sleep. We said good night. But I was restless. I had too much to think about.

Sunday morning was clear and sunny, and I walked once again to the Plateau for the post-wedding brunch, a cheery and chaotic affair, another chance to see the happy couple, another chance for more hugs, for more photos to be snapped and toasts to be made. Some of the wedding guests were going to Quebec City for the day and asked if I'd like to join them. It was tempting. But what I really wanted was to return to Else's, only a few blocks away. Besides, I had dinner plans that night with a couple I'd never met, who'd gone to McGill in the sixties with a good friend of mine in New York, the poet and editor I'd met at Puffy's when I was a graduate student.

After brunch I picked up a Sunday paper and repaired to the bar. In the early afternoon, light poured through the big windows and reminded me of happy afternoons spent at Liquor Store in TriBeCa years before. I saw a few familiar faces from my previous visits, and although I quickly busied myself with the crossword, a cigarette break outside led to a political conversation with a few regulars that we continued inside. By now, the bartender knew me by sight and greeted me warmly. I felt like I'd been going there forever.

A few hours later I returned to my hotel to get ready for another dinner out. I called my dining companions and they offered to pick me up and drive me to the restaurant, which turned out to be two blocks from Else's. Daniel and Kathleen—a couple in their fifties—were wonderful, interesting people, and treated me to a luxurious French dinner. We ate and drank and talked, and I told them about my reunion with my old friend, the wedding, and about this great bar I'd found. They offered me a lift back to the hotel after dinner. “But I have a feeling you're going back to Else's,” Daniel said knowingly. He was right.

Sunday night at the bar was quiet and cozy. The bartender and I chatted for a while. From her, and from the few regulars seated near me at the bar, I found out more about Else, and quickly tried to put what I'd learned out of mind. Later, I met a couple from the Quebec hinterlands—by then, they were quite drunk and very friendly—who loudly sang an old folk song in French and filled me in on what Quebec life was like beyond the city, deep in the country. Sometime around midnight I bade them, the bartender, the regulars, and Else's good night. My train left early the next morning—and I was in for another long ride, back to New York, to work, to Frank, to real life.

•   •   •

M
y last morning in Montreal, I checked out of my hotel and started somberly walking the few blocks to the station. And the closer I got, dragging my suitcase behind me, the more I wanted to turn around. The weekend had gone by too quickly, but it had also been so full. My old friend. The wedding. The mountain. The smoked meat and—it pains me to admit this—the better-than-New-York bagels.

And what I had enjoyed most was this: exploring a city that was new to me. Meeting new people. Drinking at a great bar. Being on my own. I could not say these things to my husband when we spoke on the phone. I wasn't sure if I could say them to him at all. I couldn't stand the thought of hurting his feelings. Would I have to? Would it be worse to withhold these things? Would it be better?

What exactly did I want, anyway?

I stopped at a corner and paused for a few minutes. Standing there, I really could imagine a whole new life for myself. Maybe I'd stay here, I thought. Forever. I'd already made some friends. And I'd found the best bar. And maybe that was all I'd ever need. I could find a little apartment in one of those pretty brick row houses on the Plateau. (The rent in Montreal was much cheaper than in New York.) I would perfect my French. I could get some kind of job—nothing too serious, maybe even go back to bartending. I'd start to write poems again. Maybe I'd let my hair grow. Maybe I'd get a lot of tattoos, like Else. Maybe I'd fall in love again.

What had I done, landed in a Leonard Cohen song? I thought about my kind, quirky, smart, thoughtful husband. It would be completely crazy just to stay in Montreal. To end my marriage, just like that. That was no way to say good-bye.

And I reflected on what I'd heard the previous night, about Else. She had died in a fire in her apartment that was started, according to some accounts, by a cigarette she had neglected to extinguish fully before she passed out, drunk—a tragic ending to the otherwise inspiring story of the bar's founding. I was sorry I would never meet her. I reminded myself that no one's death is a lesson; no one's death is meant to teach us anything. It disgusted me to think even for a moment that anyone's life is a fable with a dreadful moral at the end. But even as I hated thinking what I was thinking, and refused to believe it, I couldn't shake the sickening feeling that maybe Else's story was somehow cautionary, and that what it was telling me was this: Self-reinvention has a cost, and it is high, and it is terrible.

•   •   •

T
he morning after I returned to New York, I headed to Pennsylvania. Frank had to be there to tie up some end-of-the-semester business. He was busy when I arrived, but we went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner that night. I was anxious, and there was no way he couldn't sense it. I drank a glass of Chianti too quickly and immediately ordered another. I poked at the Caesar salad we were sharing with my fork.

We usually spoke to each other so easily, so fluidly. The tension felt alien. I think we both knew that, since he'd started working in Pennsylvania, we had slowly started growing apart, even though we talked at least twice a day when we weren't together. Distance has a way of creating distance. I tried to break the ice by asking him how his day had gone. He was too perceptive for that. He'd had a few boring meetings, he reported, but never mind that: He knew something else was on my mind.

“Something happened in Montreal,” I blurted out. As soon as I said it, I was sure that he thought I meant I had slept with someone else, or done something equally fleeting and dramatic. He said nothing, and I continued. “I don't know what you're thinking. But I don't think it's what you're thinking.” What I needed to tell him was even harder to explain.

So I told him about the talk I'd had with my old friend at the wedding, and about how the conversation had made me feel: sad, then angry, then confused and no longer at all certain about what I wanted. I also told Frank that I loved him, and that none of this had anything to do with anything he had said, with anything he had or had not done. This was on me. But what I had learned, I told him, was that maybe I needed to be alone, at least for a little while. Maybe we should see a marriage counselor. Maybe we needed a break from each other. I waited for him to say something, and it felt like a very long time before he spoke.

“I am so hurt,” he finally said, “that I can't talk about it.”

It took nearly a year until he was ready—a hard and tense year for both of us, but it could not be rushed. The following summer, we went into counseling.

Six months later, we separated.

•   •   •

I
never did move to Montreal, but I returned for a week in the summer of 2009. It was as hospitable and appealing as I'd remembered, but as the site of such a difficult reckoning, I was frequently overcome by sadness. I rented a room around the corner from Else's and spent many hours every night there. I loved the bar just as much as I had when I first stumbled upon it. Some of the same regulars and the same bartender I'd met in 2006 were still there, and I was glad to see them. Although her picture still hung on the wall, Else's presence no longer loomed as large as it had three years earlier. Now I wanted to know more—not just about her, but about how the people in her community remembered and thought about her. Some of the regulars spoke of her with reverence and affection; others shrugged their shoulders and dismissed her as a drunk, as though her premature death had been inevitable. A candle is always lit for her in a candleholder bearing her name on the bar—reminding me, as if I needed to be reminded, of how the choices we make, our best decisions and our worst, change not only our own lives, but the lives of those who know and love us.

10.

DRINKING WITH MEN

Good World Bar and Grill, New York City

G
ood World Bar and Grill existed on the fringe of the respectable world, at the bottom of Orchard Street where it backs into Division Street. In 2005, this may have been one of the last authentically seedy stretches of Manhattan: nowhere, a gray crossroads where the Devil himself may just be waiting to strike a deal. It is a nameless borderland between the discount fabric shops and handbag hawkers and old-lady lingerie emporia and other vestigial outposts of
Yiddishkeit
and the newer hipster hangouts of the Lower East Side and the noisy restaurants, fetid gambling parlors, and storefronts full of cheap dry goods of Chinatown. And from the fall of 2005 until April 1, 2009, this was my drinking territory. Two or three or maybe four evenings a week—plus, religiously, Sunday afternoons—I'd get off the F train at the East Broadway stop, get on the escalator (when it was working), exit near Seward Park, turn the corner, and walk just a little more than a block to Good World.

The place, owned and operated by a Swedish woman and her English husband, had been around since 1999, but before I became a regular, I'd only gone there once or twice. It was a good-looking place: spare and handsome, all washed-out wood and tall windows and iron, with a little patch of yard out back, little more than an alley, really, but with some trees here and flowers there, a few picnic tables and benches. Inside, there was little adornment save for a massive caribou head mounted above the bar, but not centered, off-center, like pretty much everything else in the place. The barstools were notoriously and precariously high; the wooden floors pocked and scuffed but with jagged apertures here and there, like little mouths of hell, wounded and patched then rewounded and repatched, in which a heel might catch and make a visiting Eastern European glamour girl in stilettos let out a high-pitched squeal of terror—or a regular crack a predictable joke about filing a lawsuit.

For a time, Good World had plenty of downtown cachet—designers and art-world darlings and would-be rock stars and long blond Scandinavians wanting fixes of herring and meatballs and aquavit, and glittery European types who only appeared, in accordance with their custom, late late at night or early early in the morning. In its first several years of existence, it had buzz. It was trendy. Which is probably why it never struck me as the kind of place
I'd
turn into a second home.

But in 2005, when my husband started a tenure-track teaching job in Pennsylvania, I was ready to be a regular
somewhere
again. Something internal had overtaken me: With Frank living and teaching in Amish country, I quickly reverted to the way I'd lived when we had started dating, without having made anything that felt like a conscious decision about the matter. I'd even started smoking again. He and I had quit together, but I figured it might be okay to smoke a few cigs now and then. And I'd never stopped drinking, but I'd slowed it down—wine with dinner was more my speed than whiskey after whiskey. I was older. I was married; less and less of my social life happened in bars. I was working as an editor for a magazine with a feel-good, quasi-religious mission, but a better job description—and the one I always used when people I'd just met asked me that tiresome question,
What do you do?
—was Inspirational Ghostwriter.

My daily work consisted largely of rewriting stories of spiritual uplift. The turning points in these stories almost always came when the narrator had hit rock bottom: a spouse had died, a wayward child's addiction had taken hold, a marriage was in crisis, a business had fallen apart, a family farm had been eaten whole by a twister. And then something—
something
—came into the narrator's life that turned it all around: a sickly foster dog, a tattered old heirloom Bible that had long been lost, some small sign or wonder. I liked my work; it was just kooky enough, like a combination of reportage and pastoral counseling. I liked my office; it was civilized and, at least compared to other places I'd worked, efficient. I liked my colleagues, who were kind and interesting. But for better or worse, the wholesomeness of my work, and the relative stability of my life, felt a little incongruous, like I was not quite myself. I wanted to feel like myself again. And even if I wasn't sure exactly what that might mean, I knew it would involve a bar.

•   •   •

I
'd heard that after Liquor Store had closed, loosing a diaspora of regulars out into the city, many members of the old gang had wound up at Good World. Adam lived nearby; Luke had a studio within spitting distance. Others were willing to “commute” from TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and even Staten Island. So I figured that if I stopped by, the chances were good that I'd see some familiar faces. One fall evening in 2005, I left work in a fine mood, got on the F train, and headed downtown. Good World was conveniently situated just about halfway between my office and my Brooklyn apartment; it would be easy to have a drink or two there on the way home. I got off the train at East Broadway, the last stop in Manhattan, and was a little disoriented, not quite sure where to exit, until I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder and a soft, low voice speak my name.

“Rosie?” It was Henry, a dryly funny artist I'd been drinking with since my Puffy's days more than ten years earlier. “You going to the Good World?”

Yes, I told him, I was. But I couldn't quite remember how to get there. Even as a native New Yorker, I easily got turned around in this neighborhood of dead ends, doglegs, and angles that obeyed no ordered grid. “Follow me,” he said.
Suivez-moi.
A call to drinks.

So far, this Good World business was working out. As soon as I got off the train, I already had a friend to lead me there and to drink with. And once we got to the bar, there were about a half-dozen guys I already knew. Some, like Ian, were only familiar by sight; we'd crossed paths at Liquor Store, where he became a regular just as I'd started mostly drinking elsewhere. Others, like Luke and Fritz, whom I was delighted to see again, had been regular drinking companions from years back. And still others, like Adam, by then solidly counted as friends, both in and out of the context of the bar.

That first evening at Good World, aside from Mariana, the sweet, stunning, splendidly tattooed bartender, I was the only woman at the bar. There was a lot of catching up to do, since I hadn't seen most of that crew in ages. The one or two drinks I planned to have after work turned into four or five, and I left around eight, agreeably buzzed as I got back on the F train. It had felt like a homecoming. It had been a good evening. I was happy to be seen, and to see.

Within just a few weeks, I was there about every other night. I became a regular so quickly, so effortlessly, it felt like I was filling a space that had been left open for me. But more than any other bar where I'd spent lots of time, Good World felt actively, powerfully, predominantly male. More than anywhere else, my femaleness stood out. “It's so nice to have a woman at the bar,” Mariana said to me one evening, and one of the guys, who was sitting on the next stool, agreed. I told Mariana I'd try to bring more women in, balance the place out a bit.

I launched a campaign of sorts. One night, I asked my friend Alexandra to meet me there for a drink. She liked the place. Two evenings later, my friend Dina joined me. She liked it, too. When Ian walked in that night, he saw me and did a double take. “You're here almost as often as me,” he said, laughing.
Not quite,
I thought.
Not yet.
The following weekend, I was sitting at the bar with another girlfriend. She, too, liked the place, the bartender, the lightness of the conversation, the ease with which everyone greeted everyone else, the uncomplicated fellowship.

But no matter how much any of my female friends enjoyed themselves at Good World, and they all did, none—not a one—seemed to have any desire to return the next night, or the next, or the next. Regularhood—the thing that interested me most, the thing I had craved and missed, the singular condition of bar culture that confers both comfort
and
privilege—held out to them no metaphysical allure, no sense of necessity. And this, I realized, set me apart as a woman who loves bars: the need to be known, to have a place of one's own, a place I could call
my bar
. Of course it was not my bar, not literally; it had owners; it was a business. But as a regular, one feels a sense of ownership; one is invested, if not financially, then in every other possible way.

One of the bartenders had christened the crew of late afternoon/early evening regulars—a mix of expat and American men mostly in their late forties to early sixties—the Golden Girls, after the popular eighties sitcom about a group of plucky old ladies living together in Florida. Some of the guys took it in good humor; others were decidedly not amused. I
was
amused, even though I acknowledged with faint unease that, though female and younger, I was considered a Golden Girl, too. I loved my fellow Golden Girls, who were always ready with stories and (generally dreadful) jokes, always ready to talk about music—there were those who only wanted to listen to jazz, those who never wanted to hear it, those who loved the Smiths, those who hated them, and invariably, all of the English expats sang along enthusiastically to Ian Dury—or politics or the day's news or any old BS that demanded a public airing in the safety of the bar. But there were many times I felt like the Margaret Dumont to their collective Groucho Marx. Now and again, if the conversation got a little too salty, a little too focused on a general or specific critique of female anatomy, I'd give a great dramatic eye roll and say, for example, “Oh, Ellis!” instead of “Mister Firefly!” And he'd cast his eyes downward, say, “Yeah, sorry,” lightly slap his wrist, and tell himself, “
Behave now
, Ellis!”

And sometimes if they gossiped about an absent member of the group, I'd try to say
something
in the slandered party's defense, which can seem tedious and scolding and out of the spirit of the uncomplicated, everyday pleasure that we relied upon the bar to give us. (In this respect, Don Marquis was not far off the mark in
Her Foot Is on the Brass Rail
: “It is not the occasional rowdiness, the semioccasional bawdiness, of this barroom conversation which I chiefly regret. It is the philosophical admixture . . . spouted forth with the removal of all inhibitions. The very presence of a woman—any woman, any kind of woman—checks this.”) Ellis told me more than once, “You keep us in line.” Maybe so. But certainly not all the time. Increasingly, I behaved just as they did.

One night, my normally good-natured friend Ian—a musician turned graphic designer, the well-mannered, amiable, and exceedingly polite son of an RAF officer—delivered, after a bad day at work, an uncharacteristically foulmouthed tirade. His girlfriend, Laura, was not present. I was shocked. Even Ellis, not known for self-editing, was taken aback. “Man, you
never
talk like that, especially when there's a woman around,” he said.

“Except me,” I pointed out.

“
You
don't count,” Ian shot back. “You're one of the lads.”

One of the lads. Even if I already knew this, already knew that I was one of them, hearing it said out loud stunned me. It made me feel good,
and
it made me feel slightly queasy. I was extremely comfortable among these men, but I wasn't sure I was totally comfortable with this not-counting business. Besides, if it was true that I really had become one of the lads, Ian shared in the responsibility for producing this condition, because, in me, he had created a monster. Of sorts.

Ian may seldom have cussed up a storm, but there was another language in which he was utterly fluent. Its lexicon included words like
fixtures
,
tables
,
results
.
Strikers
,
wingers
,
attacking
midfielders
.
Offsides
,
fouls
,
corners
.
Arsenal
,
Liverpool
,
Aston
Villa
 . . . and, above all,
Tottenham
Hotspur
, the undeniably charming name—with its pleasing consonance and satisfying glottal stop, its neat internal rhyme and arguably Shakespearean provenance—of the team he had loved and supported nearly all his life. Ian spoke the language of soccer, in the dialect of the English Premier League, and in this he was not alone at Good World. Adam had been devoted to Chelsea since his youth, and others had followed his enthusiastic lead, probably in hopes that doing so might make them equally cool. The bar did not have a television, but for important EPL matches, and for major international soccer events like the European and World Cups, a projection screen was hung from a back wall and the place filled up with fans.

I grew up in a family in which the
playing
of sports was by no means essential, but the culture of sport, its history and lore, was pervasive. My father was a sportswriter and reporter, and although he and my mother separated when I was seven, his vocation had left its mark on our family. Hundreds of hours of my childhood were spent at Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden, usually bored out of my mind. I've always had a soft spot for the Winter Olympics, particularly the figure skating, but this is not uncommon among women I know. And the single possession I treasure most is a photograph of me, at age three, with Muhammad Ali. He is dressed in khakis and a pith helmet—the picture was taken around the time of the Rumble in the Jungle—and his formidable boxing-gloved hand rests firmly atop my small head. My pudgy little-kid fists are raised toward him, as though I could take him on. Perhaps because of this photograph, and because of boxing's rich literary history, and because, I will admit, of its sheer theatrical brutality, which I shamefully find irresistible, fights have always been interesting to me, though I seldom watch them anymore.