Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (21 page)

Girls are not supposed to hang around in bars with men, and they are not supposed to care about, much less understand, the rules of soccer. I spent evening after evening at the bar with men, and now I passed many hours watching and thinking and learning about the game, immersing myself in it just as I had immersed myself for so long in bar culture. More often than not, I could hold my liquor just fine and match those men drink for drink. And now I could certainly explain the offside rule to anyone who cared to ask. “Football is all very well,” Oscar Wilde said, “a good game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.” Well, I could live with being a rough girl. Or whatever sort of girl I'd become.

•   •   •

T
ottenham Hotspur FC was the good and lasting thing that came into my life at Good World in the fall of 2006. But the same season also brought trouble.

It was early December. The holiday season was upon me, and I hated it. Late autumn, nearly winter, the cold busy span between Thanksgiving and Christmas: the time of year when, if I am going to drink way too much, if I am going to do anything colossally stupid, it's going to happen. I was anxious, the way I always am during the holiday season, and I had come to be especially anxious when my husband was soon to return to the city for a month's break, a whole month, after I'd been able to make my own schedule and do whatever the hell it was I wanted to do—mostly, sit on a teetering too-tall barstool at Good World, there beside the Golden Girls, my friends, the ones I was not married to, the ones I drank and joked and talked soccer with. Soon I'd have someone to be accountable to again, and I knew that my marriage had become a fragile thing.

It is cold cold cold but I go outside to smoke anyway. Soon one of my friends comes outside to smoke, too. He joins me in the dark vestibule in front of the graffitied doorway right next to the bar, and with two of us in that tiny space, it feels less cold. Still, it's windy, and he fumbles to light his cigarette; the matches keep going out. “Just light it off mine.” That works. Now we're smoking. We're talking. We're laughing. And then we're kissing. I'd known him for a long time—more than a decade—without a single romantic thought about him ever having entered my head. But lately, over the course of a few months, he had been downright courtly. He had kissed my hand. He had praised my skin, or my dress, or my perfume. More than once, when I'd gone to the bar to settle my tab at the end of the night, I discovered that he'd already taken care of it. More than once, when I made motions to leave, he had accompanied me outside to put me safely in a taxi, opened the door, kissed my cheek, smiled, shut the door, waved. Much more than once, he had made eye contact and held it for longer than anyone else there, than any of these other men. Something was up, I was sure of it, and I didn't mind. Still, there in that dirty vestibule, I was surprised. And happy and nervous and guilty.

“I love you,” he said. It's a thing some people can say with extraordinary ease—especially some men—when they have been drinking. “No you don't,” I corrected him. But of course part of me wanted to believe it. And I knew that at that moment, my place there, there in that bar, there in that tiny little world that I loved and needed and had probably grown far too dependent upon, had changed. I also knew that all actions, even small ones, have consequences. And as the nature of those consequences started to settle into my gut, I knew, with a sinking and sickening feeling, that even if it would be a long, slow dying, as of that night, my life at Good World was over. It's the hope that kills you, not the despair. Any Tottenham fan could tell you that.

•   •   •

C
ode-switching, I have long believed, is the most valuable skill one can have in bar life, and it's something I've always been good at. I can quickly pick up on the way people speak to one another (formally? colloquially?) and adjust to it easily (probably because my usual speech is somewhere right between the two) and to what they're talking about (probably because I talk too much and like talking about nearly anything). It is not about being phony or grasping for the lowest common denominator, though I realize it may sound that way. It's about adapting—and about enjoying people's company not only on one's own terms, but on others'.

Because I can switch codes easily, I have felt comfortable, fearless even, in so many corner bars, so many pubs, so many dives. Because if you can talk, and if you can listen, and if it is easy and pleasurable to talk and listen to anyone, because you're happy to discuss anything, really, and to hear stories about anything, because you know that people
are
endlessly interesting and you know that they all have stories, and because liquor loosens tongues and you are paying attention and taking people seriously, you might just stand to learn something. Because at the bar it doesn't matter if you're an ironworker or a classics professor, a Trotskyite or a Reaganite, a Midwestern kid fresh out of college who moved to New York intent on making it as a rock star or some pickled old coot singing “The Rose of Tralee” into his whiskey. The bar is a leveler. Because as long as you can be here,
be present
as they like to say in therapeutic circles, be present in this bar, in this space, drinking and talking and listening, acting and reacting, you're good. But no matter how adept one is at code-switching, one still has a role; one is still, in some essential way, oneself. And my role at this bar was not Girl. My role was One of Them. And now that had changed. Now I was both, which made me feel like neither.

To step out of one's role is in itself a transgression, and it is possible that once you do it, bad things will happen. It occurred to me that, at Good World, being a woman among men had possibly already positioned me in a posture of transgression, that I had, in some way, enacted a piece of personal theater, a kind of extended drag performance, an aberration that might naturally lead to other aberrations. I thought of the American League playoffs in 1998, when, in the twelfth inning, the Yankees' Chuck Knoblauch, instead of finishing the play, got into a protracted argument with the umpire, standing there at first base, shouting and pointing, failing to pick up the ball lying within reach, while the Cleveland Indians runner kept going, circling the bases and tying the game, which the Yankees ultimately lost. The day after the game, in a graduate school seminar on Edmund Spenser, my professor talked about what had happened, using it as a way into a discussion of the character of the Redcrosse Knight in
The Faerie Queene
. What exactly had Knoblauch done? Well, among other things, he had stepped out of his role, my teacher said. He was supposed to be playing the game. He was supposed to retrieve the ball. Instead, he argued, and if you're gonna do that, you're supposed to wait until the play's finished. Arguing with the ump is part of the ballplayer's job, but it must be done in the right sequence. Knoblauch had upset the order, he had transgressed, and whether or not he had cost his team the game, his transgression had played a part in its loss. I had some idea of what I stood to lose from my own failure to continue performing my part correctly.

A week passed before I returned to the bar, and for me that was a long time. The next time I saw him—the longtime drinking comrade, now transformed into something else—he asked if I'd stayed away because I was avoiding him. “No,” I said. “I've just been busy.” But the truth is, yes, I was avoiding him, and also, no, I wasn't. I had been thinking. I had been wondering:
Did the rest of them know?
I wasn't sure. What would they think? Did I care what they thought? Yes, evidently I did. And I suspected that even though they were my friends, and even though they treated me so much like I was one of them, too much so sometimes, I wondered if they would judge me, because maybe, just maybe, the jig was up, and they knew, and I knew, that I really was
not
one of them after all. They were men; I was not. And as much as I'd come to behave like them, I was different. I was female; I was other-than-them. Because of this, fairly or not, I expected the worst.

If nothing else, I knew this would forever change the way I felt in that bar and among many of those people. I knew it could fuck it all up. (It kind of fucked it all up.) I had become deeply if quietly worried, and, worse, I was more than a little sad. In the end, I had lost a friend—for me, this was not just unusual, but an alien and alienating state of affairs—and forfeited the sense of ease, the enveloping comfort, that had made Good World feel like home.

After that winter, there were many evenings I'd get off the F train and start toward Good World, as though driven there by nothing but impulse, nothing but habit, maybe even something worse, something automatic, Pavlovian. Sometimes I'd slow down and think,
Why am I doing this?
And then I'd think,
I
love
this place, but it pisses me off sometimes—a lot, even—and things have changed.
I'd think,
I need to find a new bar.

There's no shortage of places to drink in New York City. I tested out a few spots. I'd lately been seeking frequent refuge at another bar not far from Good World. Nice bartenders. Friendly regulars. But it just wasn't
my bar
. And Good World—by then the faintly funny irony of its name, at least as it applied to my experience there, did not escape me—was my bar, for good or ill, for both. Whenever I tried to cut back, to make myself scarce, to move on, something called me back. The peeling paint and weathered floorboards. The boundless generosity of the buybacks. The dark little side street. The bartenders who had become trusted friends, the barbacks, the manager, the waiters and waitresses, and certainly Annika, the owner, whose friendship I had come to treasure. The charm and inconsistency and singular eccentricity of the place. And not least the Golden Girls; even if one was now lost to me, they were still my brothers, my team, my tribe.

All of this proved too hard to give up. It wasn't time. Despite my ambivalence, I wasn't ready to go. Like some fucked-up Viking song of my imagining, the place kept calling me back. By then I was running a monthly reading series at the bar, and anyone who cared to know where I might be knew that they could find me there. In a word, I felt indentured. But if I could be loyal to an underperforming soccer team, I wanted to be loyal to Good World, too, even if it was quite possibly driving me crazy.

•   •   •

O
ne Saturday in June 2007 had been extremely hot, and I'd had to work through the morning and afternoon at a crowded, airless convention center. By early evening I was tired and cranky and hadn't found time to eat, but I went to an art opening in Williamsburg anyway, got roaring drunk, danced, got stoned, drank some more, danced some more, then proceeded to Good World to drink yet some more. I continued until the early morning hours, and then, perhaps inevitably, melted down. I sat in the little garden out back and bawled my eyes out in the company of people with whom I drank nearly every night, but who had
never
seen me cry. I didn't go to the bar—any bar—to cry.

“What's gotten into you?” one of the Golden Girls asked unhelpfully. I kept sobbing. Someone else tried to say something soothing. A few others backed away. I just cried louder and harder. I moved inside to the bar, where strangers looked at me either with as much sweet drunken pity as they could manage or with unmistakable disdain. I couldn't take it, not from friends, and certainly not from strangers. In its sheer ugliness, this thing had taken on an uncomfortably Grand Guignolesque aspect, and I felt slightly feral: I could maybe scratch their eyes out, or maybe just shout obscenities until I'd scared them senseless. But I couldn't; at least I was not
that
person,
that
drunk. Instead, I took leave of my glass of wine, the seventh or eighth or ninth of the night, exited the bar, and walked to the corner as fast as I could without falling down. A hot steamy day had turned into a thick damp night, and there were no vacant taxis to be seen. Two friends followed me outside to check on me and try to help me get a cab. “Fuck off,” I barked. They fucked off.

So now I am a weeping woman alone on the corner of Allen and Canal at three
A.M.
or whatever time it was. I am running mascara. I am self-loathing despair. I am a spectacle.

Finally, after what feels like forever, a taxi pulls up and I get inside. I am still a complete wreck, but I do not fail to notice that the driver is exquisitely, wrenchingly handsome, like a prince in a Persian miniature painting, maybe, or a Bollywood matinee idol. He has a great luxurious pile of shiny black hair and a noble aquiline nose and lustrous, unblemished skin. His huge dark-brown eyes shimmer. He is a person of rare and disarming beauty. He is a vision. I believe he is an angel sent from heaven by God himself. I tell him my address—the tears and the snot have made it hard to enunciate, and I am sure I said
theventeenth thtreet—
and he turns toward the bridge.

“Miss?” he asks tenderly. “You are crying, miss?”

I sniffle and confirm that
yeth
, I am crying.

“What's wrong? What has made you sad?”

I have to think about that.

I could say too much booze, too much pot, not enough to eat, raging hormones, deep disappointment in myself and in some others, a powerful sense of personal failure, nagging troubles at home, at work, at
that bar
. It all seems too complicated to go into. “I don't know,” I answer.

“Miss, what have you been doing this night?” he asks.

Good question. What
have
I been doing?

“I have been drinking with men.”

There is a long pause. I can tell that he is not sure what to do with this information.

“And I think I'm tired of it,” I add. I am not certain that I mean it, but I cannot stand the silence. I want to hear him speak. I want to talk.