Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (22 page)

“You'll be okay, miss,” he says soothingly.

“Yeah, I'll be fine.” I laugh a little.

“See?!
You're laughing!
That means you'll be okay.”

I can find no fault with his reasoning. My tears slow down, but my face is burning, stinging from all that salt. My breathing slows, too, and steadies; it had been labored and uneven while I wept. I roll down both of the back windows just a crack to let in some air, and sink deeper into the seat. The bridge is empty and slick, but I am comforted, not afraid. It feels like we are gliding across it, like we are gliding with easeful, effortless grace across the East River, away from Manhattan, away from the bar, away from my meltdown, away from everything I want to get far away from. Down below and off to the right, a thin but steady rain-dappled streak of cars on the stretch of the BQE under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade looks like the trail of a shooting star, until the express subway whooshes by and blocks my view. Then the Jehovah's Witness headquarters come into my line of vision. READ GOD'S WORD THE HOLY BIBLE DAILY, one of their buildings proclaims in giant block letters.
Tried that,
I think.

“Where are you from, miss?”

“Here,” I tell him. “New York. Where are
you
from?”

“I am from Pakistan.”

“Are you Pashtun?” I ask him, even though, drunk as I am, it registers that he is from Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and it is therefore unlikely that he is Pashtun, and I know that I have asked a dumb and perhaps impertinent question.

“No, no, I am not Pashtun.” He laughs again. Now I am convinced that he has the most wonderful, open, honest laugh I have ever heard. “Why do you ask?”

I explain to him that I have come up with a plan. I explain that I have figured out how to change my life, which is objectively not such a bad life at all, for I have not lost all perspective and I know at least that much, but with which I am nonetheless, at this time anyway, deeply unhappy.

“I have a book idea,” I tell him. “I am going to move to Kabul, find an aging one-eyed Pashtun warlord, and become his difficult Jewish wife from Brooklyn. Maybe his sixth or seventh wife. I don't care! I think it's a
great
idea.” I slip into a brief silent reverie, imagining the crazy clash-of-cultures sitcom that might be based on it, an
I Love Lucy
for our anxious post-9/11 age.

He laughs some more. That laughter; I could listen to it forever. But then it stops. “It's a great idea,” he concedes. “But there is a problem.” His voice is deeper now, and serious.

“What's the problem?” I ask.

“Your one-eyed Pashtun husband will cut off your hands before you are able to write this book.” He shakes his head, turns to glance at me through the cracked plastic partition, and smiles.

Now I am laughing, hard. We are breezing briskly down Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue, and we are both laughing. I ask him to take a left just after the underpass, please. He turns onto my street and comes to a stop, with great care, in front of my building. I pull a crumpled twenty-dollar bill and a few singles out of my bag, smooth them out a little, and hand him the money. He hands it back. “Please,” I implore him, “take it.” He refuses.

“No, no, no,” he insists. “I am on my way home anyway.”

“You sure?” He says he is sure. I thank him. He laughs some more, and so do I.

“
See?
You're still laughing. You'll be okay, miss,” he tells me again, then pauses. “You'll find a better way to change your life.”

He does not drive away until he has seen me walk up the stoop and unlock my front door. I wave good-bye. He waves good-bye. I could not be more grateful. I could not love him more.

•   •   •

S
eptember 2008 brings big news, but there had been murmurings for months: Star striker Dimitar Berbatov is leaving Tottenham Hotspur and has signed with Manchester United. I am bereft. Ian is disappointed, but he takes it with his usual philosophic, let's-move-forward-then attitude. And there's other talk circulating at Good World. Rumors are rampant: The place is closing, and soon. Probably by the spring. The building has been bought; the upstairs tenants have been told to shove along. Many of the Golden Girls are resigned. We'd seen bars we loved come and go before; this was standard New York life-cycle stuff. We had moved on before. We could move on again.

By the time the rumors turn into cold hard fact, Annika seems terribly sad. This place was her baby. She is my friend. I want her to be happy and successful, so I do not tell her that part of me welcomes the news, now that it is decisive, now that it is a done deal, although I wish it had come to pass under different, and better, circumstances. I had not been able to find a way to extricate myself from this bar, and forces beyond my control had made a way for me. It was a relief, but one not without attendant sadness.

I was relieved that Good World would not stagger and sputter haltingly to its death the way Liquor Store had. I object to the notion of closure, which always seems bogus and impossible, but maybe this would offer something resembling it. I was glad I would be there to witness the endgame, to watch it all shake out. It certainly would not be the first time I'd parted ways with a bar, but in this case I felt an invigorating and novel sense of agency: I could choose how to say farewell, in the best way I saw fit. There was an end date. There was lead time.

About a week before the bar was set to close, I knew what I had to do. I drafted an e-mail to most of the Golden Girls and a few other regulars. It read:

Dear friends,

“O brave new world, that has such people in't!” Some of you know that it has long been one of my crazy dreams to stage Shakespeare's
The Tempest
at Good World. With Good World closing on 3/31, undertaking a full-on production with sets and costumes and the works won't be possible.

So what I'd like to do is gather a group of Good World folks together to sit around a table on Sunday at 2:00 to read the text aloud. We'll draw parts from a hat, but if there's a role you feel you were born to play, we can surely work something out.

“Few plays are so haunted by the passing of time as
The Tempest
,” wrote the critic Northrop Frye.
The Tempest
was Shakespeare's last play, and is a work intimately concerned with endings and beginnings. As such, I hope it will be a sweet tribute to a place that has been like a second home to many of us.

Please let me know if you'd like to participate . . . I hope you're game: “As you from crimes would pardoned be/Let your indulgence set me free.”

I attached a jpeg of J. W. Waterhouse's painting
Miranda
and hit send. A few days later, the Good World Shakespeare Company convened: it included Annika, Luke, Arnold, Fritz, Samuel and T.J. We drew our parts, written on little cards I'd folded and put in martini glasses, each taking one large role and one or two small ones. I was disappointed to get Miranda—it seemed like a minor cosmic joke that I, of all people, would get stuck as the ingénue—but I went with it. Annika made a wild and brilliant and terrifying Caliban. Luke, our Prospero, marched through his many monologues and hundreds of lines with occasional exasperation but good cheer, and ad-libbed whenever he felt like it.

I am certain that no one enjoyed this as much as I did. My friends were doing me a favor, handing me the ending I wanted. But where else could this possibly happen? Who else would ever indulge me quite like this, that some spell I needed to be broken might really and finally break, and on my own terms? During a longish gap in which Miranda does not appear onstage, I stepped outside, smoked a cigarette, psyched myself up for the final act in which the stranded are rescued, the villains vanquished, the spirit set free, and looked in at these people, this funny troupe of players gathered around a table. They looked like a painting, like something from the nineteenth century, and in their faces and in the details—the bottles of beer from which any and all could drink, the packs of cigarettes strewn around for sharing, the bodies huddled a bit closely together for warmth—I saw, as though captured in a frame, the specialness of the place, the collective and communal spirit that had made me love it even when I didn't. To an outsider, this might have looked like the most slapdash, ridiculous, worst production of
The Tempest
ever staged. Shakespeare himself might have been turning in his grave, but I would not soon forget this great and gracious and generous gift, this indulgence my friends had given me. I certainly would never forget them.

•   •   •

G
ood World goes out with a bang: a closing party that starts on the last evening of March and ends the following morning, April Fool's Day. Most of the furniture has already been cleared out, many of the fixtures removed. For the first few hours, it's just a bunch of regulars and staff members (who had often seemed interchangeable), some friends of regulars and friends of friends of regulars, a few familiar hangers-on. It is quiet enough for conversation. There is milling around and chatting, and an air of mild melancholy, a pervasive strange sensation of nostalgia for the present. But by midnight the joint is jumping: There are bodies wall-to-wall, and it is a bash, a blowout, a bacchanal. A spread of bread and cheese and chicken legs has been set up in the back like a medieval feast tableau. Regulars from years earlier turn up. Curious passersby come in tentatively, then stay for hours. And everyone makes nice, no matter how they really feel about one another. Any grievances are, for now, suspended. We may all feel like ghosts now, but we are friendly ghosts.

Annika, resplendent in shiny silver leggings and a T-shirt that says, in tabloid-style lettering,
MY BOOZE HELL
, is swinging from the pipes suspended from the ceiling, a cigarette between her lips. There is dancing on the bar and on the banquettes. There is predictably a great deal of drinking. There is some crying, but not, as far as I can tell, the worst kind. There is a whole lot of kissing, in expected and unexpected combinations. There is some serious making out. There is a whole other party going on in the basement. There is more than one arrest.

This party, one friend remarks, feels like the old days—when New York was fun.

And this is absolutely as it should be. This is the way it must happen. I have dressed up for the occasion, out of respect, but at some point my polka-dot cocktail dress is mostly obscured by a capacious black-and-white Celtic FC hoodie I have acquired that night under somewhat shady circumstances, my hair is a mess, and I have stopped bothering with the reapplication of lipstick. And that's fine. This is home, and I could be wearing a trash bag for all anyone here would care. And this
is
fun, if a little surreal and charged with emotion. Some regulars leave earlier than I'd expected, not wanting to make such a big deal of it, because, I suspect, it really
is
a big deal. Others will stand their ground until the landlords come and kick them out, even long after every last drop of booze has been drained.

My friend Samuel staggers over to me. He has been drinking quite a lot, as we all have. He edges up close to me, a little too close, maybe, but that's his style. And Samuel, an artist, is a gentle man with a sweet soul, but his accent (English boarding school with occasional South American flourishes), his distinctive, unhurried speech pattern, and his deadpan delivery conspire to make him sound like he could convincingly play the part of a subtle, urbane, quietly crazy and exceptionally deadly villain in a British gangster movie. He eases an arm around my shoulder and, as is his unnerving custom, looks me right in the eyes. Samuel can go for a long time without blinking.

“I love you, Rosie,” he says. “Do you know
why
?”

I shrug and say no, I do not know why, not exactly, anyway.

He stares a little harder and answers
very
slowly.

“Because you're like a guy,” he says. “But you're
not
.”

 

EPILOGUE:
THERE IS ALWAYS A STORY AT MILANO'S

New York City

A
fter Good World closed, I was suddenly no longer a real regular anywhere, but set adrift in a city full of bars. The places where I'd occasionally sought refuge when the intrigues at Good World had gotten me down had, it turned out, been best suited for that. I didn't feel perfectly at home in any of them. They just weren't Good World. Or, for that matter, Liquor Store. Or the Fish Bar. Or the Puffy's I'd known and loved in the mid-1990s. Or Grogan's. They were fine bars, but they didn't feel quite right. Of course, there was no way I'd stop drinking in bars. That was unthinkable. But for a time I wandered—to places that had piqued my curiosity, to old standbys I'd not visited in ages, to the many new spots suddenly popping up closer to home, right in my Brooklyn neighborhood, where a bar boom was in full swing. Without a bar of my own, I felt a little bit lost. But, like Ariel at the end of
The Tempest
, I also felt surprisingly free. There was no longer anywhere in particular I had to be.

One Thursday night in October 2009, I went to a poetry reading in Manhattan, way uptown. It wound down around ten, and I left with much to think on, wide awake and a little thirsty. I got off the 6 train at Bleecker Street, figuring that a nightcap at Tom & Jerry's, a good, solid, reliable place, would be just the thing. But it was packed, and so, for the first time in probably fifteen years, I went to Milano's. What compelled me to do this I cannot say. Milano's is one of the last great dives in New York, but as the site of occasional debauchery in my early twenties, not a place I'd been much inclined to revisit as a grown-up.

It's super-narrow and tiny, Milano's. There aren't many seats at the bar. Most were taken, one had a briefcase on it signaling that it, too, was taken, and one was empty. I claimed the empty seat and ordered a Jameson. To my right sat a woman I'd met a couple times, a friend of some friends. We greeted each other cheerfully and caught up. I told the young Irish bartender—and right away I liked this bartender, a live one—how I
never
come to Milano's anymore, how it has been something like fifteen years, but here I am, after all this time, sitting next to someone who is not a stranger at all. She confirmed that it was an excellent thing and proceeded to turn up “Thunder Road” really loud and sing along:
“Show a little faith, there's magic in the night/You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right.”
Maybe the best lyrics ever.

To my left sat a friendly and appealing man. He also agreed that this was a fine thing, this showing up here after such a long absence and seeing a familiar face. “When you came in,” he told me, “you looked like you were looking for a friend,” which I thought was the most wonderful and ambiguous thing to say. We clear up that he hadn't meant it in a you-looked-sad-and-desperate way. I told him he looked really familiar.

“International, maybe?” he asked.

“International?” I asked. “Are you some big internationally famous person I should recognize?” (He laughed; he'd meant from the bar the International on First Avenue, and I felt like a moron—though, to be fair, you just never know who might turn up at Milano's.) He got up to go to an ATM—Milano's is cash only—and asked me if I'd still be there when he got back. I had taken only a sip or two of my whiskey, so I said, yes, it is likely that I will be.

He returned and ordered us another round. “You know,” he said, “
you
look really familiar, too.” I told him my name.

“Rosie what?”

I told him my last name, too.

And suddenly it's all:
Oh. My. God.

We used to drink together, pretty often, at another bar, in another borough, in another decade. We clinked glasses. We had not seen each other in more than ten years, and he reported that the last time we'd met was on a Long Island Rail Road station platform, completely by chance, just like this, but we had been headed to different destinations. I did not remember it, but I also did not doubt it. We reminisced about the old days—the ones we had in common, anyway. And I reported that in the intervening years, life had, if nothing else, been indisputably life-y. I briefed him on the milestones: my father's death, my marriage, Tottenham winning the Carling Cup in '08, this big lucky professional break I'd gotten, a loved one's illness. He filled me in on his previous decade: a marriage, a few years away from the city, work stuff, a divorce, a new marriage, his return to New York. A lot of life can happen in ten years.

He asked me if he might speak freely, and I told him I would want nothing less. So he said, “You know, back then, I always really liked you.” And this was followed by a litany of flattering things that managed to sound entirely sincere. And I had always really liked him, too. He was, and is, lovely and gracious. But back then, of course, he had a girl. And I was someone else's girl.

A few moments of silence. We're both gazing into our glasses now, not looking at each other. I can't speak for him. I can't read his mind. But I, for one, was doing a little thinking of the
what-if
variety. So I ordered us another round. Another Jameson for me, another bourbon for him. He told me he could pay. “I know that,” I said, “but I'd like to get this one, please.” We drank some more. We talked some more. And, well, I felt a great chemical charge and wondered if in another lifetime we might have hastened to the grungy little bar bathroom, locked the door behind us, and ripped off all our clothes.

But more than that, better than that, there was just this comfort, this openness, this ineffable sweetness. Bruce Springsteen is right: there
is
magic in the night. It was just really nice, is what it was. And by then it seemed to me that we were quite madly in love, even though it was only a temporary affliction, the result of the heady combination of alcohol and attraction. And nostalgia. And this bar's own powerful mojo. (I know a woman and man who met here—she says she peeled him off the floor and dusted him off—and they have been a happy couple now nearly a score since. A former Milano's bartender told me about the long-ago afternoon when a regular, a burly court officer drunk and sugar-high after many rum-and-Cokes, pulled out a pistol and aimed it at the poker machine, shouting at it to give him back his money, until said bartender eighty-sixed him as coolly as he could manage. And I know another man who, in his youth, spent a night here so debased and distressing that he refused to utter a word about it more than twenty years later. There is always a story at Milano's.)

We were older now, my long-lost drinking companion and I. And possibly smarter. Whatever I wanted from bars when I first starting going to them, this is what I wanted now, and I couldn't imagine anything better. This connection. This empathy.

We got quiet again. He patted me on the back and smiled. I extended my hand, and we shook. We agreed that it was great to see each other again, there at Milano's of all places, where we never hung out, here, after all this time, out of nowhere. Sensibly, we finished up our drinks. We said good night. We wished each other well. And we left. Headed, once more, toward different destinations.

•   •   •

W
here
was
I headed? At that moment: to Brooklyn, home, to my bed, to sleep.

In the grander sense, I didn't know for sure where I was going, but something that night had shifted. And of course it was that night, but it was not
only
that night. It was that year. It was the last few years. My work, my marriage, even my habits: All these had changed, in big ways and small, because of age, because of time, because of experience. Maybe I no longer needed to be a regular anywhere anymore, at least not the way I had been. A chance visit to a bar I seldom drank in had been so strangely meaningful, so rewarding. And I knew that if I'd just defaulted and gone to one of my usuals, it wouldn't have happened. One of the comforts of regularhood is that it holds few surprises; its rhythms are steady and consistent and predictable, so that when any disruptions occur, they are all the more jarring, and sometimes terrible, as they had been at Good World. Maybe I needed to take more chances with bars. Maybe I needed to be willing to be a stranger again.

One of the new places that was part of the bar boom in my neighborhood was especially inviting. It's a little place, with about ten seats at the bar, four booths that seat four people each, and a yard in the back with enough space, on a nice day, for about the same number of drinkers that fit indoors. It's a mom-and-pop joint, run by a local couple—mainly a beer-and-shots bar, nothing fancy or complicated (though you can get an excellent Manhattan). One night, not long after it opened, one of the owners asked me if I knew anyone who was looking for a shift or two. I took it as a hint. (I'm still not sure if she hoped I might be interested, but that's how I interpreted the question.) I hadn't been on the other side of a bar in more than fifteen years, and hadn't given it even a minute's thought. But maybe it would be the perfect way to break up a week that otherwise consisted mainly of being home, alone, writing. I was starting to feel isolated. I told her I couldn't possibly work nights—I felt far too old to close a bar at four
A.M.
—but I wouldn't mind giving one day shift a week a shot. The next day, I was trained. And I've been happily working there ever since.

As at most bars I know, my regulars are mostly men. And they're a good crew: cabinetmakers, chefs, painters, teachers, other bartenders, and freelancers of many stripes. I love my day drinkers: Since they work unorthodox hours, they can come to the bar when others can't. During the day, it seldom gets too loud or too crowded. We talk, we toast, we catch up on one another's news, lives, families. Every now and then, when I have to take a Tuesday off, I miss seeing them. When I tell them that, some seem to think I'm trying to flatter them, but it's the truth.

Observing my customers over on the civilian side of the bar often gives me the uncanny feeling that I'm watching a film about my own life, even if I'm just out of frame. I see people falling in love with this bar, as I fell in love with so many other bars. I see how it happens and the way it takes hold: First they're in once a month, then twice, then every week. Even if they're a little shy at first, all it takes is a good conversation with the person sitting on the next barstool (or with the person behind the bar) to feel fully at ease. It has become a second home for them, as Puffy's and Good World and Grogan's and other bars once were for me. They come alone. They come with friends and coworkers, and sometimes even their wives and adult children. They come in good moods and celebrate, and in bad moods to drink away their troubles. This is
their
community center. This is their local. And just as so many bartenders became my friends over the years, I've become their friend, too.

And of course I can't help paying closest attention to the women who drink here, especially those who are regulars and, among them, those who are young and single and come on their own. The lives of a few seem to revolve around this little bar. This is where they've made their closest friends. Sometimes, I see them elsewhere in the neighborhood. When I do, they are often with people they met at the bar, not infrequently members of its staff. And I feel like I'm having a flashback. They remind me more than a little of someone I knew years ago. Recently, I noticed one woman coming in from time to time with a friend. Then she started coming on her own. She'd take a seat at the end of the bar near the door, drink beer, and knit. She has told me how much she likes the bar, how comfortable she feels there, how much it reminds her of warm, unpretentious places in her hometown. By now, many of the regulars know her by name, and the knitting needles and yarn come out less often. When I see her, I remember grading papers at Puffy's Tavern, ensconced in one of those booths, drinking Guinness, occasionally listening in on conversations among the regulars—and then becoming one of them.

Like me, the women who are regulars at my bar love to drink. At a bar. In the company of men. There are moments when I want to protect them if it looks like they're about to make a familiar misstep: go home with someone not quite worthy of their affection, confide in someone who might not be trustworthy, drink one too many. But I can't intervene too much, and I think they're getting as much out of this kind of life as I once did. Being a woman at home in bar culture is a way of figuring out who you are, and of getting comfortable with her. It's an assertion of independence. I'd be the last person to get in the way.