Beware the Solitary Drinker

by Cornelius Lehane

  The regulars at Oscar’s adored Angelina. She flirted with everyone, moseying from one barstool to the next, lapping up the barflies’ attentions and enjoying the jealousy she created. Everyone had a crush on Angelina, and she made each of the winos feel in turn that she had a crush on him. Maybe she did.

  Angelina found something to like and admire in everyone. This generosity toward her fellow suffering humanity went over extremely well with the winos, most of whom had run out of things to like about themselves years before.

  Sometimes, Angelina had dates she met at the bar, and some nights she didn’t come in at all. Usually, when she met a guy, she’d stay out all night, not returning to my apartment until the next day. On those days after, she was withdrawn, staring at the TV, not talking, depressed, and getting on my nerves. I hated the sound of the television.

  Sometimes, her dates kept her away from the bar for a week or so, but sooner or later she’d come back for a night with the regulars. Back with a couple of new lousy jokes that everyone would laugh at. Whenever I looked up, someone’s arm circling her bony shoulder, she was raucously laughing her way through the joke. The joke that was always vulgar—about balls or tits or vaginas—and never really funny.

  Oscar’s really became a bar late at night after the dinner crowd thinned out. Around ten-thirty, the rock and roll band set up, and the respectable people went home. Then the winos filtered in one at a time. They weren’t really winos unless they drank alone. Beware the solitary drinker, the old-time bartenders had told me years before. Now, here they were, all of them—solitary drinkers.

  A few of the regulars were in their twenties or thirties, but most were older, some in their sixties. Pretty much everyone had traveled many roads and had many stories to tell. As long as they told them to each other, I didn’t mind.

  My stock had gone up considerably because Angelina came to see me. And I have to admit my night brightened considerably each time I saw her. But Oscar’s of the Upper West Side was a bar any number of women came into on their own. The women who frequented the place liked me well enough. Most women like the bartenders of the joints they drink in. But most of them didn’t like Angelina. This was mostly because the men were so taken with her, and she didn’t have any scruples about going to bed with men—except me. I put up with the dirty looks and snide remarks from the other women and with Angelina’s outrageous act, despite my certain knowledge that her flirting and carelessness would lead to trouble, because I couldn’t help wanting to have her around. As she was for the stumblebums, she was the excitement in my life. But there was more. I knew, without knowing it, that beneath the flamboyance, the craving for attention, the lewdness, and the recklessness, Angelina was as gentle as anyone I’d ever known, except maybe my mother.

  Not surprisingly, Angelina’s sashaying from one barfly to the next caused a good deal of jealousy, and the jealousy caused more than a few shoving matches, do-si-dos, and step-outsides. The closest we got to a fistfight was when Nigel Barthelme, one of the smitten regulars, felt called upon to defend her honor against the barbs of a certain Reuben Foster, another regular. Fed up with her antics one evening, Reuben called Angelina a slut and a prick-teasing little twat. Angelina took umbrage.

  “I can’t believe the assholes in this place,” she said.

  “It’s three in the morning,” I reminded her. “You’re in Oscar’s on Broadway. Who’d you expect, Prince Charming?”

  Nigel stepped in, though. Maybe he thought he was Prince Charming. Reuben knocked him on his ass. Duffy, the doorman, grabbed Reuben while I picked up Nigel. Reuben, well into his fifties, hadn’t lost his upper body strength; his torso was the size of a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  “Nigel,” I said as he squirmed to get back to the fight, “if you don’t stop, I’m going to whack you.” Something had snapped in him: he couldn’t stop if he wanted; his face was twisted with hatred beyond rage. He actually scared me, but I was inside his arms so he couldn’t hit me, and since I was bigger and heavier, he couldn’t get me out of the way. I talked to him, my face inches away from his contorted mouth and his foul, labored breathing, trying to talk reason, and looking into his eyes that, like a blind man’s, didn’t look back.

  “She’s not a slut,” Nigel screamed—a point I didn’t think even Angelina would argue too strenuously.

  “They’re all sluts,” said Reuben. He wasn’t angry and he didn’t show drunk, despite a half-dozen undiluted rums. On a good night, he was steady on his feet after a dozen.

  “Reuben!” I bellowed, while I crushed the squirming Nigel against the partition wall, “Take a walk or I’ll bar you from here, too.” Reuben had to consider this threat since he’d already been barred from a couple of the other bars on our part of Broadway and was running out of places to drink.

  He also liked me. “C’mon, Reuben,” I said more softly, “do me a favor, take a walk for a half-hour.” Grumbling about twats and sluts, he picked up his money from the bar, leaving a couple of bucks for me, and walked out. Reuben was a tough guy, and I liked having him around the bar; two or three times he’d helped me drag someone out, and once he’d pulled a drunk off-duty cop off my throat. His problem was that he hated women.

  After four marriages, he hadn’t learned; he’d still engage any woman, particularly a young woman, who happened into Oscar’s. An aging hipster, who’d drunk in the West End with Ginsberg and Kerouac, he was a light-skinned black from an old New England family who had graduated from Oberlin College and still read novels and philosophy. He was one of the folks who made life a bit interesting at Oscar’s. The college girls from Barnard and Columbia who wandered in now and again found him eccentric and charming. So did Angelina. She probably spent more time with him than with most of the other regulars, leaving him panting after her most nights there at the bar, still in fond pursuit of his biggest problem.

  Nigel’s brain returned to the fold a few minutes after Reuben left. I let go of him, Angelina took over comforting him, and I went back behind the bar.

  Nigel Barthelme was another of Angelina’s conquests. He was already part of the scene when I began working at Oscar’s, having established himself as a kind of gofer. If I needed something from the liquor store to tide me over until Oscar paid the liquor distributor’s bill, or the chef, Eric the Red, needed some hamburger meat from the market at 110th Street, Nigel would trot off to get it. Whenever something broke, Nigel ran to his apartment for his tool kit and came back and fixed it. But he wasn’t your typical gofer. He had a good job doing something with computers in the financial district. Nor was he your typical barfly, as most of the time he drank ginger ale. He’d never really be an Oscar’s regular since he considered his day job more important than his drinking.

  Yet the four walls closed in on him late at night, too, like they did the rest of us. He was a night owl, and if you wanted to go out late at night on the Upper West Side, your choices were limited in 1983. Oscar befriended Nigel, word had it, because Oscar believed him to be descended from a wealthy family—and there was nothing that impressed Oscar more than wealth.

  Angelina snatched poor Nigel up the first time she saw him come in the door. When he spied her that first night, he stood in the doorway gawking like he’d just fallen off the turnip truck. She looked up from her drink once, then looked up again. In no time at all, he was sitting beside her. This night, she was at first her cheerful self, then later much more serious than I was used to seeing her. Just before closing, she looped her arm about Nigel’s shoulder and leaned heavily against him as they rolled out of the bar into the Broadway night. He seemed so taken with her, and she acted so differently with him than with her other conquests, that I thought she might have found something with Nigel. But he was back in the bar a couple of nights later nervously looking for her, and she was nowhere to be found. He looked for her every night for a week, asking me with fake casualness if I’d seen her.

  I had seen her in actual fact because when she needed to be alone and get som
e sleep, she came back to my apartment, usually during the day, and curled up on the couch. But I didn’t see any reason to tell Nigel this. His pining around the bar at night was bad enough; I didn’t want him on my doorstep during the day also.

  The time came, though, not long after this, that Angelina stayed away from the bar for quite a while and even stopped showing up at my apartment. I worried but then heard tell she’d been making the rounds farther downtown. When she finally did come back to Oscar’s, she was in the chips. She bought the regulars drinks, tipped me five bucks when she bought a round, and tuned me up every half-hour from her packet of blow. She’d found a job at Hanrahan’s on 65th Street, she told me, and I figured it must be a gold mine. She said she’d found herself a sugar daddy, so she would be my sugar momma.

  That night, she left with Duffy the doorman. Her leaving cast a pall over the bar; the laughter and the good times gave way to steady, solitary, hard drinking, the kind usually disguised by the good time. We all shared an unspoken belief that she was throwing herself away on Duffy, but I doubt any of the rest of us planned to build her a house in the country. Even Nigel drank that night. So did I. Losing Angelina was one more failure added to a long string, so each of us, mired in the remembrance of a lifetime of losses, settled in to feel sorry for himself.

  Nigel turned out to be an awful drunk, belligerent, foul-mouthed, contemptuous, and nasty to everyone. I finally threw him out around three. The next day, he was back, sheepish, contrite, diffident, wearing dark glasses instead of his coke bottles, his face even whiter than usual.

  “You see now why I don’t drink often,” he said.

  “You’re one of the worst drunks I’ve ever seen,” I assured him. “Maybe you should try drugs.”

  “I’m worse,” Nigel said.

  From then on, when Angelina did return, she and Nigel might talk or they might not, but I could tell the flame had gone out. Nigel pined after her, and she toyed with him. Still, he took it like a man, hanging on, being her friend, waiting for the day she’d come to her senses and realize he was the one for her.

  During this time, too, Nigel and I took to hanging out together. Since he was often around at closing time, we’d have breakfast at the Greek greasy spoon, sometimes with Angelina, sometimes with some of the other leftovers from the bar. We regaled each other with stories of our pasts and commentaries on the state of the world and nation. Nigel liked to argue politics—bait me would be more like it. Late at night, with the greasy smoke of the Greek’s grill as a backdrop, he’d pontificate like I imagined those Russian-royalty hangers-on displaced by the Bolsheviks did in the Paris cafes. An eloquent defender of privilege taking on the half-sloshed mouthpiece of the great unwashed, we bored to tears everyone around us.

  Other nights, we went to my apartment or to Eric the Red’s to smoke dope and listen to music, except that Nigel didn’t smoke dope either. He seemed perfectly content, sitting there straight while we got stoned. He said he’d lived in the East Village in the mid-seventies when he’d been a roadie for groups like the Doobie Brothers and Aerosmith, and had been drugged out enough in those days. He did seem like a counter-culture leftover trying to go straight—a little off-kilter with the aura of having taken one trip too many.

  Nigel was maybe ten years younger than me, but he seemed older. He was smaller than me, too, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and had a good-sized mustache. Maybe he was handsome but I don’t think so, and maybe he was attractive to women, but I doubt that too. He wore a business suit most of the time and had an unconscious tendency to treat the rest of us, clad in our Levis and T-shirts, like the hired help. I’d never seen him infatuated with a woman before Angelina came along with her pretty blue eyes, her pouting lips, and her dirty jokes. And I suspected a good part of his interest in me had to do with keeping track of her.

  As for Angelina, she settled into her gold mine near Lincoln Center and became quite well known at some of the bars farther down on the West Side, the higher-priced, glitzier places where the clientele still expected they would shine in life.

  Leaving bars with strangers was a pattern for Angelina. Sometimes it was the same guy for a week or so, then for a while a different guy every night. It was dangerous to do this. I might have warned her. But it was her life, and she wouldn’t have listened anyway. If she listened to warnings, she would have stayed home in Springfield.

  Once she got her feet under her and adjusted to life in Fun City, she didn’t need me much anymore. Finding a studio on 110th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam, she moved out of my apartment, not really moving out after not really ever moving in. During this time, she was flush, spending like a drunken sailor, recklessly enjoying her prosperity and popularity. Dressed up, bright lipstick, colorful clothes, she would come back to the winos every couple of weeks or so, like the prodigal son, and they would take her in. She seemed desperate in some ways, but cheerful in others. She liked having money and had a lot of it.

  ***

  When I saw Angelina now, it was unexpectedly—late at night in the bar or out of the blue in the early afternoon when she stopped by to have breakfast with me. I would call her, too, once in a while. I’d gotten over my crush, except when I was drunk and looking right at her, remembering how beautiful her face was against my pillow. She kept me up to date on auditions, her new discoveries and ambitions as they came and went—to open a boutique in the Village, a gallery in Soho, to sing with a piano player on the East Side—and her flirtations. She also wanted to be a bartender.

  “You move so fast,” she said after watching for an hour one busy Thursday night. Already a little drunk, she sat at the corner of the bar nearest the door, very alluring in a white satin shirt opened two or three buttons along her chest. “I want to go to bartending school and be like you.”

  “Number one, you don’t want to be like me,” I said. “And number two, you don’t want to go to bartending school. All you learn there is how to mix drinks. You need to work behind a good bartender to become a bartender.”

  That’s how I’d learned, the hard way, bar boy to service bartender, finally to the front bar. It wasn’t the way things were done anymore. But I still had the attitude: you had to pay your dues. It rankled on me when some amateur walked behind the bar into a hundred dollar a night gig because he or she knew someone or had a pretty face.

  I’d learned to pour with both hands, to make sure that the bar stations were all set up when I took over a shift, and to make sure that the bar was clean and stocked when I left a shift. I learned about working with my head up and always knowing everything that was happening at every moment. I learned how to make a good living, which means being alert for walkouts, for spotters, controlling the waiters and waitresses so they didn’t become independent contractors. I learned to know who was trouble the second he or she entered the bar.

  Later that night, Angelina, swaying to the music and seeming to caress the microphone with her mouth, sang a song with the band. A Tracy Nelson song that said: “It’s a nickel for a donut and a dime for a dance but it’s an arm and a leg for a little romance.”

  The band loved her. Young as she was, she could really sing the blues. They talked with her at the bar on their breaks about taking on a female vocalist. Angelina was thrilled and left around two, when the band finished up, to rehearse a couple of songs and party with the band back at their apartment.

  “I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” she said before she left. I had something going with a young fluegelhorn player who’d been at the bar for a couple of hours with some of her fellow musicians. They left; she and her girl friend had stayed. She had a cherubic face, green eyes, and dark eyebrows. Dressed in her black tux, carrying her horn, she was winsome, and impressed that I’d heard of Mendelssohn.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Angelina.

  She looked at the fluegelhorn player, who was looking at her, and said, “I’m jealous.”

  I knew the band and liked most of the guys. Something like the Grat
eful Dead, they were stuck in a time warp, all of them well past the age for playing rock and roll in a neighborhood bar. But they wrote their own songs, played with tremendous energy, loved what they were doing. Max was the leader, wild on the keyboard, a drinker, a doper, and a carouser. His father was a Presbyterian minister in Massachusetts, so sometimes late at night, when there weren’t any women to chase, we would compare notes on fathers with strong belief systems. Angelina would be fascinated with him I knew, and he had fewer residual principles than I did, so I expected he would take her to bed.

  I was wrong, of course. She took up with the bass player. Danny, like most bass players I’ve ever known, was mellow. He would play his music—usually without so much as a twitch except for running his fingers along the neck of the guitar and tapping his foot—while the rest of the band bounded around the stage like the Flying Karamazov Brothers somersaulting out of the wings to open their act. Danny leaned against his imaginary wall, his eyes closed, the bass purring out the sounds you feel in your soul, until you found yourself moving in rhythm to the rock beat of the music.

  As I heard it, Danny and Max had been part of a crew running a howitzer 105 in Vietnam, both of them trying not to go deaf so they could play music again back home. A couple of years after the war, when Max arrived on the Upper West Side after ruining the family name in Barnstable, or wherever it was, he ran into his old gunner mate one afternoon on Broadway. They put together a band, called it The Hoods, and did pretty well, playing some downtown gigs at Tramps and the Bottom Line, and, of course, Oscar’s three nights a week.

  “Your girl friend ran off with that black bass player,” Eric the Red told me, in case I’d missed it.

  Eric was our Yugoslavian cook, a world traveler lifted up from sheep herding by Tito’s revolution. He’d become a world-class hippie, his long black hair tied in a ponytail, sporting a stringy black beard that stood out stiffly from his chin and tapered to strings at the middle of his chest.