“He really likes it.” I glanced over at the bar. The really big older dude was still not cracking a smile.
“Can I think about it?” I asked. I couldn’t just cave. Was this a joke? Were they just messing with me? I wondered if it had become a matter of principle for both parties. He returned to his gang, looking forlorn and dejected. He had failed.
“Oh, come on, just take the money,” Owen said. “His friend likes the hat more than you do. And besides, it’s hideous. Personally, I never want to see it again.”
But this wasn’t about aesthetics. And they were still looking in my direction. Most of my friends had ceased to pay the goings-on any attention by this point. But I was mulling over a strategy. Owen was right: It was an ugly and unbecoming hat. What exactly a big old biker wanted it for was beyond me. Maybe it reminded him of someone, or of some better time in his life, maybe back in the seventies, when presumably everyone, even bikers, wore dumb rainbow-colored chapeaux, when, maybe, he’d gotten his first bike and first set out on the back roads of America, Easy Rider–style. Or maybe there was something deeper behind this pursuit, a real tragedy: recollections of a deceased beloved who’d once had in her possession a similar hat and then, when they were touring cross-country—maybe on their honeymoon, even—she collided with a discarded beer can in the middle of the road, shot up into the air, and went tumbling to her premature death, the hat tucked under her helmet, but given the terrible extent of her injuries, irretrievable?
Or maybe his mother, who raised him up to be something more than he was, who had tried, just like in the Merle Haggard song, had been a knitter.
Maybe he just liked the thing.
And maybe it was the number of beers I’d drunk by then that made me see the situation differently. If he was just fucking with me, he was doing it with admirable, dogged tenacity, never once raising his voice, never being anything but utterly polite and calm. The thing was hideous. And my friend, who’d given it to me, well, she was a biker herself—not a lifer like these guys, but an enthusiast, anyway—so she’d not only understand why I’d let the thing go, she’d be happy about it, maybe even proud. And as for the northern weather being cold, that particular night demanded nothing more than a quick dash from bar to car and car to door. I’d survive. There was more than one hat in the world.
I felt bolder. I took the hat off, gripped it in one hand and my beer in the other, and walked up to the biker. “All right,” I said. “It’s all yours. I mean, it’s your friend’s.”
He looked like he might cry. “So,” he asked, getting back down to business, “how much you want?”
“I can’t take your money for it,” I said. “But if you want to buy a round for my friends and me, that would be nice.”
“It’s a deal,” he said. “Ma’am, I can’t thank you enough.”
And that’s when I knew that whatever else this had been about, it wasn’t just a joke after all. It meant something, even if I’d never know what. All I did know was that this man loved that other man—as leader, brother, lover, who knew?—and was determined to give him this gift. He put energy into it, and emotion, and I was moved, too. “Sir, you’re welcome.”
There was a loud clinking of glasses and bottles among the bikers. The guy who’d led the negotiations victoriously crowned his buddy with the hat, making him king of whatever ragged brotherhood this was, and the whole gang of these previously stern, stone-faced men was smiling and laughing, a bunch of kids, a bunch of little boys. A round soon appeared at my table, my friends and I drank up, celebrated this curious coronation, and lit back out on Route 7 and into Vermont, where it became Route 9, where late at night you could not see the lush loping valley that opened out into a great bowl just off to the right as soon as you crossed the border, but you knew it was there, and you could feel it, even in the dark, all that space, all that green country and sweet air.
When people asked me what had become of that hat—its disappearance would not go unnoticed—I could now tell them that it had fallen into the grateful hands of its true and rightful owner, and was off with him on an adventure somewhere. And every subsequent visit to the Man of Kent held out the possibility that something a little magical might happen, even if it was just a conversation with John, or the first cheeseburger I bit into after seven years of vegetarianism, or just the simple pleasure of introducing someone who’d never been there before to this place, this special place where a chicken might wander in at any moment, where surprised English tourists might pop in and be startled at first by this more-than-the-real-thing, more-English-than-the-English but still very upstate New York simulacrum of something so familiar to them, where the respect of a good barman made at least one college girl feel like a citizen of the world. As long as I had a willing and sober-enough friend to drive and enough cash for a round, there was no place I’d rather be, even if I could only get there once every few weeks or, sadly, even less often.
• • •
But the rarity of my visits made the place all the more alluring, a destination, not a default. When I needed to be there, I really needed to be there. And never did I need to be there more than the night after my college graduation. All I knew for sure was that I’d spend that summer in Vermont, before getting on with the rest of my life, before entering the real world, whatever that might be. My friend Theo, who had so often been the designated driver to the Man of Kent, had graduated the year before me, but he’d come up that weekend to see his friends get their diplomas and to come to our senior party. It had been a busy, weird weekend: The presence of my always-unpredictable mother made me nervous. At dinner the night before graduation, her then-boyfriend had a pain in his chest and started to kvetch, loudly. He didn’t have a heart attack, but it seemed possible. My brother was returning from a few weeks of work in France, where he’d gotten mysteriously and seriously ill. And as for me, well, I realized that no matter how much I’d complained about college, how many times I had considered dropping out as I had in high school, when it was all winding down, I understood that it had been the life. I had come to love the small town of North Bennington, where I had lived in comfortable pseudo-independence for two years. I loved the bar just a block up the street, where I spent nearly every night in the company of a few friends and professors and locals. Reading poetry and philosophy as though it were my job, thinking about Yeats and Tolstoy and Joyce and Kant, was not such a bad way to keep oneself occupied. I had become known as a political agitator on campus, as a poet, as a girl who could hold her liquor and still get things done. And now that it was over, I knew I’d never have it so easy again.
Ma and her boyfriend and my brother cleared out after brunch the morning after graduation. I went back to my apartment, where I’d let a bunch of students crash who’d been kicked out of their dorms now that the semester had ended. Their stuff was everywhere: suitcases and backpacks and duffel bags in my living room, contact lens solution next to my bathroom sink. But they were all out doing something. I sat alone all afternoon in my cluttered living room, flipped through my senior thesis, a project I’d spent the good part of the year writing, and it reminded me of how lucky I’d been those last four years. The young have a talent for magnifying everything, especially everything bad: every little failure, every heartache, every shitty day, every little test of one’s character, every disappointment, becomes so huge. And all your Blake and Brecht and Orwell, all your deep-seated lifelong class consciousness, all your cloistered political agitating, everything you may have read, or believed, or done, did little to stop this, little to say, Don’t you see how good you’ve got it? It felt weak and silly and self-indulgent to feel so sorry for myself, but there I was. Later, Theo showed up at my door and found me crying at my desk. He didn’t have to ask what was wrong; he’d gone through the thing just a year earlier.
“I’m sorry you’re sad,” he said. “I wish I could do something for you.”
I shook my head. “Thanks. I’ll be okay.” I was glad Theo had shown up, but I couldn’t think of anything he could do to make me feel better, less afraid, comforted.
“Wanna go to the Man of Kent?”
He asked exactly the right question. If anything might console me, an evening at the Man of Kent was it.
Off we went, just before the sun set, out on that curvy country road, past the great green bowl of the valley, past the reservoir, listening to the Minutemen on the car stereo in his white egglike little Honda. I felt totally enclosed, in a good way, and grateful for my friend, who had intuited exactly what I needed. By then, Theo was no longer straight-edge—he’d capitulated to the pleasures of drink in his senior year—but I knew that he knew that this evening, this trip to the bar, was for me, not for him, that he would let me get as drunk as I needed, as drunk as I wanted to, and he would shepherd me safely home. “Hello, darling!” John greeted me when we walked in. “How are you?”
“I just graduated, John,” I said.
“Well done,” he said. “So you’re leaving us, then?”
“I guess so,” I said. “After the summer.”
“Well, you’ll be back. I know you will.”
Would I? I hoped so. I knew I couldn’t stay in that part of the world forever, though it was tempting. He gave me a Belgian cherry lambic on the house. Theo and I took a table and talked. I thanked him for taking me there. We toasted each other.
And I didn’t really get drunk at all, not on booze, anyway. Instead, I slowly drank my Belgian beers and got drunk on the bar itself. I thought about everything that had made the Man of Kent possible—thank God John had somehow settled in this little community in a picturesque but unglamorous corner of upstate New York. His bar had been a blessing to me, a secret garden—and the gentlest, warmest place to observe, learn, and enact a transition from youth to adulthood, to study and appreciate a bar’s unwritten but powerful code of honor. Be good to the people serving you drinks; be open to your fellow patrons, no matter how different they are from you. Gently mind the people you bring with you, but have authority. Have fun, but not at the expense of anyone else’s fun. A bar is never yours alone.
Sitting there that night, all the songs John played, all the memorabilia, the bar towels and cricket bats and jerseys and accoutrements, all these things that had initially just looked like so much kitsch took on richer properties: This bar was a labor of love, a pouring-forth of someone’s heart, someone from far away, someone who’d lived in many places and, it seemed, lived many lives. Every item represented a choice or a gift; everything was about John, and about that sometimes incoherent mix of customers, the patrons he protected, served, nurtured, cared for.
Before Theo and I left that night, I made sure to tell John how much the place had meant to me, how much I loved every visit I’d made there. “Well, you’ve been one of our favorites, too,” he said. And maybe he said that to everybody, but I liked to believe it was true. I’d never exactly been a regular there—its distance made that impossible. But even if I didn’t know everybody as soon as I walked in, I knew they were all okay; they loved this bar, they got it, and that was enough.
• • •
In the summer of 2007, my husband and I went to Vermont. On the way back to New York, we stopped at the Man of Kent. I couldn’t imagine not stopping by when I was in the area, but it was especially good that we paid that particular visit. We sat down at the bar, happy to find John behind it. After a few minutes of catching up, John dropped a bomb: he told us that he’d sold the bar. He still might tend bar sometimes, he told us, but this was it.
I couldn’t believe it, but he was getting older, spending more time away, gearing up to retire. I didn’t want to give him the third degree about the new owner. But I did have questions.
“I think they’ll keep the place pretty much as it is,” he told me, but that wasn’t completely reassuring. I couldn’t stand the thought of one single bar towel out of place. It was perfect—too-bright lighting and all—and I’ve never been a believer in change for change’s sake. I certainly couldn’t imagine anyone improving on the place.
There are so many bars where the owners are invisible, where they just fade into the background, collect the cash, sign the checks, take care of the payroll, maybe stop in to make sure the place is busy, but don’t really get involved. For owners like that, it’s a business—they might as well be selling auto parts or groceries or pet supplies. They are effectively anonymous—Oz-like, machinating behind the scenes, but not out among the men and women whose patronage is their livelihood. And for certain bars, that’s fine. But the Man of Kent was not that kind of bar; it was exactly the opposite. Its owner’s life and history, interests and tastes, animated the whole place. The Man of Kent was an extension of John, an extension of his home—the one right next door, and the one across the Atlantic.
A more recent visit eased my mind: The place is still thriving, the bar towels are still there, the Piaf songs still playing. The new owner gets it. Bikers are still staring down college students, farmers still arguing politics with professors. And best of all, John is still there, no longer the owner, but behind the bar during the early weekday shift. It has managed to retain its spirit, its singular genius loci. It’s still there, still set back on that green stretch of roadside, awaiting any pilgrims who might find their way there to take their drink and sweet rest. And maybe, if they’re as young as I was when I first stepped foot in the Man of Kent, they’ll also learn a thing or two about how to be a good bar patron, as I did. The Man of Kent was always farther away than I wanted it to be, even when it was only a matter of ten miles or so. Now it is hundreds of miles away. But it still comforts me to think about it, and about the gently pastoral—admittedly romanticized—life it represents. Now it feels like it exists in a parallel world, still there, if impossibly beyond my physical reach, but rooted deeply in this drinker’s heart.
6.
LATE TO THE PARTY
Puffy’s Tavern, New York City
One early autumn evening in 1995, Puffy’s Tavern appeared before me like a shimmering urban mirage, like a dream bar vision out of an Edward Hopper painting, anchoring its corner of Hudson and Harrison Streets in TriBeCa in stalwart brick and great plate glass windows. Some nights, Puffy’s felt like the saddest damn song Tom Waits ever sang; others, it was vibrant and alive, humming with conversation and cosmopolitan good cheer. Puffy’s was scuffed black-and-white tile, barroom green walls gone grayish with ash and age, a battle-ravaged dartboard, sad-faced drunks, and regulars ready with stories to tell—whether you felt like listening or not. And more often than not, I did.
Puffy’s was beautiful. In its way. Like an old weather-beaten chanteuse with running mascara who still manages to break your heart as soon as she starts singing. But ask, and anyone will tell you that Puffy’s is not what it used to be. Then again, TriBeCa isn’t what it used to be, either. And to be fair, by the time I showed up there, both the neighborhood and the bar already weren’t what they used to be—though they’ve drifted still further from their former selves in the years since.
Puffy’s, in a sense, predates “TriBeCa”; that graceless tripartite designation was, by most accounts, imposed upon the area by realtors when the neighborhood was just waking up—with a hangover—after well over a decade as a sparsely populated artists’ enclave, where pioneers had staked their territorial claims and carved spaces first and foremost for painting and printing and sculpting, and only incidentally for living, out of drafty old loft buildings on badly lit cobbled streets. In those days, “TriBeCa” didn’t exist; the neighborhood was just downtown, or the Lower West Side (as one friend, who could never quite stomach the new name, still insists on calling it), or where you found yourself when you got off the IRT 1 train at Franklin Street, or the express at Chambers Street—the seedy two-way artery at its southern edge—or if you strayed too far west f
rom the courts after a day of jury duty or from dinner in Chinatown. By the mid 1990s, TriBeCa was on its way to becoming the wealthiest neighborhood per capita in Manhattan, outdoing even the western flank of the Upper East Side. Artists had cleaned up the area, made it habitable, vibrant—and desirable. The thankless result was that bankers and movie stars and others from the ranks of the superrich would, within a generation, swoop in to displace them. In New York City, of course, the rich have always been with us, and they have effectively taken over: the teachers and social workers and struggling artists and writers and performers who populated the city of my youth can no longer afford Manhattan. On this small island, less and less space is available to those who were, and are, responsible for so much of its identity and spirit.
The first time I drank at Puffy’s, it was with college friends; we’d all recently graduated. We claimed the far end of the uncomfortable painted wooden banquette that lines the wall opposite the long, dark, imposing bar. Banquette is euphemistic; it’s a bench, really, likely slapped together with plywood and two-by-fours, God knows when. We got there late one afternoon—a Saturday, probably—and stayed well into the early morning hours. The bartender—an earthy, vivacious woman in her forties, a rarity in New York City bars—held court, expertly mixing cocktails and drawing pints, dancing energetically to “Brick House” or some other loud beat-heavy number issuing from the gorgeous old jukebox while making everyone feel welcome (loved, even) all at once. I liked the place. In fact, I felt pretty sure I might be falling in love with it. I made a few return visits with friends, but I had the sense that I belonged there solo. I had never before felt so territorial about a bar, for mysterious reasons.
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