Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123)

by Schaap, Rosie

  In September 1995, I was in graduate school, working on a doctorate in English literature, and not long after my first night at Puffy’s I started teaching freshman English at the huge community college just a block west of the bar. The Borough of Manhattan Community College has about a million students—I am only exaggerating a little—and like many campuses of its early 1970s vintage, it was designed with specs better suited to a correctional facility than to a university. Drive past it on the West Side Highway and, with its sparse, horizontal windows looking out at the Hudson River like suspicious squinting eyes and its pitiless stretches of drab brick, it looks like a prison.

  The campus came into being in the years after four students were murdered at Kent State, after Mark Rudd took Low Memorial Library at Columbia hostage, after student activists tore shit up all over the country. By design, BMCC has no quad, no central space where students can congregate—or protest. The sheer physical hardness of the campus is oppressive. But I liked teaching. I liked my students, who seemed to come from everywhere: Haiti and Poland, Russia and Macao, Serbia and the Dominican Republic and Greece and Ivory Coast and Staten Island. The range of ability and talent matched the international diversity; there were some brilliant people in those classrooms and some insufferable dumbasses. But they were never boring, and I took to teaching pretty quickly and easily. Still, as much as I enjoyed teaching at BMCC, my affection for it abruptly deteriorated outside of the classroom. My office, for instance, was shared with some fifty other underpaid and often embittered adjunct professors of English.

  I was living just across town, near the South Street Seaport, in a boxy, dark, charmless apartment with gray industrial carpeting and low drop ceilings. My roommate was a friend from college—a smart, sad Goth with jet-black hair that cascaded nearly to her ass and a constellation of deathy tattoos sprayed about her pale body. Though we had been close as undergraduates, Vanessa and I turned out to be a bad match as living companions. Her Gothic mien was more than subcultural affect; it was deep and hard-earned. She’d lived through personal tragedy that few people at her young age had had to endure, and seemed, at least back then, to carry the heavy weight of loss with her at all times. By comparison, my own sadnesses seemed slight, but they were there nonetheless. Grad school wasn’t working out for me. At my tiny college in Vermont, for better or worse, it had been easy to stand out and to be spoiled by the attention—friendship, even—of my professors. At a big school in the big city, I was doing nothing to distinguish myself, and at the same time I had little but contempt for the great majority of my fellow students. In a seminar on the Romantics, when we were discussing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I made what seemed to me a winning, if obvious, joke. The first time someone in the room spoke the book’s title aloud, I corrected him. “Fronkensteen,” I insisted. Either no one in the class had seen Mel Brooks’s masterpiece Young Frankenstein—which seemed to me not merely impossible, but downright tragic—or they pretended they hadn’t. In either case, it felt like one more little depressing moment in a year that was quickly filling up with them. The gloom of my apartment, whose few windows faced only the back sides of other buildings—hardly brightened by my roommate’s poster collection (heavy on the Cure) and Sisters of Mercy–centric sound track—only made it worse. The place confirmed my unhappiness and my nagging, if premature, sense of failure. I called it Bleak House.

  Puffy’s, for all its louche allure, was the perfect antidote to graduate school, to my work environment, and to my housing situation. For a time, I’d go in the afternoons after teaching, return to that little stretch of banquette near the back corner, and quietly grade papers. The afternoon bartender at the time was Louie, a flirtatious painter in his fifties with an abundant head of salt-and-pepper hair, a dense mustache that would not have been out of place on the sepia-photographed countenance of a Union soldier in 1863, and a wardrobe of homespun shirts with wooden buttons, suspenders, and breeches. The first time I met him I was in a foul mood and ordered a pint of Guinness and a Jameson, neat. He smiled slyly. “Girl,” he asked me, not exactly rhetorically, “where you been all my life?”

  Most afternoons I’d stick to Guinness, keep to myself, and slog through a tower of freshman essays. But I eavesdropped shamelessly on the conversations among the guys at the bar. It was never anything scandalous: neighborhood news and a smattering of gossip, pretty standard among people who’d known one another seemingly forever. But they were an animated bunch. Bill was a sandpaper-voiced ironworker who’d spent years working on the Manhattan Bridge and had a nose that looked like it had seen more than its share of fights and occupational hazards. He usually had a Yorkshire terrier in tow, wearing a little satin bow in her silky topknot. “Emma,” he’d coo at her with gravelly affection, stroking her head and chin. The dog was named after Emma Goldman. Emma was not the only canine in the crowd: Henry, an aging overweight beagle, usually accompanied Walker, a homeless man known to just about everyone in the neighborhood, loved by some, tolerated by others. Probably in his fifties at the time, he reputedly spoke about a dozen (mainly classical) languages and had been a tournament Scrabble champion. Anyone who tried to talk to Walker about the shelter system or encourage him to “get help” was instantly rebuffed. Even I, the queen of the bleeding hearts, who badly wished to regard myself as a helper of humankind and a friend particularly to people who were poor, marginalized, and outcast, knew better than to dare. He made it perfectly clear that he was more than smart enough to seek help and make use of whatever resources existed; he happened to prefer his life the way it was, thank you very much. Walking Henry, who belonged to a friend, seemed to provide Walker with enough money to feed himself and buy the occasional drink. I also got used to the sight of a wiry guy named Ken, a bundle of nervous human energy, who’d stop by, chat with Louie, maybe have a drink, maybe not, and disappear as quickly as he’d arrived. Within a month or so, I’d be working side by side with Ken on the little magazine of literature and art he’d been putting out since 1971, the year I was born.

  Everything felt right to me at Puffy’s: the look of the place, its tone and cadences, the absence of a television, the presence of the old jukebox loaded with classic rock ’n’ roll 45s (“Satisfaction,” “Runaround Sue”) and some curiosities (like Randy Newman’s “Short People”), the playing card—a six of hearts—confoundingly affixed to the high ceiling in the front right corner (lodged there, I am told, by a long-ago bartender/magician who liked to entertain his drunks with card tricks). It was comforting and reassuring; it was not home and not school and not the office. The afternoon guys were welcoming and friendly, but politely left me to my Guinness and my work. Then, having finished grading, critiquing, and often despairing over a substantial-enough number of papers, I might reward myself in the early evening with a nice Jameson on the rocks.

  For that reward, I would move from the back bench to a barstool up in the front corner. And that was probably the single most important development in my drinking life. I became a regular, a person who belonged to a bar, and to whom a bar belonged. I understood that though I loved the bars I patronized in college, I was only passing through; four years and I’d be gone. But I had, at the time, no desire ever to leave New York again. So why would I ever leave Puffy’s—this perfect, picturesque, comfortable spot?

  I found myself staying later and later, watching the early evening crowd replace the afternoon crowd, watching one bartender relieve another as the former counted out the till and tallied up his or her tips, then switched over to the civilian side of the bar for a very welcome post-shift drink. Evening, and the locals, the ones whose jobs made day drinking impossible, filed in. Like the afternoon crowd, most of them were nearly a generation older than me. The really, really tall guy. The ponytailed Southern one with the anxiety and the twang. The cowboy, outfitted more appropriately for a day out on the range than on the streets of the great metropolis. The blond guy with the boyish face and the interest in post-struc
turalist philosophers. They were so at ease with one another, so familiar. They’d bullshit and laugh, and I’d sit a few stools down and listen. They were mostly guys, yes, but there were a few women, too. The one with dark curls and sparkly blue eyes and a great love of beer. The foxy, witty one with a little gravel in her voice; she’d graduated from Bennington in 1969, back when it was really cool. The sad, sweet one who slurred her words as she sat below the portrait of her deceased beloved.

  Aside from the bartenders, I don’t know who talked to me first. Not the cowboy. Not the Southerner. Not the boyish one. It might have been Sonia, with the curls. Or maybe it was Jimmy, the tall guy, who had a deep tall-guy voice and a long face and glasses, and a distinct sweetness about him that was matched by an equally unmistakable watchfulness. He knew everyone there. He knew their stories, their wives, their habits, their histories. And through all the years of drinking together, I sensed that he was the one who remembered, and recorded, what they’d experienced in one another’s company. So many of Puffy’s conversations, especially among the guys, started with, “Hey, remember that time . . . ?” And, of course, I did not remember that time—that time when everyone was dancing on the tabletops, that time when so-and-so disarmed a mugger in the shady little alley behind the bar with his blunt assertion that, really, his day couldn’t get any worse anyway, that time when . . . that time when . . . But I was happy just to take it in, to listen, to imagine what a past here, a history here, felt like.

  But certainly it was Will, the boyish blond, with whom I had my first substantial Puffy’s conversation—fun and lively and long—and with whom I felt an instant kindred-spirit connection. I got Will, and he—this funny, smart, deeply charming person—got me.

  At the time, I was all too eager to tell people that I considered myself a Muggletonian. Muggletonians were a radical Protestant dissenting sect of the seventeenth century, and the great historian E. P. Thompson argued that William Blake’s mother might have been one. The Blake connection alone might have been enough for me. But there was more: Instead of worshipping in churches, which they considered pointless and hierarchical, the Muggletonians instead are said to have “worshipped” in taverns, going from public house to public house praying and singing and making political trouble—and drinking. I’d first heard about them in college, when one of my professors ID’d me as a Muggletonian. I could see his point, so I readily claimed Muggletonianism as my true faith and happily preached its dissenter doctrines to anyone who’d listen. At Puffy’s, people were ready to be converted.

  Will was more than a skillful conversationalist. He was an intellectual and a lover of history. He’d spent a lot of time in the former Czechoslovakia and, although a nonbeliever himself, he felt an affinity for the Hussites—the Bohemian followers of Jan Hus, who was burned for heresy in 1415. We must have talked dissenting Christians and poetry and politics until three or four in the morning, with some of the other regulars occasionally contributing their two cents, or making fun of the highfalutin and vaguely religious content of our conversation.

  Although Will had been drinking at Puffy’s since the seventies, he wasn’t blasé about it. He knew that here, here, we had something rare and special. “Café society,” he said with a sigh, and we clinked glasses. And at its best, that’s exactly what Puffy’s was: a distinctly American, distinctly New York version of European café society, replete with thick smoke and friendly argument and laughter. Where else could two drunks talk fervently about early modern religious movements, and politics and life, and God knows what else, all night, laughing, occasionally shouting, having a ridiculously good time? Until then, I hadn’t found it—at least not since Dublin. From then on, the tall one—Jimmy—frequently announced, in his booming voice, “It’s the Muggletonian!” on my arrival at the bar. Jimmy and Will had lived in the neighborhood since the mid-1970s and had been friends since they were in their twenties.

  Very soon, they were my friends, too. There was no hazing period at Puffy’s. I fit in right away, although, in one significant way, I was not like them: Like many of the other regulars, Will and Jimmy were painters. The place was crawling with artists—even among the bartenders. Some of them had done well for themselves in the previous decade’s art boom. Some had managed to hold on to at least some of the money, some of the success they’d earned. Some had lived it up and partied like crazy and lost it all. Most were somewhere in between, still painting, still showing their work, but doing construction, proofreading, anything to stay afloat. What made Puffy’s so inviting, what made it work so well, was that here the painters and poets and designers and ironworkers and occasional academics and even lawyers all found common ground.

  The days of abstract expressionist heavyweights like de Kooning and Pollock and Rothko holding court at the Cedar Tavern were long gone, but this had to be the next best thing. I was twenty-four at the time and holding my own just fine with these fortysomethings. At least I could teach them something about Muggletonians. Because, for me, Puffy’s was itself a classroom—a protracted, whiskey-soaked lesson in art history and New York culture, a repository of downtown lore and legend. I cared about politics. Hey, I cared about art. I had grown up in New York, going to museums and galleries and theater and concerts. Maybe the problem was that I’d taken all that for granted. In college, so many of my friends were painters and sculptors. But at Puffy’s, even though I could match those art guys drink for drink, I quickly discovered—to my mild horror—that I did not get all the references.

  One night pretty early on in my time there, the guys were talking about something—God knows what—and laughing. “Like a Robert Ryman painting” was the punch line. Robert Ryman. Who? I quietly cursed myself for not having taken any art history classes. But even as my ignorance embarrassed me, I was excited that here, among these painters, these drinkers, these talkers, I stood to learn so much. When Cory, the Southern painter, rhapsodized about Albert Pinkham Ryder, about his risky technical experiments and abiding Romanticism, I made it my business to find out who the hell this person was, and he soon became one of my favorite painters, too.

  Ken, the wiry, intense guy I’d often spotted in the afternoons, also came around in the evenings now and then, and we got to talking, too. He was a poet and the publisher of a cultish little magazine of literature and art. He had interviewed Auden and Ginsberg and Creeley, spent time in the company of Bukowski, been conned by Corso. And even though I made it clear that I’d rather be reading Blake or Yeats or Wordsworth over any of them any day, I was impressed. His intelligence was swift and sharp; maybe because I knew he was, or had anyway been raised, Catholic, it struck me as Jesuitical.

  “Young poets in New York write about art,” he told me, as though it were a given. I gave it a shot. But my experiences at Puffy’s with the art guys had shown me that I didn’t know nearly as much about art as I thought I did. Ken recommended books, including Robert Atkins’s extremely handy ArtSpeak, an overview of art movements and ideas. I’d sit up at night reading it, absorbing as much information as I was able, so that I could better follow whatever the hell my Puffy’s friends were talking about, that I might know my Art Brut from my Arte Povera, my new realism from my photorealism. (Robert Ryman: Minimalist. White paintings. Check.) One evening at Puffy’s, Ken nodded in the direction of a glamorous older woman who looked European, or South American, or both. Her bearing was regal, if not downright imperious. I’d seen her before. She usually drank sake and kept to herself. “You know who she is?” I did not.

  “Marisol,” he said. One of the most celebrated living women in the visual arts. I clearly knew nothing. Marisol often had two imposing dogs in tow. One was known to be good-natured; the other, vicious. She generally paid me no mind, but on one occasion she moved from one end of the bar down to the front corner, where I had planted myself for the previous few hours. “I have to talk to you,” she said conspiratorially in her high and heavily accented voice. “You zee zat re
pulsive man?” She gestured toward the back of the room at a burly disheveled character. “He wants to sleep with me. Zo I must talk to you eenstead.” Not exactly a compliment, but I was glad to be of service.

  Not long after I’d learned who Marisol was, I showed up at Puffy’s one evening, surprised and saddened to discover that a memorial service for one of her dogs (the good one) was in full swing. When I walked in, someone was eloquently eulogizing the dead Akita. I nudged a friend’s elbow and whispered, “He’s good.”

  “I think it’s Edward Albee,” she said, sotto voce.

  The next day I told my father—a notorious and enthusiastic name-dropper who could seldom be one-upped—that at my bar the previous night, I’d heard Edward Albee eulogize this artist named Marisol’s dog. His eyes got huge. “Do you have any idea what a big deal she was in the sixties?” By then, I had some idea. “I saw her at a party once. She was stunningly beautiful. Sinatra was also there,” he said. “And I couldn’t decide who was more famous.”

  I hardly socialized with my fellow students. Why would I, when I had these friends at Puffy’s, who, I was sure, were giving me a more valuable education anyway? Jimmy’s stories about traveling the world with the famous painter he worked for were certainly more interesting than anything in my dry American literature seminar. The collective reminiscences of seeing bands like the Talking Heads and Blondie and the New York Dolls at places like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, the all-night benders at Tyrannosaurus Rex, the openings at Mary Boone and parties with Jasper Johns were riveting. I might have been the only native New Yorker in the bunch, but my new friends had lived in a New York I’d never really known, a New York that was louder and dirtier and sexier and infinitely more interesting than the one I’d grown up in.