Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123)

by Schaap, Rosie

  I not only felt understood at Puffy’s, I felt valued. Moreover, I even felt pretty. Some women walk into bars and heads turn instantly. Everybody knows this. I am not one of those women. I’ve always been a big girl, which, without going into the complicated, fraught cultural politics of weight, always seemed to give me a literal kind of buffer in bar culture and made it possible to be accepted among men without inevitably becoming the object of romantic attention. But at Puffy’s, my friends were frequently telling me I was beautiful. Was it something in the water? Or maybe the lighting? Was it because they were artists and saw things, and people, differently? It made me feel good. So good that I started to believe them, that when I looked into the mirror in the teeny tiny bathroom at the back of the bar to the right of the dartboard, well, I thought I looked pretty good, too. There was no shortage of sociable and largely harmless flirting among the regulars, and I happily participated. I became bold enough to flirt with non-regulars, too. And, from time to time, after a few drinks, after the talk and flirtation, I became bold enough to go home with near- or total strangers. Despite the risks, that, too, seemed better than another night at Bleak House.

  Within months, Puffy’s had overtaken every aspect of my life. Grad school was pretty much a bust. I fell behind with all of my schoolwork. I’d signed on with Ken as assistant editor of his magazine; my responsibilities included brandishing a hockey stick in his direction when he wasn’t working hard enough (he’s Canadian, so it made a perfect kind of sense), for which I was “paid” in lunches at the local sports bar or at the café at the other end of Harrison Street and drinks at Puffy’s. We’d cut and paste, old-school style, and talk poetry and art. I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday with dinner at an Italian restaurant with Sonia and some of the other women among the Puffy’s regulars. Once, when Louie the bartender was in a bind, I agreed to pick his kids up from school. I’d even invited Paul—the extremely bright Irish bartender—to come talk to my class at BMCC about Irish culture and politics when I’d assigned a few stories from Joyce’s Dubliners. It’s not that Paul wasn’t qualified—he was a native Dubliner, a Trinity alum, and a natural teacher—but was it, possibly, just kind of weird to invite your Thursday night bartender to come and lecture to your Monday afternoon class?

  Maybe this was not a normal way for a twenty-five-year-old woman to live her life. Maybe something really was wrong with me.

  But at least at Puffy’s, most of the time, everything felt easy and good. This was not the case at school, where I was seriously fucking up. Or with my family, from whom I felt more alienated than ever—with the exception of my maternal grandmother, whom I visited every Sunday afternoon, normally bleary-eyed after a long night at the bar, not that she noticed. It was certainly not the case at home, where I proved to be a shitty and irresponsible roommate, seldom present, frequently late with the rent and other bills. The friendship I’d once enjoyed with my roommate had almost dissolved completely, and I knew it was my fault. I was living my life, and my life took place in a bar—a bar from which I’d just as soon have my old friends stay away, even the ones I used to go to bars with and drink with all the time.

  Vanessa was a devoted journal-keeper; she’d kept journals forever, probably since she’d learned to write. And she was in the habit of leaving her journal, an oversize hardback black book, splayed open on the little table just beyond our tiny kitchen. This, I told myself, surely meant that she wanted me to read it. In my heart, I knew it was wrong to read someone’s diary, even if they left it wide open on a table you shared. Oh, it was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. And I found it totally irresistible.

  One morning, as I’m sitting at that little table, drinking my coffee, smoking a cig, slightly hungover as usual, I see the journal in front of me. Open. And the first thing that catches my eye is my name. There. In black ink, in my roommate’s distinctive, cramped, jagged, anxious hand. I can’t say exactly what she’d written verbatim. But I do recall that she observed, not surprisingly, what a fuckup I was in so many ways. I was aware that this was not an unreasonable assessment. She opined further that I was not, however, a terrible person. That I was, actually, a pretty nice person. Well, that’s nice. Even really mean people, she continued, are nice when they’re around me. I wasn’t sure who these mean people she had in mind were, but I liked this fine, too. She remarked that for as long as we’d known each other, I’d demonstrated a knack for making myself “indispensable” at bars; she’d seen it in college at the bar in North Bennington, and to a lesser degree at the Man of Kent, and she could tell that it had happened at Puffy’s, too. Indispensable. An interesting way of putting it, I thought, but sure, fine. All I ever seemed to do these days was go to the bar, she noted. Well, you’ve got me there. I couldn’t argue with her on that point.

  And one more thing.

  She wrote, Rosie has a serious alcohol problem. Or something like that. Maybe it was even starker. Maybe it was Rosie is an alcoholic. Or even Rosie is a serious alcoholic. I managed not to spit-take my coffee across the page.

  I could live with being a fuckup. I had lived with being one for most of my life. I thought that when I finished college, I was on the right track. I’d had setbacks since graduating, but surely they would pass. And, for now, I could also live with being a disappointment. I was still young, and there was hope that someday I would redeem myself. I was sort of flattered by the “indispensable” bit, and accepted it as a peculiar but not necessarily bad trait. But I wasn’t so comfortable with the realization that Vanessa—someone I knew well, who knew me well, someone who was no lightweight when it came to the drink herself—considered me an alcoholic. Because—dumbly or blindly, maybe disclosing some real deficit in the self-reflection department—no matter how much I drank, no matter how many hours I’d logged sitting on my ass on a barstool in the front corner of Puffy’s Tavern, the thought had never occurred to me. Not once.

  Maybe something really was wrong with me.

  What did it mean to be an alcoholic, anyway? To my knowledge, there was no precedent among my kin. My mother, fond of the occasional whiskey sour (on the sweet side, preferably) or Bloody Mary or screwdriver, was never a champ in the booze department. After two drinks, three tops, she was reliably buzzed and content to go no further. I think I’d seen her drunk, properly drunk, once, during a party she’d thrown for a friend when I was about ten. My father’s drinking habits were pretty tame, too. No, I knew of no relative with a reputation for being a serious boozer, no hardcore shikker among the Schaaps.

  But I did have one reference point for what an alcoholic was: a close friend of my mother’s, with whom I’d spent a lot of time when I was growing up. Angie always had a huge bottle of cheap gin stashed in the giant satchel she lugged around. I couldn’t remember a time I didn’t smell alcohol on her breath, a time she wasn’t drunk. I knew I wasn’t like that, like her. I drank in bars, not at home. I drank because I like being in bars, and that’s what you did there. You drank. And you talked. But it could not be denied that I was spending an awful lot of my time in bars. Drinking.

  The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health tells us that alcoholism is a disease characterized by the following four symptoms:

  Craving: A strong need, or urge, to drink.

  Loss of control: Not being able to stop drinking once drinking has begun.

  Physical dependence: Withdrawal symptoms, such as nausea, sweating, shakiness, and anxiety after stopping drinking.

  Tolerance: The need to drink greater amounts of alcohol to get “high.”

  I considered the facts. Yes, I was drinking almost every night. How much? Hard to say. I hadn’t been counting. The liquor flowed freely at Puffy’s. The buybacks were bountiful. Did I crave alcohol? No. I loved drinking, but more than anything, I craved the bar, not the booze, though of course they went together. Did I lose control? Ever since I’d blacked out as a teenag
er in California, I did not want to drink expressly to get drunk—though inevitably I sometimes did get drunk. I drank to feel more relaxed, certainly, but not to get wasted, and not nonstop. Did it take a lot for me to get a good buzz? It is probably true that my tolerance was peaking just around that time—I could hold quite a lot of whiskey in my twenties—but even after just a few sips of Jameson I could feel its calming and comforting effects. And yes, I was able to stop—as soon as I left the bar.

  And that was the hard part: leaving. I frequently stayed at Puffy’s for hours and hours—marathon stretches that lasted from late afternoon until early morning. I thought back on the many long nights I’d spent there. I’d been having fun, hadn’t I? Yes, I had. I’d met interesting, smart people who, in a real and undidactic way, had taught me so much. What had I been doing? Well, mostly, I drank and talked and listened and made friends. Was that so bad? No, I decided, it wasn’t so bad.

  But. But. But. There were a few nights that, on reflection, troubled me. I rarely stayed late enough to close the place, but I recall one time when I did. After four—when bars in New York are supposed to pack it in—the closing bartender dimmed the lights in the front and the few regulars who remained there moved to the back. I stepped out of Puffy’s in broad daylight (it was probably nearly seven A.M.) and made my way two blocks north to Socrates, the local coffee shop. I downed a few cups of coffee and had a greasy, delicious bacon sandwich. In the ladies’ room, I splashed my face with water. And then I walked back past Puffy’s—finally shuttered until the afternoon shift—to BMCC, where I had an eight-thirty A.M. Intro to English Literature class to teach. All the coffee and bacon in the world really couldn’t counteract the plain truth that I was still drunk. Would my students notice? Probably. I always did when, in college, a couple of my own professors occasionally taught under the influence—not that I held it against them. Worse: Would they notice I was wearing exactly what I’d worn yesterday? Some would. For sure. In my office I gave myself something between a pep talk and a talking-to. And then I taught. I was so anxious about my condition that I did my best to overcompensate. It was a good class. But I didn’t feel good about it.

  And another late night came to mind, when after a certain hour—midnight? one A.M.?—the mood shifted. This was often the case. Gone was the collective good cheer of early evening, when the room was alive and packed and thrumming. Later, something somber could creep in and take hold. That night, late, in a nearly empty bar, I found myself having a heart-to-heart with Cory, the Southerner, and I was taken aback when he asked me, with something that sounded like genuine concern, “What the hell are you doing hanging out here?” He took a long swig of beer. “You’re too young for this shit, Rosie. It’s fucking boring.”

  I ordered another Jameson and tried to shrug off his question. I didn’t look at him. I lit another cigarette and stared at the back of the bar, at the rows and rows of bottles that now looked so obviously male, so undeniably martial. For the first time at Puffy’s, I felt a little ashamed of myself, and even though Cory had meant well—was candid, anyway, had gotten real with me, which had come as a shock in the world of the bar, where, ideally, things stay on the surface, superficial, in a good and necessary way, no matter how much you genuinely care about the people around you—I even felt slightly rejected. Did he want me to stop coming? Or was he just warning me, with some self-deprecation and even generosity, of what might come to pass if I kept this up? At the time, he certainly didn’t seem satisfied with the way things had panned out for him.

  I didn’t know what to say. What would I have said? That I found it totally not boring? That this bar, and the people in it, had somehow become the center of my life? It was true, but suddenly I couldn’t ignore that in this there was quite possibly some authentic pathos. Why—at least up to this point, at least until I was asked directly—did this feel like home, and why did these people feel like my people? What did it mean that I felt happier and more accepted in this place—this bar—with these people, mostly men nearly a generation older than me, than I did with my peers, than I did, at the time, anywhere else? Why was I turning down other social opportunities—dinners with old friends, concerts, readings, etc.—to sit, night after night, on a barstool in the front corner of Puffy’s Tavern? By then, I was socializing with my Puffy’s friends to the exclusion of nearly everyone else, mostly at the bar, but also at their homes, at restaurants, at parties, at their art openings, at their performances.

  There is a particular kind of anxiety that can afflict bar regulars, and it borders on the pathological. You go to your bar night after night. And, night after night, the same things happen: The same people turn up, the same conversations are had, and, with some variations, the same stories are told. The same booze is drunk. The same songs are played over and over on the jukebox. One night is almost an exact replica of the one that preceded it. Stick around long enough, show up often enough, and you’ll hear the same jokes—though you might politely pretend that you haven’t. This consistency, this sameness, plays a big part in the comfort of regularhood. And yet, you worry. You worry that if you fail to put in an appearance some night, you might miss something. Maybe that night—the night you decided to study instead, or to go to a movie, or to take the time to cook a real dinner and stay in, or maybe to hang out with people your own age—you’d miss something, something funny, something moving, something important. You could be rational about it. You could assure yourself that, really, you’d miss nothing new. But something nags at you, something tells you that, if nothing else, you’d just miss the placeness of the place. Think a little deeper, and you realize that the bar has imposed a kind of order on your life, and even if it might be a destructive one, it is preferable to no order at all. And if you let yourself get personal about it, even a little sentimental, you tell yourself that most of all, same old same old or not, you’d miss the people, and you’d hope that they missed you, too. And you wouldn’t be wrong about any of this.

  What I could no longer deny after that night with Cory was that the unstudied cosmopolitan dissolution that had charmed me so in many of my fellow drinkers at Puffy’s had a contagious quality, and I wasn’t quite ready for it to claim me completely. I had not only fallen for this place, I’d fallen in love with the people in it. Fortunately, it was worth it; some of the people I met at that bar remain, to this day, among my closest friends. But it was time to move on. New York is a big city, after all. There were other bars. There were other people. Besides, even among my fellow regulars, a general weariness had set in, and everybody seemed to sense that this party—to which I’d arrived so late—was now officially over. There was talk of people moving out west. Of people taking full-time jobs with benefits. Of giving up cigarettes. Of drinking less.

  And among those who still wanted to drink, who still needed this bar culture, this café society, a migration was underway—and it led just a few blocks north and east to some new place on West Broadway. More and more often, Jimmy would swing by Puffy’s for a couple drinks in the early evening and then announce, clearly bored and a little exasperated, “Well, that’s it. I’m heading over to No-Name.” Traitor, I thought. But I understood why he was tired of it.

  I was getting tired, too. I felt as though, among my very grown-up friends at Puffy’s, I, too, had grown up, and it had happened there. I had badly wanted to be part of this world of art openings and dinner parties, poets and painters, performance artists and playwrights, and I got what I wanted. But I also felt that I’d not only grown up, I’d also grown old, and before my time. In a year at Puffy’s, I went from being a chatty young drinker who could hold her own with the big boys to a person anxiously stepping into adulthood with an aversion to responsibility and a hell of a hangover. And the small tragedy of being precocious is that, by definition, you outgrow it. A single solid year at Puffy’s had aged me. I could feel it in my skin, and I could feel it in my soul. I wasn’t ready for that, but I was ready to move on
. Maybe just in very small steps, but at least as far as another bar.

  7.

  ED

  Liquor Store Bar, New York City

  Because of the rats, in the summer of 1996, I’d get home from work and trade in my sandals for a pair of tough, thick-soled hiking boots—the scarred survivors of four Vermont winters—no matter how stupid they looked with a sundress. New York summer weather is usually miserable, but in TriBeCa, where construction projects seemed to be underway on every block—converting old loft buildings into expensive condos—the dust kicked up by the jackhammers and the power of all those generators magnified the sticky, sweaty, wretched haze and made it all feel even worse. And the construction brought out the rats in force, so I’d stomp in those huge heavy boots, lest one or two brazen little bastards dared skitter across my feet, to and from my sublet apartment all the way west on Harrison Street, along the cobbled and badly lit streets of the neighborhood, past Puffy’s up at the next corner, past the restaurants Chanterelle and Nobu, where limos queued up to drop off big spenders, past the Fourth Estate, the magical store on Hudson that traded in precious Persian carpets and international magazines, where the amiable owner listened to opera on the stereo and offered visitors a glass of wine, past the Greek diner and the Korean grocer, across North Moore Street, past Walker’s bar and restaurant at Varick Street.

  I loved those streets. How well I’d come to know them, how confidently I felt like they were mine. I wasn’t afraid of the dark alleys that shot off the side streets like rusted spokes; I was young, and on good days I felt invincible. I had fallen madly back in love with the city where I was born. One more block east, past the firehouse, and then across the street and a tiny backtrack south, to the corner of West Broadway and White Street, and there, at the end of this zigzag circuit through the neighborhood, was Liquor Store—the bar for which I’d all but abandoned Puffy’s, on the ground floor of an 1825 vintage, landmarked, whitewashed Federal-style townhouse with a gabled black gambrel roof.