Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123)

by Schaap, Rosie

  After a year in the apartment I’d nicknamed Bleak House, I’d lucked out in finding new quarters just a block from Puffy’s Tavern, the bar where I had spent the great majority of the previous three hundred and sixty-five nights of my life. But by then, I’d started to grow weary of Puffy’s. I wasn’t the only one. Several Puffy’s regulars had already started drifting a few blocks away to Liquor Store or, as some insisted on calling it, the No-Name Bar. (In its first few months of existence it didn’t have a name, and some people preferred it that way.)

  Its charms could not be denied. Liquor Store was the sunny allegro to Puffy’s dark penseroso. It was well worth trekking a few extra rat-filled streets to get there, straight past many other bars to which my allegiance might have shifted. But Liquor Store stood out from the corner saloons, the taverns with dartboards and pool tables, the endless variations on Irish pubs that dotted the city. It wasn’t a dive, nor was it pretentious. It was just right.

  Like Puffy’s, Liquor Store occupied a TriBeCa corner, but unlike Puffy’s, it was a southwest-facing corner, with excellent afternoon light and, in warmer weather, outdoor tables. Inside it was equally bright and simple: white walls, an oak bar with brass fittings, simple café tables and chairs, an almost total absence of clutter on the walls. The low ceilings made it feel safe and intimate. Although many of the faces were familiar, the atmosphere was strikingly different; physically, anyway, it was a far better facsimile of European café society than Puffy’s. And, as at Puffy’s, there was no shortage of homegrown artists, but at Liquor Store, they were joined by European expats—designers, craftsmen, performers, architects, art dealers, English, Danish, German, Irish—making for a more international crowd, on both sides of the bar, and a better mix of young and old, men and women. And there were lawyers and law students, local rogues, a tugboat captain, a burlesque revivalist, bankers, kitchen workers from the nearby restaurants, poets—a little cross section of the world below Canal Street.

  I couldn’t help drifting over there, too. Puffy’s had given me comfort and security, but it had become routine. And I was certain the friends I’d made there, the ones I loved most, were firmly fixed in my life. I would not lose them by drinking elsewhere—especially if many of them had already decided to drink at the same elsewhere. We needed, and found, a change of scenery. If there was any dissent at Liquor Store, any factionalism, I never felt it. Here, everyone seemed so unfailingly and effortlessly pleased to see one another, so easy, so comfortable.

  Well, almost everyone. On one of my earliest visits, some time before that summer, the first person I saw was that guy. That wiry, skinny, sour-faced, scowling, sort-of-old son-of-a-bitch with the thick black glasses and shitty teeth, a Marlboro always dangling limply from between his lips, as though it were stuck there, part of his long, lined face. An artist of some kind, apparently. Jimmy had introduced us once at Puffy’s, not long before. That night, he didn’t so much say anything as just kind of grunt to acknowledge my existence. And then, when he and Jimmy moved a few barstools away, I heard Jimmy whisper to him, “She’s pretty, right?”

  And I heard him reply, “Yeah, but too big.”

  Well fuck you, you toothless old motherfucker, I thought.

  So when I saw him sitting there at Liquor Store early that summer, I was less than thrilled, and my defenses went up. Cory and Jimmy and a couple of other, less familiar guys were with him at a table. Someone made an introduction.

  “We’ve met,” I said coolly. He just looked at me, unblinking, cigarette dangling, eyelids heavy, nodded, just sat there and gave me a good once-over. I felt exposed and hated being scrutinized like this. What did my friends see in this guy? He sure as hell didn’t say much. And all my Puffy’s friends who’d gravitated to the new place seemed to swarm around him, like he was king of the goddamned universe. I’d never seen these guys, many of whom I’d been drinking with for a solid year by then, quite like this before; they just couldn’t get enough of this guy. At least three of them claimed to be his best friend. I wondered why anyone would want that. Liquor Store, whatever else it may have been—an expat refuge, a peaceable kingdom—was also Ed’s second living room. And I understood that if I still wanted the company of these other men, these other drinkers, I would have to put up with him.

  That summer I had started the weirdest job I ever briefly held down. I worked in the library of a paranormal research organization, based in a grand brick-and-limestone townhouse on the Upper West Side. It paid next to nothing, but I didn’t have to do much. A few days a week, I sat behind a massive desk in a wood-paneled, dusty, magnificently moody library that readily imparted the not unpleasant illusion of being trapped inside a Gothic novel, filed a bit, shelved and reshelved books, and fielded questions from the public—the credulous and incredulous both. One visitor, who’d been eighty-sixed by the organization previously for erratic behavior, sometimes showed up in shambolic disguises—floppy hat, pasted-on beard, trench coat, that sort of thing—to regain access to arcane texts on ESP or something. Far more poignant was the young widow, earnest in her desperate longing to make contact, somehow, with her departed husband, as though there must be some book in our collection that would show the way. Skeptics called and tried to squeeze confessions out of me: Did I really believe in this? Really? Well, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter to me. It was a job, and a pretty cushy one at that, and mostly I read.

  The library’s holdings were all over the place. There was plenty on hauntings and automatic writing and mediums and how to bend spoons with your mental energy, but there were also books about the Shakers, about American spiritualist movements, and mythology and folklore. I particularly relished the works of one Vance Randolph, who collected Ozark songs and stories, a good many of which were bawdy, scatological, or just flat-out raunchy, with titles like “A Good Dose of Clap” and “The Prick Teaser.”

  So after a day among the dead and the undead and the mystics and the psychics, I’d look forward to a few Jamesons down at Liquor Store. Most of my drinking mates knew about my job and would tease me, in a good-natured way, about it. I got used to questions like, “Hey Rosie, bust any ghosts today?” “Bend any silverware . . . with your mind?” And in turn I might tell them about the visiting Girl Scouts—one of whom, a pallid, dark-haired preadolescent with a disconcertingly serious countenance, seemed to have it, the ability to move objects with sheer psychic will. Or I’d tell them about the ectoplasm “samples” I’d seen pictures of, specimens that looked like nothing so much as gnarly swaths of snotted-up cheesecloth.

  Ed seemed vaguely interested in all this. But he only really started paying attention when I mentioned that I’d been reading dirty stories from the Ozarks.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, like he knew something about them. “From the Ozarks?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, still a little defensive around him. “They were collected by this folklorist Vance Randolph—”

  “Shit!” He smiled big, baring those insane teeth unselfconsciously, which seldom happened. “You know who that guy is?”

  Well, I felt like I’d won a prize, and in a way, I had. It’s not that I really had wanted to crack this guy, to break through somehow—I saw no reason to make a special effort—but now that I had, I knew that I could feel more relaxed in his unavoidable company, and that my status as a Liquor Store regular was on more solid ground. Ed was from Missouri, it turned out, though he kept his past, his provenance, his history, more than a little mysterious. (I later learned from Jimmy that he claimed to have been conceived on a Greyhound bus, and also to have once been abducted by Gypsies.) And now it was as though Ed and I were meeting again for the first time. We’d struck on an unlikely contact point. His earlier insult, if not quite forgotten, had receded, and suddenly we were off—on a long, rambling conversation that went on until late. He had a deep voice, and after nearly thirty years in New York, he had not lost a distinct Missouri twang. But I did m
ost of the talking.

  What became clear to me that night was that what distinguished Ed from so many of the men I drank with was this: He was a listener. A great, patient, attentive listener. It didn’t matter if I was telling him a convoluted story that trailed off into nowhere, or something more painful and personal that I would share with few other people. He listened. As much as I valued the light and fluid back-and-forth of bar conversation, the ensemble rhythms of Dublin craíc, the free exchange of bad jokes and friendly teasing and testy argument that were so much a part of my previous bar experiences and so much a part of what I love about bars, in the act of pure listening Ed gave me something different and deeper and, at the time, more necessary. What had seemed like arrogance to me at first was something altogether different: an active interest in what others were saying and doing, and a talent for taking it all in. By the end of the night, I not only felt more certain that I belonged at this bar, but that I’d gotten to know someone of unusual depth and intelligence.

  And so it was for most of the summer of 1996, night after night, having put in my time at the library, I’d swing by the sublet, change the footwear, run the rat gauntlet, and head to Liquor Store. On the best nights, when there was no rain and the heat had abated and maybe there was just a little breeze, the regulars would collect at the tables outside and look down West Broadway to the luminous view of the World Trade Center. Most of my life I’d thought those buildings were so ugly, but from there, from that seat outside the bar, they were so impressive, all lit up as the sun set. And we’d watch the rats dart around the corner and into the grates under the sidewalk, like it was a spectator sport. I’d always run into at least some of my Puffy’s friends there, plus the expats—supercool Adam, an English painter in skinny black jeans and skinny black T-shirts with a jolt of white hair that vee’d into a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead (earning him the nickname the Prince of Darkness), the laddish British furniture restorers drinking pint after pint, the comically laconic Danish businessman always a little scruffy in his wrinkled suits, maybe even the tugboat captain with a penchant for fancy restaurants.

  I loved both of the Irish bartenders, one a little gruff but also warm and funny; the other no-nonsense at first, but engaging and interested once you got to know him, and protective of his regulars. I enjoyed all of them, but as I approached the bar and scanned the sidewalk tables, or peeked through the window, there was really only one person I wanted to see. I’d walk over hoping Ed would be there, practically praying that he would be. And if he was, I was relieved and happy and all felt okay with the world. If he wasn’t, well, I might just turn around and go back to Puffy’s instead.

  I was so uncertain then of the shape my life might take, and often fretful. I was still in graduate school, but paying it less and less mind all the time. And of course the bar was where I went to forget all that, to stop fretting, to drink and talk and put on my cheeriest possible front. At the bar, you don’t so much unload your shit as set it aside. You keep the conversation light; wit is welcome, humor even more valued, but nothing too deep, nothing too serious. Of course, there is the tradition of the stranger who shows up and spills his guts. And then, having confessed all, absolved by the proxy priesthood of the barman, the stranger moves on. I have on one occasion been that stranger, at a bar I’d never visited before and never returned to after. But as a regular, that’s really not what one does. There’s safety in superficiality, in not letting things get too deep or too personal. The bar, usually, is a blessed refuge from the too-deep and too-personal. But my instincts told me that with Ed, I could, and should, get personal. I could talk, I could vent—about work and family and worry—and he would listen, and take it seriously, without issuing judgment or prescription. I knew that as soon as I saw him, as soon as we hugged—and he hugged with great strength and heartbreaking delicacy all at once—I would feel fine. And then I could spend the next hour or two talking his ear off; he would nod, he would focus, he would be absolutely, completely there.

  So of course by then, I got why all these guys had such deep affection for him. Ed clearly didn’t like everybody. But if he liked you, well, he really liked you. And if he didn’t, well, good luck to you. I can’t say exactly that he held many people in contempt, I don’t think that’s what it was, but often, he sure looked like he did. If he took to you, he made it clear. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was happy to see you. In the way he called out your name. Or extended a barstool or chair to you. Or threw his arms around you and embraced you with his usual disarming tenderness.

  After our inauspicious start, we had become fast friends. And after finding him so unappealing at first, I now found him singularly beautiful. I wasn’t sure that it was romantic love, exactly; I wasn’t sure what it was. I think many of us—Ed’s drinking friends—were a little bit in some kind of love with him. But I suspect that because I was a woman in this company of men, I felt I had to think harder about this. I didn’t especially want to have a crush on a drinking buddy. Particularly a married drinking buddy. I told myself it was fine; my crush on Ed was probably no different from the man-crushes so many of the guys seemed to have on him.

  But one night something happened. It was a charmed night: Everyone was happy, the little room thick with smoke and full of laughter. I was sitting at a table with Ed and Jimmy and a couple of other guys. Ed and I got into some kind of loud argument. I have no memory of what we were fighting about, but suddenly we were standing up, palms planted on the little table, screaming at each other. And then, just as suddenly, we kissed, right across the table. It was quick. Just as quickly, we backed away from each other. It was nothing, and it was something. The room’s din died down, everything went into a spin for a moment, then stopped. I knew that it would never happen again, and it shouldn’t. Jimmy sat there gaping. I was pretty sure he’d give me shit about it some day, even if he never said a thing about it to Ed.

  I didn’t return to the bar the next night. It wasn’t that I was avoiding Ed—I never wanted to avoid him—but I was afraid that maybe he would now think less of me. Two nights later I was ready to return. I had to. Liquor Store was where I lived in the off-hours and, besides, regardless of what had happened—a small thing that had now become overblown, amplified, outsized in my conscience—I still had to see Ed.

  I ran into him before I even got to the bar. He was walking across North Moore Street, too, and when I saw him from half a block away, I picked up my pace and caught up with him. “Hey Ed.” I nodded.

  “Rosie.” He nodded.

  We said nothing more. We proceeded to Liquor Store, where he ordered a beer and I ordered a Jameson. And it felt like everything was completely back to normal—like it had never not been normal. There would never be another kiss, and that was a good thing. Instead, there would be more talking, more listening, more drinking, and a greater deepening of our friendship. If anything, things were easier now, like some air had been let out.

  Summer was nearly shifting into fall, and my time in the sublet was running out. I couch-surfed in the neighborhood for a while. I started looking at apartments in Manhattan, but there was nothing I could afford. A friend told me that there was an apartment available in the building next door to her in Brooklyn. I didn’t want to move to Brooklyn. Really, I didn’t want to leave a ten-block radius of Liquor Store. But I went and checked the place out. It was a real apartment, with space and light and closets and high ceilings, and the price was right, and friends lived next door. In October I moved in, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time at Liquor Store, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to see Ed nearly as often. But I felt that now, with a place of my own and some distance from TriBeCa and its bars, my life would start to stabilize. And it did. For a while I was happy to set up house and refinish the floors and paint the walls and scavenge for furniture and cook real dinners. I missed the almost-nightly sessions at Liquor Store, but I felt ready to start acting like an adult, or
something. And maybe adulthood was finally ready for me.

  That fall, in dizzyingly rapid succession, I got an apartment, I got a cat, and I got involved with a really good, really smart guy. Someone my own age. Someone I didn’t know from a bar. Frank and I had met during graduate school orientation the previous year and slowly became friends. We wound up in a few classes together—Spenser; Yeats and Linguistics; Revolutionary Poetics. We taught at the same community college, where we, as brand-new professors, were in the same small group of teachers who had to meet weekly with a supervisor who helped us figure out how to do our job. In these meetings and in our classes together, Frank impressed me. Whenever he spoke in our seminars, he did so judiciously: the points he made were always insightful and nuanced, never gratuitous, never uttered just to show off. He was an excellent reader with a broad and interesting mind, and a fine writer. And in our little teaching group, I also discovered that he was a stand-up guy with a strong sense of justice. Once, when one of the other male students in the group launched a vicious verbal attack on one of the women in the group—disagreements about pedagogy could get heated, but I’d never heard anything like this—Frank cleared his throat and calmly said, “I doubt you’d talk this way to me. Or to any other man.” The perpetrator was silenced. No one in the room would ever forget that. We all knew that Frank was right. Much as I wished I’d said it, I was glad he had. My respect for him multiplied, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly when I started to fall in love. Not long after that, we tried to make a plan to see a movie together, but couldn’t figure it out. In December, he mentioned that he was having a small birthday dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in Chinatown. I promptly invited myself. And that’s when and where our romance really began—over platters of duck with flowering chives, Singapore mai fun, clams with black beans, and roast pork with ginger-scallion sauce.