Normal things were happening in my life, which surprised me, and I think it also surprised many of my bar friends. Not long after Frank and I had started dating, I took him to meet my Puffy’s and Liquor Store friends, and I soon felt pretty terrible about subjecting him to their scrutiny. But it was necessary, because these people had become like another family to me. Frank was low-key and often shy, a generally mild-mannered, even-tempered academic. Some members of my bar family were friendly and open and welcoming. Some just tried to take a reading of him, like they were checking out a horse at auction. And others, just a few, were downright hostile. One especially tart-tongued friend grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him right in the eyes: “If you fuck with this girl,” she said, “I will superglue your hand to your dick.” I tried to laugh it off, but I could tell that he hadn’t found it funny.
Part of me was moved by how protective some of my friends were. And part of me felt uncomfortable, even resentful, and it made me wonder if maybe some among them didn’t want me to get on with my life, to behave like a normal person in her twenties probably should, as if I should just stay put in this little world of bars, drinking every night, occasionally fucking men whom I did not love, with whom it was understood there would be no future. I knew something serious was happening in my life, and I knew that such seriousness fits uneasily into bar culture. Ultimately I didn’t really care what most of the crowd thought of my boyfriend, as long as they were courteous and not too scary. But I did care what Ed thought. I trusted him. I trusted his judgment. I knew he didn’t like everybody. His approval mattered.
So when Frank and I went to Liquor Store together one evening, I did a quick check through the window to see if Ed was there. He was. I took a deep breath and collected myself, like we were about to have an audience with the Godfather, and we walked inside. I’d told Frank about Ed. I’d gushed about him. He knew that it was important to me that they meet.
I introduced them. They shook hands. We sat down. Not much was said. A few questions. A few answers. They were both quiet men. I felt tense and a little awkward. I made some small talk, mostly about how great they both were, as though it were a public relations event or a diplomatic summit. I talked up Ed’s art and Frank’s scholarship, both of which I ardently admired. But the point was to get them talking to each other, and that wasn’t happening. What would get them going? There had to be something. Finally, it hit me: It had been Missouri folklore that had brought Ed and me together, the night we became friends. The Show-Me State would come to the rescue once again.
“Frank, Ed’s a big Twain fan,” I said casually. Frank was, too, even though Mark Twain was well out of the realm of his academic specialization in English Romanticism. But that was all it took. For fun, Frank had recently reread Pudd’nhead Wilson for the first time in years, and he and Ed had found their subject. Now I could sit back for a spell and just listen. Perfect.
Frank and I had a couple of drinks and left. Everything seemed to have gone fine, but I wasn’t sure what Ed thought.
“He’s cool, right?” I asked Frank.
“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “He’s cool. And really smart.”
Not long after their first meeting, Frank arrived at Liquor Store before me one night. He later told me that Ed had grilled him. “He wanted to make sure my intentions were honorable,” Frank told me. He said that they were. Frank was touched by Ed’s concern, and relieved that no threats to his person had been made.
The next time I returned to Liquor Store by myself I found Ed alone at a table. I got a whiskey and joined him. He nodded and said quietly, “He’s a nice young man.” I already knew that, but I needed to hear it from Ed.
I’d still stop by the bar now and then after work, but my visits became rarer. I was starting a new life, one that relied less on the bar. But on a bright sunny spring day in 1998, Frank and I found ourselves in TriBeCa and headed to Liquor Store. We ran into Ed a block south of the bar, on West Broadway. He was unusually worked up, uncharacteristically loquacious. He delivered a rapid-fire monologue. He and his wife had been in New Mexico. “It was weird, man. Even went to Roswell. Looked at some property. Checked some shit out.” He’d finally gotten around to seeing a dentist. And he’d been to the doctor, for the first time in years. Something was wrong. There would be some kind of operation. But he’d be okay, he assured us. I told him that Frank and I were planning our first trip together, to Europe. His parents were living in Bayreuth for a year. “Well, if you’re going to Munich, let me know,” Ed said. “I have people there.”
Later, I called Ed. Sure, we’d go to Munich, an easy train ride from Bayreuth. We’d need to get away from the parents for a few days. We talked for nearly an hour. “Go to my gallery, on Maximilianstrasse. And go to my friend’s restaurant, near the market. And drink at Schumann’s. Use my name,” he said. “And yeah, the museums. You should go to those, too.” I jotted all the names and numbers down in a notebook. Thanks to Ed, Frank and I spent three wonderful days in Munich, meeting Ed’s friends, eating and drinking in places where he was as beloved as he was at Liquor Store. But the best and most revealing part of our visit to Munich was seeing his art there. At his gallery, an assistant patiently pulled drawings from the flat files and reverently showed us fine, funny drawings, funny and tough and tender, mostly in black with occasional shots of other colors, spare but not at all stingy—beautiful in an off-center way, a way that makes you stop and think about what beauty is, anyway, not unlike their maker. This is where Ed really abides, I remember thinking, in his work. This is who he is. This is where all of that listening, all of that reception, all of that quietness and patience, all of that toughness and discernment go.
But by that November, something else was wrong. I’d heard through the grapevine that Ed had been diagnosed with cancer. Really bad, advanced cancer that had started in one organ and metastasized elsewhere. Soon after I heard the news, I caught up with him at Liquor Store. He wasn’t smoking anymore. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, and neither, it seemed, were most of the guys. They were clearly distraught, but trying to act like everything was okay, or was going to be okay. It was unusually quiet around the bar. After that, he was in and out of the hospital.
I called him at the hospital a few times, and his voice was weaker with every conversation. “Don’t visit,” he said emphatically. He’d told others the same thing. He didn’t want visitors; he didn’t want people to see him like that—other than his wife and the doctors. I talked to people about it. I couldn’t stand thinking that I might never see him again. I wanted to respect his wishes. But I was also scared. What would I say? I couldn’t imagine treading lightly around Ed. I knew that would piss him off. And in the face of death, I was suddenly, weirdly, shamefully timid. I stayed away. And when he died, less than five months after he’d been diagnosed, I regretted it. But even Jimmy—the best of all those who made the claim of being Ed’s best friend—had obeyed his wishes.
There was a round of phone calls one day in late March 1999. Ed had died. And as much as I expected a call, as much as I knew it was coming, the news punched me in the gut. I hated that I hadn’t gone to see him. I hated even more that he was gone. Ed had only been part of my life for a short time. Should that have made his loss harder or easier to bear? I couldn’t tell. I knew how crushed Jimmy, who’d known Ed for thirty years, since they were boys—“we’re still boys,” Jimmy once said—must have been. They had traveled the world together, working for a famous artist. They had spent mornings drawing together on a hotel balcony in Hawaii. They had been poor, grubby young artists together in Manhattan in the seventies. During the course of their friendship, they had seen each other through odd jobs and successes and failures, through girlfriends, through their courtships and marriages, through everything. I tried to imagine how he must have felt, the enormity of the loss. At the same time, I was jealous. He’d had decades of Ed; I’d only had a few years.
&nbs
p; In my cubicle at work the next day, I cried. I’d recently left graduate school and was pretty new to my job at a publishing company. My coworkers busily passed by. I wanted to shake them, explain to them that, really, I wasn’t hysterical, but something hugely important had happened. But there was copy to edit, there were faxes to send, there were phone calls to make, there was shit to do. I went to the office of one colleague whom I’d become friendly with and told her that a friend had died.
“He was the most amazing person I’ve ever known,” I told her. “And a great artist. A really great artist.”
She said she was sorry about my loss. “How did you know him?”
“From the bar,” I said.
She was not unsympathetic, but she looked a little puzzled. Like it was strange that I should be so invested in someone I knew from a bar, someone I drank with. I hadn’t grown up with Ed. He was not a relative, though he was family in a way that was suddenly too hard to explain. We had not gone to school together. We had never worked together. We knew each other because, night after night, for just a couple of years, we drank in each other’s company. Something felt uncomfortably snobbish about my coworker’s puzzlement, as though the affinities upon which friendships are based should be prescribed by having gone to the same school or working in the same field, as though having a friend who was male and significantly older was somehow suspect, as though having a bar in common was not an acceptable foundation for true friendship.
And part of me understood my coworker’s puzzlement, because I knew that what I’d wanted—at least what I thought I’d wanted—from bar life was something both real and less than real, a kind of controlled, convivial shallowness. The bar was not where one went to get deep, nor certainly to cultivate the kinds of friendships that might someday lead to hard, horrible mourning. It is convenient to compartmentalize, and I have frequently done just that: There are friends, and there are bar friends. Clearly, in Ed’s case, the line had blurred. And I couldn’t imagine missing anyone more.
Jimmy got busy organizing the first of two memorial services. This one would be casual, at a larger bar right across the street from Liquor Store. He called me a few nights before the memorial and asked if I wanted to read something. Yes, of course I did. But it took me a while to figure out what. I thought back to the first time Ed and I really talked—the long night of whiskey and cigarettes and Ozark folklore. I recalled how when we met, I was working in the paranormal library, how I’d told him about the young widow who repeatedly visited, wanting so earnestly to communicate with her departed beloved. And I remembered reading, somewhere, a letter Twain had written, in which he spoke of friendship:
I remember you & recall you without effort, without exercise of will;—that is, by natural impulse, undictated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth the having. When we think of friends, & call their faces out of the shadows & their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, & do it without knowing why, save that we love to do it, we may content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, & not a Fancy—that it is builded upon a rock, & not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides & carry their monuments with them.
About a dozen people spoke at the memorial. Jimmy went first. He ended his talk by describing Ed’s hugs. “Did you ever hug Ed?” he asked. “It was like one of his sculptures”—here, his deep voice cracked—“fragile, but still strong, and still very beautiful.” Exactly. I read the Twain. And it’s true: It takes no effort to think on Ed. It is all natural impulse, and I do love to do it, even as it still breaks my heart.
At home that night, hours after the memorial, Frank and I were in bed, and I started to cry again. “You know,” I said, as though it were a confession, “I was madly in love with him.”
“I know,” Frank said, with no anger, no jealousy, no surprise, only understanding. “I know.” I wondered if it had been that obvious to everyone.
I thought back to that summer when I first got to know Ed, when I first noticed that here was someone rare, someone I could rely on, someone who was more to me than just a drinking companion. I thought of the widow at the paranormal library, how I’d been moved by, but also dismissive of, her hopeless yearning to make contact with her dead husband. Now that I had lost someone I loved—someone who was not a relative, someone I’d chosen to be part of my life—I understood her better, and felt ashamed that I’d ever been dismissive of her quest.
After Ed died, I sometimes went back to Liquor Store. If I had to pick a favorite New York bar, it was the one. It hit the sweet spot: I was in it, I was of it, I was happy to be there, but I never felt I’d gotten in too deep, never felt obligated to put in an appearance. I don’t recall ever getting crazy drunk there, ever losing it, ever being appallingly fucked up—well, once maybe—ever leaving wishing I hadn’t gone that night. I always was there because I wanted to be there. There was no pressure. I did stop by a few days before my wedding in 2002. The usual suspects, mostly married guys in their forties and fifties, were there at the bar. I announced that my wedding was the following weekend and asked for the best marriage advice they could offer. “Go ahead,” I said. “Lay it on me.”
“Separate bars, darling,” a furniture restorer, one of the British lads, shouted back. “Separate bars.”
When Liquor Store closed in 2005 after a drawn-out battle with neighbors who objected to its outdoor seating, part of me mourned its passing, but part of me was fine with it, because I felt that without Ed, the place just hadn’t really been itself anyway. Despite the presence of many familiar drinking associates, it was too empty, and too painful.
And all these years later, I still think about Ed all the time—every day, really—and no matter how many excellent drinking companions I’d come to know since then, I’ve never found another person whose company I’d rather have at the bar. Jimmy and I don’t hang out together nearly as much as we used to, but we do run into each other once in a while. And whenever we do, every single time, like we can’t stop ourselves, because we really can’t, we talk about Ed. My failure to visit Ed in the hospital still haunts me. Jimmy insists that I did right by obeying his wishes. I’ll never be sure. But when we get past that discussion, we get back to what exactly it was about the guy that made us love him so intensely. We’ve tried to figure out why it is that we still talk about him constantly, what made him a drinking companion unlike any other. “He just made me feel special,” Jimmy told me not long ago while we shared a bottle of wine. “Maybe because there were so many people he didn’t want to talk to.”
We clinked our glasses.
Here’s to you, then, you toothless old motherfucker, I thought. How I wish you hadn’t up and died on us.
“He made me feel special, too,” I said. “I felt really lucky to be loved by Ed.”
“You were lucky,” Jimmy said.
I was.
8.
BAR CHAPLAIN
The Fish Bar, New York City
My friend Paul—barman, scholar, and gentleman, previously of Puffy’s Tavern and sundry other drinking establishments—pulled me aside at the holiday party Frank and I threw in 1999. His cheeks were flushed and his spirit elevated after a few cups of glögg—that irresistible Scandinavian winter delight composed of red wine, vodka, and brandy, slowly, slowly, slowly brought to a simmer with orange peels, cloves, and cardamom.
“You know what I want?” he asked me, quietly but excitedly, almost in a whisper. More glögg, I might have guessed. But that wasn’t it. “I want to have a bar,” he said, “where a woman could come in, sit down with a book, read, have a drink, and not be bothered.” He was excited to open, finally, after so many years of pulling pints and mixing martinis at other people’s bars, a place of his own (or almost his own; he had a partner in his friend and fellow bartender John, an acerbic Welshman and former rock-and-ro
ll roadie).
The following month the two took over the space formerly occupied by an old dive on Fifth Street in the East Village, rechristened it the Fish Bar, and opened for business. The place was tiny, with a bar that seated about eight, a banquette for about ten more against the back wall, and a few wobbly two-top tables in between. It was dark and cramped, and efforts had been made to liven it up with a nautical theme. Sometimes the seafarer scheme—in bluish greens and greenish blues, with anchors, and arty fish, and coral and shells, etc. etc. etc.—gave me the unsettling sensation that I was getting drunk in a boy’s nursery. But I could get past that. We were there because of Paul, and because of the environment he created.
Yes, here was a place where a lone woman might stop by, sit herself down at the bar, and quietly read, reasonably confident that no drunks would menace her (though one might buy her a drink), where the prices were right, where the bartenders knew what they were doing. Frank and I felt at home there right away, alongside a handful of holdovers from the previous bar and other drinkers who, like us, had followed Paul and John to their new place, and a few strangers who wouldn’t stay strangers for long—the cute young couple consisting of a chef and a painter, a lanky and affable middle-aged interior designer with a litany of health problems, and an argumentative cartographer.
Conveniently, I was still working at the publishing company, only a few blocks west of the bar, though I was starting to have other ideas about what I might do with my life. The Fish Bar was a perfect after-work spot, where, more often than not, Frank would meet up with me after his day’s work—writing his dissertation—had wound down, too. We might break up our evenings with a bite somewhere in the neighborhood, return to the Fish Bar for a nightcap (or two), and then make our way back to Brooklyn. We had settled into a comfortable domestic groove, and Paul and John’s little place felt like an extension of our home.
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