Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123)

by Schaap, Rosie

  • • •

  I’d heard that after Liquor Store had closed, loosing a diaspora of regulars out into the city, many members of the old gang had wound up at Good World. Adam lived nearby; Luke had a studio within spitting distance. Others were willing to “commute” from TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and even Staten Island. So I figured that if I stopped by, the chances were good that I’d see some familiar faces. One fall evening in 2005, I left work in a fine mood, got on the F train, and headed downtown. Good World was conveniently situated just about halfway between my office and my Brooklyn apartment; it would be easy to have a drink or two there on the way home. I got off the train at East Broadway, the last stop in Manhattan, and was a little disoriented, not quite sure where to exit, until I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder and a soft, low voice speak my name.

  “Rosie?” It was Henry, a dryly funny artist I’d been drinking with since my Puffy’s days more than ten years earlier. “You going to the Good World?”

  Yes, I told him, I was. But I couldn’t quite remember how to get there. Even as a native New Yorker, I easily got turned around in this neighborhood of dead ends, doglegs, and angles that obeyed no ordered grid. “Follow me,” he said. Suivez-moi. A call to drinks.

  So far, this Good World business was working out. As soon as I got off the train, I already had a friend to lead me there and to drink with. And once we got to the bar, there were about a half-dozen guys I already knew. Some, like Ian, were only familiar by sight; we’d crossed paths at Liquor Store, where he became a regular just as I’d started mostly drinking elsewhere. Others, like Luke and Fritz, whom I was delighted to see again, had been regular drinking companions from years back. And still others, like Adam, by then solidly counted as friends, both in and out of the context of the bar.

  That first evening at Good World, aside from Mariana, the sweet, stunning, splendidly tattooed bartender, I was the only woman at the bar. There was a lot of catching up to do, since I hadn’t seen most of that crew in ages. The one or two drinks I planned to have after work turned into four or five, and I left around eight, agreeably buzzed as I got back on the F train. It had felt like a homecoming. It had been a good evening. I was happy to be seen, and to see.

  Within just a few weeks, I was there about every other night. I became a regular so quickly, so effortlessly, it felt like I was filling a space that had been left open for me. But more than any other bar where I’d spent lots of time, Good World felt actively, powerfully, predominantly male. More than anywhere else, my femaleness stood out. “It’s so nice to have a woman at the bar,” Mariana said to me one evening, and one of the guys, who was sitting on the next stool, agreed. I told Mariana I’d try to bring more women in, balance the place out a bit.

  I launched a campaign of sorts. One night, I asked my friend Alexandra to meet me there for a drink. She liked the place. Two evenings later, my friend Dina joined me. She liked it, too. When Ian walked in that night, he saw me and did a double take. “You’re here almost as often as me,” he said, laughing. Not quite, I thought. Not yet. The following weekend, I was sitting at the bar with another girlfriend. She, too, liked the place, the bartender, the lightness of the conversation, the ease with which everyone greeted everyone else, the uncomplicated fellowship.

  But no matter how much any of my female friends enjoyed themselves at Good World, and they all did, none—not a one—seemed to have any desire to return the next night, or the next, or the next. Regularhood—the thing that interested me most, the thing I had craved and missed, the singular condition of bar culture that confers both comfort and privilege—held out to them no metaphysical allure, no sense of necessity. And this, I realized, set me apart as a woman who loves bars: the need to be known, to have a place of one’s own, a place I could call my bar. Of course it was not my bar, not literally; it had owners; it was a business. But as a regular, one feels a sense of ownership; one is invested, if not financially, then in every other possible way.

  One of the bartenders had christened the crew of late afternoon/early evening regulars—a mix of expat and American men mostly in their late forties to early sixties—the Golden Girls, after the popular eighties sitcom about a group of plucky old ladies living together in Florida. Some of the guys took it in good humor; others were decidedly not amused. I was amused, even though I acknowledged with faint unease that, though female and younger, I was considered a Golden Girl, too. I loved my fellow Golden Girls, who were always ready with stories and (generally dreadful) jokes, always ready to talk about music—there were those who only wanted to listen to jazz, those who never wanted to hear it, those who loved the Smiths, those who hated them, and invariably, all of the English expats sang along enthusiastically to Ian Dury—or politics or the day’s news or any old BS that demanded a public airing in the safety of the bar. But there were many times I felt like the Margaret Dumont to their collective Groucho Marx. Now and again, if the conversation got a little too salty, a little too focused on a general or specific critique of female anatomy, I’d give a great dramatic eye roll and say, for example, “Oh, Ellis!” instead of “Mister Firefly!” And he’d cast his eyes downward, say, “Yeah, sorry,” lightly slap his wrist, and tell himself, “Behave now, Ellis!”

  And sometimes if they gossiped about an absent member of the group, I’d try to say something in the slandered party’s defense, which can seem tedious and scolding and out of the spirit of the uncomplicated, everyday pleasure that we relied upon the bar to give us. (In this respect, Don Marquis was not far off the mark in Her Foot Is on the Brass Rail: “It is not the occasional rowdiness, the semioccasional bawdiness, of this barroom conversation which I chiefly regret. It is the philosophical admixture . . . spouted forth with the removal of all inhibitions. The very presence of a woman—any woman, any kind of woman—checks this.”) Ellis told me more than once, “You keep us in line.” Maybe so. But certainly not all the time. Increasingly, I behaved just as they did.

  One night, my normally good-natured friend Ian—a musician turned graphic designer, the well-mannered, amiable, and exceedingly polite son of an RAF officer—delivered, after a bad day at work, an uncharacteristically foulmouthed tirade. His girlfriend, Laura, was not present. I was shocked. Even Ellis, not known for self-editing, was taken aback. “Man, you never talk like that, especially when there’s a woman around,” he said.

  “Except me,” I pointed out.

  “You don’t count,” Ian shot back. “You’re one of the lads.”

  One of the lads. Even if I already knew this, already knew that I was one of them, hearing it said out loud stunned me. It made me feel good, and it made me feel slightly queasy. I was extremely comfortable among these men, but I wasn’t sure I was totally comfortable with this not-counting business. Besides, if it was true that I really had become one of the lads, Ian shared in the responsibility for producing this condition, because, in me, he had created a monster. Of sorts.

  Ian may seldom have cussed up a storm, but there was another language in which he was utterly fluent. Its lexicon included words like fixtures, tables, results. Strikers, wingers, attacking midfielders. Offsides, fouls, corners. Arsenal, Liverpool, Aston Villa . . . and, above all, Tottenham Hotspur, the undeniably charming name—with its pleasing consonance and satisfying glottal stop, its neat internal rhyme and arguably Shakespearean provenance—of the team he had loved and supported nearly all his life. Ian spoke the language of soccer, in the dialect of the English Premier League, and in this he was not alone at Good World. Adam had been devoted to Chelsea since his youth, and others had followed his enthusiastic lead, probably in hopes that doing so might make them equally cool. The bar did not have a television, but for important EPL matches, and for major international soccer events like the European and World Cups, a projection screen was hung from a back wall and the place filled up with fans.

  I grew up in a family in which the playing of sports was by no
means essential, but the culture of sport, its history and lore, was pervasive. My father was a sportswriter and reporter, and although he and my mother separated when I was seven, his vocation had left its mark on our family. Hundreds of hours of my childhood were spent at Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden, usually bored out of my mind. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Winter Olympics, particularly the figure skating, but this is not uncommon among women I know. And the single possession I treasure most is a photograph of me, at age three, with Muhammad Ali. He is dressed in khakis and a pith helmet—the picture was taken around the time of the Rumble in the Jungle—and his formidable boxing-gloved hand rests firmly atop my small head. My pudgy little-kid fists are raised toward him, as though I could take him on. Perhaps because of this photograph, and because of boxing’s rich literary history, and because, I will admit, of its sheer theatrical brutality, which I shamefully find irresistible, fights have always been interesting to me, though I seldom watch them anymore.

  As for baseball, I was born and will die a Mets fan—an allegiance dutifully served to my beloved maternal grandfather—but I am an extraordinarily lazy and ignorant one, whose grasp of the mechanics of the game will never be better than tenuous. I got excited about hockey for a short spell of two or three years, mostly during college, where the Vermont climate seemed well suited to the enjoyment of the game, and then abruptly stopped caring. For most of my life, sports were never so much my thing—in part, I’m sure, to distinguish myself among my kin.

  Resentment figured into my resistance, too. I blamed sports, to some extent, on my father’s frequent absences even when my parents were still together; he often had to go to games, as it was part of his job. In my adolescence, I often made some money by transcribing his lengthy interviews with athletes. After typing up hours and hours of conversation with one savagely mind-numbing dullard, I complained bitterly to my father. He seized this as an opportunity to teach me a lesson about not stereotyping people and told me that the first time he met Jerry Kramer—the celebrated Green Bay Packer of Super Bowls I and II and not, I hasten to add, the subject of the interview in question—the strapping right guard was sitting on a bed in a motel room somewhere in America, reading a book of poems by Wallace Stevens. Well, I hadn’t read Wallace Stevens yet and was duly impressed. My lesson was learned: Jocks are people, too, and sometimes they even read really hard poems.

  Many years later, I was working on a project at my father’s office. He was sifting through a big pile of his papers from the sixties and came across a note that made him blanch. He looked at me and said gravely, “There’s something I have to tell you.” I asked him what it was. He turned away from me and answered, “It wasn’t Wallace Stevens. It was Rod McKuen.”

  We never spoke of it again. I don’t blame it on Rod McKuen—though I guess I could—but gridiron football would never do a thing for me. Soccer was another story. It probably didn’t hurt that it is the sport in which the rest of my family seemed to have the least interest. Frank and I happened to be in France during the 1998 World Cup, and it was impossible not to share in the excitement of the people around us, not to get caught up in their collective joie de football. Evening after evening in a little Franco-Irish pub in the Loire Valley, we’d join the locals to watch the games. And as we continued our travels around Europe that summer, we watched matches as often as possible. I especially loved the Netherlands’ national team, partly out of some sense of duty to my Dutch heritage, I suppose, but also because their style—even though it was by then little more than a shadow of the Total Football for which the Dutch had been famous in the 1960s and 70s—looked so intelligent and elegant, and when they lost to the indisputably great but far flashier Brazilian side in a penalty shootout in the semifinals, I was crushed.

  Ian knew about my half-assed, fair-weather, World-Cup-centric interest in soccer. He also knew that I was at least nominally a Mets fan, and therefore predisposed to champion an underdog. To top it off he was certainly aware that I am Jewish, and Tottenham—for historical reasons about which there is considerable disagreement—has long been a team beloved of the Jews of north London and, by extension, elsewhere. This confluence of three key elements—you seem to like soccer well enough anyway, you root for losers anyway, and you are a Jew anyway—formed the heart of Ian’s compelling case for my candidacy for Spurs fandom, which he launched in earnest in the fall of 2006. “Why don’t you just come watch a match with us sometime?” he suggested gently and casually, not being a hard sell kind of guy. Okay, I agreed. Sure. Why not?

  Let the record, an excited flurry of e-mails, show that I watched my first Tottenham Hotspur FC game on Sunday, November 19, 2006, a few days after I’d received this missive from Ian:

  I’ll be watching the Tottenham game at Central Bar. We’ll be there for the 11 am kick-off. Come prepared to be disappointed, it’s part of being a Spurs fan (“It’s the hope that kills you, not the despair”).

  It was an unremarkable, uninspired, even a little bit ugly match against Blackburn, a team I have detested with nearly irrational fervor ever since. I brought a pen and the Sunday New York Times Magazine with me; in the event that my interest waned, I would at least have a crossword puzzle at hand. The game, played on a rain-soaked pitch, ended in a 1–1 draw. Ian’s brow was tightly furrowed throughout, his focus intent. I was not exactly riveted, but for most of the ninety minutes of play, the crossword puzzle stayed in my bag. When we went outside to smoke after it had ended, Ian scrunched up his face and shrugged his shoulders. I got the message: This was how it was, being a Tottenham fan, and I couldn’t say he hadn’t warned me.

  As I wish to remember the chain of events, despite this lousy first game, I returned, week after week, and gradually started to catch on, to get into it, to figure out who was who, who did what, who was good, who was not, to pick favorites (the suavely skillful and broodingly handsome Bulgarian striker Dimitar Berbatov) and not-favorites (the beleaguered and often hapless goalkeeper Paul Robinson, whose best seasons with the Spurs were by then over). In the version in which I prefer to remember how my love for Tottenham Hotspur took hold, what happened was that I persisted until, to my utter amazement, I was hooked, I was invested, I cared. I like to recall it as an experience of natural and incremental engagement, in which each game I watched deepened my commitment, no matter if it concluded with a win or a loss or a draw.

  But the same e-mail record offers evidence that something quite different had actually been going on. It reveals that once the seed of the notion of the possibility of my becoming a Tottenham Hotspur supporter had been planted, it instantly took root. It is a fact that the first Spurs game I watched was the dismal one against Blackburn on the nineteenth of November in the year 2006. It is also a fact that a few days before this momentous and ultimately life-changing occasion, in an e-mail to a college friend and fellow New York Mets fan, I wrote, “After the letdown of the baseball season, I am devoting all of my sportsfan energy exclusively to Tottenham Hotspur.” So it was not something as organic as I wanted to recall, but a deliberate and willful decision. It was, in its way, a lifestyle choice. I had made up my mind. I wanted to be a soccer fan, and, specifically, a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

  Exactly what had brought on this ardent desire eludes me. Was it just that I craved something new with which to keep myself occupied? Was it that Ian’s abundantly apparent joy in the game itself, and especially in his team, was truly infectious? Was it that, in soccer fandom, I recognized another means by which to effect my complete assimilation among the Golden Girls, to galvanize my place in the tribe, if that was in fact what I wanted to do? Probably all of the above. Still, the extent to which I came to care was, if not cause for amazement, surprisingly deep and consuming. It wasn’t long at all before I was arranging my weekends around Tottenham games (“Sunday brunch? Okay. But it’ll have to be after one-thirty.”) and taking lunch late at work to catch the second half of the occa
sional game that aired on weekday afternoons at a pub near my office. In soccer, the game loved so intensely by so many people throughout so much of the world, I had found a sport that I, too, could love—a straightforward game with simple rules, thrilling speed, admirable efficiency, and many instances of beauty. And maybe that was all I’d wanted: a sport I could call my own, and a team I could call my own, after having spent most of my life as an outsider.

  Ian was, and remains, the best soccer mentor a novice could have—never pushing too hard, gently offering counsel as necessary, pointing out pretty plays and great runs and spectacular saves without any disagreeable air of didacticism, and I believe that he considers me one of the resounding successes among his disciples. I threw myself into my soccer education with gusto, and sought out sources independent of his tutelage. I read books and blogs, watched classic clips on YouTube, diligently followed news of transfers and injuries, learned all the words to a number of Tottenham chants (which Ian, being as well-mannered as he is, rarely partakes of and often frowns upon, and which I would never dare to vocalize in his presence, save for the tame and frequent battle cry of COYS: Come On You Spurs!). Here is a personal favorite, a filthy and bellicose little number set to the tune of the English music-hall chestnut “My Old Man”: