Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2013 by Rosie Schaap

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schaap, Rosie.

  Drinking with men / Rosie Schaap.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60312-3

  1. Schaap, Rosie. 2. Bars (Drinking establishments). I. Title.

  HV5137.S33 2013

  362.292092—dc23

  [B]

  2012030405

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  For Ma, and for Frank

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION

  1. BAR CAR PROPHECY

  The Metro-North New Haven Line

  2. TWENTY-ONE SHOTS

  Inglewood and Santa Cruz

  3. AN AMERICAN DRINKER IN DUBLIN

  Grogan’s Castle Lounge, Dublin

  4. SHADOW SCHOOL

  The Pig, North Bennington, Vermont

  5. HOW TO BEHAVE IN A BAR

  The Man of Kent, Hoosick Falls, New York

  6. LATE TO THE PARTY

  Puffy’s Tavern, New York City

  7. ED

  Liquor Store Bar, New York City

  8. BAR CHAPLAIN

  The Fish Bar, New York City

  9. HEY, THAT’S NO WAY TO SAY GOOD-BYE

  Else’s, Montreal

  10. DRINKING WITH MEN

  Good World Bar and Grill, New York City

  EPILOGUE: THERE IS ALWAYS A STORY AT MILANO’S

  New York City

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Time is never called in my recurring dream of pubs.

  —CIARAN CARSON, Last Night’s Fun

  INTRODUCTION

  Thirteen thousand hours.

  That’s a rough estimate, scratched out on the cocktail napkin in front of me, of how much time I’ve spent in bars. An indelible reckoning.

  Many people would say that every one of those hours was wasted, but not me. I wouldn’t change a moment—not even the time I nearly got clocked by a barstool turned projectile in the midst of an altercation between two grizzled old punks, nor the evening a seemingly innocuous, if inebriated, couple all but forced me to referee their debate about whether they should stay together or break up. (For the record: I thought they were a perfect match, and advised them to give it another shot.) I’ve come of age in bars, and they’ve given me as much of an education as college did, and have fostered many of my strongest friendships. That could be why a certain type of bar—small, welcoming, with a lively chorus of voices and the house lights turned down to a warm glow—will exert a gravitational pull, compelling me to return one night after the other, and often twice on Sundays.

  But my attraction to bars is less governed by the laws of physics than it is by the rules of romance: I prefer one bar at a time. When it comes to where I drink, I’m a serial monogamist. Still, although loyalty is upheld as a virtue, bar regularhood—the practice of drinking in a particular establishment so often that you become known by, and bond with, both the bartenders and your fellow patrons—is often looked down upon in a culture obsessed with health and work. But despite what we are often told, being a regular isn’t synonymous with being a drunk; regularhood is much more about the camaraderie than the alcohol. Sharing the joys of drink and conversation with friends old and new, in a comfortable and familiar setting, is one of life’s most unheralded pleasures.

  And yes, that goes for women, too. Or it should, anyway. If regularhood is considered suspect behavior, then female regularhood is doubly so. In many parts of the world, women just don’t go into bars alone. Even in comparatively less patriarchal societies, such as our own, a solitary woman at a bar is a curiosity, a wonderment to be puzzled over. And even in New York, where all things seem possible, as a bar regular who happens to be female, I am something of an anomaly. Regularhood is still predominantly the province of men.

  I’ve been going into bars since the age of fifteen. Certainly in my youth I knew that patronizing bars was unusual behavior—but I figured that was due to my age, not my gender. There was the excitement of getting one over and getting served, of trying to fit in, unquestioned, with grown-ups in their natural habitat. But as I got older and that thrill abated, what I discovered in bars was much richer. As a regular, I have found friendship, comfort, and community. Mostly, I’ve found that fellowship in the company of men. Relations between the sexes at bars are often perceived as predatory and dangerous. But I did not look to bars for a place to hook up; I looked to bars for a place to belong.

  In 1936, Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis counseled readers of her single-girl guide Live Alone and Like It. “It is not incorrect for a woman to go alone into any bar she can get into,” she wrote, “but we don’t advise it . . . if you must have your drink, you can have it in a lounge or restaurant, where you won’t look forlorn or conspicuous.” I find it remarkable—and a little depressing—that nearly eighty years later, ideas identical to hers still seem deeply internalized by many women. “I just don’t feel comfortable walking into a bar alone,” a friend once told me. “Like everyone’s looking at me and feeling sorry for me. Like there’s something wrong with girls who go drinking by themselves.”

  For better or worse, I’ve seldom worried about who’s looking at me or not looking at me, or about what they might or might not be thinking. But I have noticed a pattern: Every time I’ve fallen hard for a bar, I’ve invited my best girlfriends to join me there for a drink, meet my fellow regulars, soak up the ambience that I found so appealing. Invariably, they like it. They have a good time. But, unlike me, they have no particular interest in returning the next night, or the next, or the ones that follow. Not only does the idea of becoming a regular at a bar hold no allure for them, they are also often puzzled by my enduring bar-love. But they have come to admire my ability to integrate, t
o talk to anyone, to be one of the guys.

  In his very funny 1935 tract Her Foot Is on the Brass Rail, the humorist and newspaperman Don Marquis laments the post-Prohibition presence of women in bars. For men, there was “no longer any escape, no harbor or refuge . . . where the hounded male may seek his fellow and strut his stuff, safe from the atmosphere and presence of femininity.” In my experience these concerns have been beside the point; if anything, my chronic regularhood has made me assimilate into a largely male culture, not change it—except by the fact that I am part of it.

  Regardless of my gender, a bar is my safe haven, my breathing space. Knowing how to read a bar helps. My favorites have never been big, rowdy sports bars teeming with testosterone or trendy spots featuring cutting-edge cocktails, but intimate, friendly neighborhood places where relationships with other regulars—and bartenders—have the right conditions to take hold, and where my instincts tell me it’s a safe space to be a woman in a bar. At its best, bar culture is both civilized and civilizing, and at the end of a long, stressful day, I know I can head to my local and the bartender will know exactly what I want—often whiskey, occasionally a mixed drink, but usually these days red wine in a tumbler, as a stem is too much bother—and will set it down before me, ask me about my day, listen to me vent. And instantly, I relax. I remember to exhale.

  And it’s not just the whiskey or the wine or the martini, though of course they’re part of it. It’s the atmosphere, the familiarity, the ritual, the community. At the bar, my friends and I greet one another with hugs and pats on the back, catch up on one another’s lives (How’s the new job? Did your brother move out of your apartment yet? How was your trip back home? Is your mother out of the hospital?), discuss Premier League transfer rumors (Will Tottenham ever get a world-class forward?) and other news of the day, and we all start to feel so much better, so quickly, even if we hadn’t really been feeling so bad to begin with.

  It seems to me that someone ought to defend the great tradition of regularhood, of passing hours and days and years drinking and talking and laughing in bars. And it’s time someone advocated for equal regularhood rights for women everywhere. It might as well be me, a woman with a quarter of a century of devoted bar-going under her belt. Along the way, I’ll chronicle my quest for the perfect local haunt, a journey that’s taken me from the bar car on the Metro-North railroad to a beloved Dublin pub, and from an expats’ haven in New York City to a neighborhood institution in Montreal. From one bar to the next, I’ve had the good fortune to drink with painters, cabdrivers, lawyers, ironworkers, professors, musicians, craftsmen, chefs, electricians, poets, and even a tugboat captain. And lately my regular status has led me back to the other side of the bar, serving friends and neighbors at the cozy local pub right around the corner.

  More than anywhere else—home, school, or work—bars are where I’ve figured out how to relate to others and how to be myself. They’ve not only shaped my identity, they’ve shaped my point of view—one that is profoundly optimistic about human kindness despite a healthy dose of skepticism. And I challenge anyone who becomes a regular at their neighborhood bar not to feel the same way.

  Not long ago, I was talking with a young woman who has lived just a few doors away from one of my favorite bars for more than a year. Like many of her peers in their early twenties, she’d rather go to clubs than bars—especially not neighborhood bars with no complicated cocktails, no hipster cachet, no cute boys anywhere near her age. But she’s stopped in a couple times and acknowledged its earthy charm. I asked her if she knew a particular bartender. Mmm, he sounded familiar, but she never got his name. “Go in and introduce yourself,” I advised her. “Get to know him. And get to know everyone else who works there, too. And the regulars.”

  Even if she’d never become a regular there herself, I explained, this was still her corner bar. Being neighborly is a good thing in itself; it also comes in handy. If some night someone was walking down the street a little too close behind her, this is where she’d duck in and be looked after until any danger, real or imagined, had passed. This is where they’d sign for her FedEx package when she wasn’t home. This is where she could leave that extra set of keys in case she ever locked herself out of her apartment. And this is where, if she ever happened to be really sad and really broke and really in need of a drink, they’d give her one—and people to talk to, too—and they’d know she’d be good for it, someday.

  You can drink anywhere, I told her. You can drink at home. But a good bar? It’s more than a place to have a few pints or shots or cocktails. It is much more than the sum of its bottles and bar stools, its glassware and taps and neon beer signs. It’s more like a community center, for people—men and women—who happen to drink.

  1.

  BAR CAR PROPHECY

  The Metro-North New Haven Line

  In 1986, when I was fifteen, I discovered the bar car on the Metro-North New Haven Line—a dingy, crowded, badly ventilated chamber where commuters drank enough to get a decent buzz going, told dirty jokes, and chain-smoked. These were my kind of people. I liked my friends at school—mostly pothead misfits like me—but these were adults, and, right or wrong, I liked to think of myself as one of them. And even though in my memory the whole place is clouded by a sort of grimy yellow film, it was my kind of joint.

  My mother had moved us—herself, my brother, me, a shih tzu, a Lhasa apso, a cat, and a parrot—from Greenwich Village to the suburbs a couple of years earlier for many reasons, but partly, I think, in a desperate bid to make a normal kid of me. It didn’t work. I became a druggie, a Deadhead, a reasonably resourceful truant, a small-time delinquent. But I was not without ambition. I wanted to be a mystic.

  Once a week, I got a reprieve from my suburban exile. After school every Thursday, I took the train from Westport, Connecticut, to Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal to see my psychoanalyst. I’d been going since eighth grade and I’d come to enjoy it; the fifty-minute sessions made me feel like the featured guest on a talk show. It helped that my shrink sounded a lot like Dick Cavett.

  Except on the few occasions when my mother had called him, crying, after finding a bong in my closet (“It’s not mine! I swear! I was just holding that for a friend! It’s decorative!”) or a roach clip in a jacket pocket (“Oh, that? It’s for holding papers together!”) and demanded that he submit me to another drug test, I looked forward to seeing my shrink week after week, Thursday after Thursday. Besides, I could pocket the round-trip cab fare Ma gave me to get to his office from Grand Central and back. It was just enough for a dime bag of pot, and I didn’t mind having a little time to walk the city streets alone. It was good for thinking.

  But from the moment I first stumbled into the bar car after one of our appointments, my return trip to Westport became the best part of my Thursday visits. I liked the company of grown-ups, especially strangers. With them, I found it easy to feel smart and funny and interesting. Easier than it was with my peers.

  I first discovered this one summer, years earlier, when I was eight or so and my family was vacationing on Fire Island. Ma sent me to borrow a skillet from the neighbors, a bunch of thirty-somethings in a shared rental. They were lounging on an L-shaped white couch and seemed to get a kick out of everything I said, even the word skillet. I wasn’t even sure what the word meant until a tall, tanned woman handed me a heavy frying pan with flared sides. I thanked her and turned to leave. But they weren’t ready to let me go. They had questions: Who was I? What grade was I in? What was I into?

  I was astonished by their interest. I sat myself down on a puffy ottoman and asked if they wanted to hear a joke. Did they ever. “So this Jewish American Princess married an Indian chief. Guess what they named their baby?” I paused. “Whitefish.” It’s a terrible joke. I’d heard my mother tell it to one of her friends. I didn’t exactly get it. But those grown-ups, sitting there drinking wine, tumbled off the big white couch, laughing. And I
felt like a superstar.

  That’s not how I felt in the bar car. Surrounded by its regulars, mostly men in wrinkled suits and loosened neckties, I felt almost invisible. But I liked listening to them. They were not like the silent, unsociable commuters in the regular cars who napped, read, or reviewed spreadsheets. No, the people in the bar car crowd drank beer or Scotch, laughed loudly, talked fast, and always seemed happy to see one another. They were a tribe, and I wanted in. On the surface, we had little in common: they were mostly male, mostly much older, mostly professionals. I was none of those things. Yet I felt an affinity; here, among these hard-drinking commuting men, in some way I felt that maybe I could be myself. Still, I didn’t dare belly up to the bar and order myself a beer; there was no way the weary, wary, seen-it-all Metro-North crew would serve me. I needed a point of entry.

  The night I pulled my tarot cards from my backpack and gave myself a reading, right there in the bar car, I accidentally found just what I was looking for. I’d been studying The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a 1910 primer by Arthur Edward Waite—an English weirdo fairly typical of his day who, like Aleister Crowley, had belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I had read that Jimmy Page was into Crowley and the Golden Dawn and all that, so it had to be a good thing. I had cultivated a look that fell somewhere on a spectrum between Madame Blavatsky and Janis Joplin: gauzy Indian dresses, batik caftans, chunky silver rings on my fingers (more delicate ones on my toes), glass beads and colorful embroidery floss woven into my long messy hair. From way back in my mother’s closet I had appropriated a paisley head scarf shaped a bit like a turban, shot through with glittery metallic thread and adorned with ruby-red rhinestones and golden tear-shaped studs. A silver pentagram with an amethyst in the middle hung from a black silk cord around my neck, coming to rest on my solar plexus, where, according to the salesman in the New Age bookstore where I bought it, its power would be most effectively transmitted throughout my chakra system.