Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (15 page)

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

M
y 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-roll 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.

Whenever we had friends visiting from out of town, we'd take them there, and they were consistently struck—moved, even—by the uncommon sweetness of the place, the family feeling, the friendliness and warmth. The size and scale of the bar made it difficult not to be sociable there, elbow to elbow. This was a place where people could grow old together, as domesticated as an East Village bar could be. On Sunday afternoons, Paul's girlfriend brought in cheese and sausage for all to share, and one of the bartenders frequently showed up with pies he'd baked from scratch. There were regular cookoffs—chili, pasta—to which regulars and staff alike would bring in their best dishes. There were spirited trivia nights, which Frank and I were politely asked to sit out of after we'd brought in a ringer—my know-it-all cousin Phil—a few times too many. We honored the request.

I was getting restless at work. The hours were long, the pay was low, I had no ambitions of advancing in the company, and this nagging feeling that I needed to do something more
meaningful
was starting to get to me. I'd been taking adult education Hebrew classes at the Jewish seminary across the street from my office and volunteering at the soup kitchen they operated on Monday nights. By the time I got to the cafeteria, meal service was over, and all that remained for me to do was the cleaning up. I was sorry I didn't get to cook, didn't get to feed the guests, didn't get to interact with them and with the other volunteers, most of whom were also gone, or on the way out, when I arrived. But cleanup duty was fine by me. It was useful, it was purposeful. I scrubbed and scoured huge industrial-size pots until they shone, wiped down the crumb-covered tables, swept and mopped the kitchen. One evening, I ran into the young rabbinical student who taught my Hebrew class just as I was leaving. He was pleased that I'd been volunteering at the soup kitchen. “I saw the poster one evening after class,” I told him, “and since it's right across the street from work, it's convenient.”

“Is service supposed to be
convenient
?” he retorted with a sly smile. He wasn't being antagonistic. He was funny and, especially for a young man, wise. He'd make a great rabbi, I was sure. And he was right. He'd gotten his point across; there's nothing inherently
wrong
with volunteering when and where it's convenient to do so—it's better than not volunteering at all—but it shouldn't be anyone's major criterion for trying to do a little bit of good in the world. I couldn't get his question out of my head, and it troubled me throughout the next few days at work. I probably needed to inconvenience myself a lot more. And it's not coincidental that studying Hebrew and volunteering in the soup kitchen happened at the same location. Faith and service—both of which had always been important to me, even if the ways in which I had expressed each had taken many forms, and to which my commitment had fluctuated a lot over the years—were, in my mind and in my heart, of a piece. And both were occupying more and more of my thoughts and my time.

I started taking Hebrew not only because I believe that faith is built into the alphabet, the characters, the words, the syntax, the language itself, but also to fill a gap. I hadn't had a Bat Mitzvah, but much like I wish I'd been forced to learn piano or violin
before
my self-consciousness of my lack of musical talent had set in, much like I wish I'd learned how to drive
before
I'd become an adult and had spent too many years thinking about how fucking dangerous cars are, I wish I'd been sent to Hebrew school. (And of course I realize this is all easy for
me
to say, not having been made to turn down party invitations to practice my violin, not having been awakened early on Saturday mornings to haul my ass to temple. I know. I know.) Still, I'm grateful that I grew up in a secular home and was given the freedom—more, surely, because of my mother's lack of interest in such concerns than as a matter of some benevolent and liberal family policy—to explore religion in whatever ways I chose.

I tried to make sense of my religiosity for years, but the thing is, it's really not so complicated: It's just how I'm wired. When I was seven or eight and spent summers with my family on Fire Island, I often went to services there by myself, walking barefoot (as most did on the island) to the little reform temple nearby, where I loved the hippie homeyness of it all, the strumming of guitars and singing of folk songs along with the reading of scriptures and reciting of prayers, and where I believed that the little cups of grape juice they served to us kids were wine until somebody set me straight. (I was also wired for wino-hood; family legend maintains that one of my first words was
Bordeaux
.) I was pretty sure I was getting kind of drunk on
something
. But even as a kid I doubted that I'd ever be a good and observant Jew; I was too curious about any and
every
religion I heard about or read about or saw something on TV about, and that was fine by my folks, if a little startling. Did I want to go to Easter mass with a Catholic friend and her family? Sure, go ahead. Quaker meeting? Why not? Buddhist sitting meditation? Fine.

It is possible, however, that the long pagan period that began in high school, peaked when I was living in the Santa Cruz mountains, and ended in college had been too trying for my mother. She was not exactly dazzled to see my byline in publications with titles like
Weekly Wiccan World
, nor especially enchanted by the chanting she could hear just behind my bedroom door. The many hours during which I commandeered the kitchen to mix up astringent tinctures and gooey poultices with strong-smelling herbs that I procured either at the dusty witchcraft book and supply shops I frequented or by mail from farms and communes across the country caused her to raise her well-groomed eyebrows on not a few occasions. The tarot cards. The runes. The far-flung pen pals whose letters arrived in envelopes emblazoned with ankhs and pentagrams and return addresses bearing names that sounded like
Lord of the Rings
characters. The tattered, dog-eared, suspect-looking treatises about ancient mystery cults and Druidic wisdom and the healing properties of plants and crystals. The little altar I set up on my bedroom dresser complete with a miniature cauldron and a chalice and a bunch of stones and dried leaves. The solemn invocations of the Old Gods. It was all a bit much for her, and, in time, it no longer satisfied my own spiritual yearnings, if only I could figure out exactly what they were, exactly what it was I wanted from God, or the gods, and what He or She or They in turn expected of me.

In my senior year of college, under the heady influence of William Blake, I started to think that maybe I might be a Christian—but a peculiar and specific kind of Christian, the sort of Christian I imagined Blake himself might have been. I read about and admired many of the old dissenting, rabble-rousing British sects, like the True Levellers, the Muggletonians, the early Methodists, the Shakers. I could get behind their radical and liberating conception of Jesus and, in many cases, their proto-communist practices and the fiery indignation that connected them in one long angry righteous line to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, I was drawn to more recent Christian thinkers who championed social and economic justice, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day.

When I moved back to New York after college, I went to services at many of the grand old do-gooder churches—the Riverside and Saint John the Divine and the Abyssinian Baptist—and some less grand but equally impassioned houses of worship (a Methodist church in my Brooklyn neighborhood, an authentically radical Presbyterian congregation on, of all the unlikely places, the Upper East Side). I was frequently moved by the worship services I took in, roused by the hymns and spirituals, touched by the sense of community, inspired by the faith-in-action that was so palpable in these places, by the collective commitment to social justice. But I fell silent when prayers were directed specifically to Jesus, and I could not take communion. I was not, after all, a Christian. Or was I?

I agonized over this question and prayed for an answer to come. When it didn't, I started to attend Unitarian Universalist services regularly—for Unitarians make no doctrinal demands, and irrespective of the tradition's Christian roots, one can now identify as a Jewish Unitarian, a Buddhist Unitarian, even an atheist Unitarian, as one sees fit. Its tent is wide open. The sermons were always smart and learned, the congregants welcoming to newcomers and visitors like me. But it all felt so fucking
polite
. Everyone was so educated and rational. The ecstatic experience I sought could not be found there. I think I wanted a Unitarian congregation that behaved like a Pentecostal congregation. Such a thing does not exist. I envied the submissive faith I observed in the Chasidim I saw davening every morning on the subway, that I witnessed among Pentecostals. But my own skepticism was stronger than I'd reckoned. I had too many questions to allow myself to be overtaken completely by the spirit.

Yet the more I immersed myself in the spiritual life of the city, the more, inevitably, it became essential to me. By the time I'd become a regular at the Fish Bar, I was reading the Bible regularly, along with books about faith leaders I found especially compelling and inspired, figures like Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley and Shaker leader Ann Lee. And it frustrated me that here, in New York City, where all things seem possible, this place that so many people move to from
everywhere
that they might be free to express themselves creatively, sexually, socially, howsoever they wish, it remained an anomaly to make one's own way in faith. Among my largely liberal circle of friends, the fact that I even believe in God was, and is, regarded as a bit of a novelty—interrogated with courteous curiosity by some, with condescension by others, with outright contempt by a few. That I was, furthermore, a believer who could not identify exactly as a Jew or as a Christian or as a Zen Buddhist or as a Sufi, as
something
, was even harder for people to grasp.

So when in 2000 I was called—seriously called, like, by
God
—well, that threw most everybody, not least of all myself. I wish I could report that some magnificent spiritual drama attended this call, but a host of angels did not fly to my side with trumpets, nor was I struck asunder by a brilliant, near-blinding light, and no white salamander was telling me what had to be done. It was something quieter, something internal. My desire to do some good in the world, to be a servant, kept growing stronger, and I knew that this yearning was connected to my faith and believed that somehow this added up to a call to ministry. Besides, if I could not find the kind of worship I wanted—something both socially progressive and spiritually ecstatic—I would have to make it up. Maybe I could even bring a modified Muggletonian-style drinking and dissenting ministry right to the Fish Bar. The Shakers aside, teetotaling sects baffled me. If wine flowed freely in the Hebrew Bible and was good enough for Jesus, surely it was good enough for us. And if Saint Brigid had the power to turn water into whiskey, she must have had good reasons and honorable intentions.