Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (17 page)

And then, it was drinking. And I knew that at the Fish Bar, I had a place where people weren't just pouring me Jameson after Jameson, where I wasn't just a person who drank. I was a friend, and they were my friends. I knew that the people there—the owners, the bar staff, the other regulars—had, like me, lived through 9/11. We had been there. We had been together in this. We had shared in that singular experience. We got it, and had no need to explain or even, most of the time, say anything. I can't imagine a place that would have been a greater, more reliable, more consistent comfort than the Fish Bar was to me at that time. Never had I
needed
a bar more. It was stable. It was my anchor.

I also knew that they knew me well enough, and knew Frank well enough, that they were aware of and cared about what was going on with my dad. They'd ask questions but never push too hard. And those among them who were inclined to pray told me that they were saying prayers for my dad, and for me, and I was grateful for that, too.

Of course we drink for solace, we drink for comfort, and the drink does its job; it is a calmative and helpmate. But you can drink
anywhere
. You can drink at home. A bar gives you more than drink alone. It gives you the presence of others; it gives you relief from isolation. When you are a regular, it gives you community, too. And at the Fish Bar, it was a community with whom I could feel sad and overwhelmed and worried and know that I didn't have to pretend to be anything else. They were with me. As soon as I entered the bar, not only would Frank be there, but Paul, too, with a big smile and a big hello, and everything would at least be a little bit okay for a few hours, until it started all over again.

•   •   •

I
f you've ever read reviews of the Fish Bar on nightlife websites, it might not square with my impressions of it. This quirky, homey, good-natured little place I loved is regarded by many, it seems, as a total dive. I certainly never thought of it that way. And it's not that I have anything against dives—I've always had a soft spot for Milano's, the Subway Inn, and the Blue & Gold, three New York institutions that could hardly be divier—but I think that where the Fish Bar is concerned, the label's just not right.

The taxonomy of bars is extensive, and not without complexity and crossover. Is a dive bar the same as an old-man bar? No, not exactly, though old hard-drinking men can be found at dives. Old-man bars are, well, generally full of old men, and anyone who is not part of the general demographic is instantly an outsider—even if the old guys in question are friendly, and they sometimes are. Is a corner bar the same thing as a neighborhood bar? In many cases, yes, but the crossroads location offered by a corner bar is likelier to attract people from outside the immediate area than a bar tucked discreetly away on a side street. Among sports bars, there are those that cater to general fans or to those exclusively of soccer or basketball or baseball or boxing, to locals or expats, to quieter fans or
really really loud
ones, those located right near stadiums and ballparks and arenas that cater exclusively to supporters of single teams. And among gay bars, yet more expressions of all these categories can be observed—with a few extra subsets. Hotel bars are in a special category; when I want to drink in total anonymity right here in my own hometown, that's where I like to be, and when I travel, that's where I generally wind up after dinner by default. And even among hotel bars, beyond the generic could-be-anywhere places found in countless hostelries in innumerable cities and towns, other significant differences exist: There are timelessly elegant places like the peerless Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle in New York and the divine jewel box that is the Blue Bar at Vienna's legendary Sacher and the little bourbon paradise at Louisville's Seelbach that belong in one category, and sleek loud caverns with thumping techno music in newer hotels in another. Obviously I love the former and would just as soon that the latter didn't exist at all.

Dives must have a mix—maybe one person who looks like serious trouble (even if he or she turns out to be a living saint), a few real down-and-outers of any age, usually at least
someone
actively on the make, a nervous underage drinker or two hoping to pass for grown-up or squeak by anyway, bemused regulars of various kinds—the comedian, the one who's seen it all, the watcher, the talker, the bore. And even if the Fish Bar has been host to exactly this mix on some occasions, it is neither dark nor dingy enough to count, truly, as a dive. Its bathroom can be relied on to be clean and stocked with toilet paper. It's hard to imagine fights breaking out there—though it's possible they have; it is a bar in the East Village after all—because the place is really just too good-natured and well-meaning for that shit.

•   •   •

F
or someone who has a hard time with authority, I never once questioned the demands the Red Cross made of me. I did as I was told, confident that they knew better than I did how I might be most useful. My spreadsheet worked out fine; I'd turned out to be a pretty damn good chaplain scheduler. When the logistics had been worked out, all necessary schedules implemented and paperwork filed, my second supervisor—the social-justice Jesuit priest from the Upper West Side, for by then the air-disaster specialist from the Midwest had been called back to serve elsewhere—pulled me aside.

“You ready?” he asked.

“For what?”

“To do this,” he said. “To be a chaplain.”

I'd been through the training and received my certificate. I'd seen many seasoned chaplains in action. I'd seen some of them do work that was downright brilliant. I'd seen others make thoughtless mistakes that made me cringe. In just a few weeks, I'd gotten a chaplaincy education unlike any other, a trial by fire. But I did not expect that I would actually be allowed to serve in this way.

“You know I'm not ordained yet,” I told him.

“That doesn't matter. I think you're ready,” he said. “And I think you'll be great.”

He handed me a Red Cross chaplain smock, and I pulled it on. Holding hands, we prayed together, and he sent me out on the floor of the Family Assistance Center. I walked the many aisles of its sprawling labyrinth, where anyone who wanted to talk to a chaplain would see my Red Cross getup and flag me down. After I'd made the circuit once, a woman in one of the sitting areas waved me over. She was crying. I pulled a box of Kleenex off a table and sat down beside her. I held her hand. She didn't want to talk. She just needed to cry, but not alone.

About a week later, the Jesuit flagged me over again and asked how things were going. Fine, I told him, which was true as far as my chaplaincy work was concerned, but not the whole story. He had no idea about my father's illness, and I didn't want to go into it. I hadn't quite realized yet that these two dramas, my father's illness and 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, were, in my mind, becoming completely conflated, different aspects of the same event, two halves of the same season of despair. By then, my father had been diagnosed with acute respiratory distress syndrome and was drugged into something that resembled a coma. He was not unconscious, but he was unable to speak, dependent on the medical technology to which he had been hooked up. It seemed possible that he might recover, likelier that he would not. No one could say for sure. We could only hope for the best. I sat by his bedside most evenings and read to him, Tolstoy, the stories “Master and Man” and
The Kreutzer Sonata
. I wondered if, under the circumstances, these were too heavy. They felt right for the season, appropriate to the gravitas both in the city's streets and in his small intensive-care room.

“Good,” my supervisor said. “I'm putting you on the next boat.”

I hadn't been on one of the boats before, but I'd talked to many chaplains who had. No single action assigned to the spiritual care team was more daunting. These were the boats that took family members—many of whom had traveled from far away—on a short but agonizing ride down the Hudson River to the World Trade Center site. When the boat docked downtown, we'd have a short time to escort family members to the site, where rescue workers were still active, no longer hopeful that any living people might be found, but still searching for bones, for fragments, for evidence of the lives that had been lost there. I don't think anything has made me more nervous, or made me feel more humbled, in my whole life than accompanying people to the site.

On my first boat run, one victim's mother, who had traveled to New York from the Deep South, wept during the ride, and not long after we arrived at the site, she fainted. Confronted by her grief, by the force of its intensity, I felt useless. It was unlike any grieving I had witnessed before: It was vast, biblical. She keened. “My baby, my baby . . .” All I wanted to do was hold her, but there were other family members who shared this impulse, and they had far greater right to exercise it. I could only watch. I could only cry with them. We were issued masks to wear at the site to offer some protection from the toxic dust and smoke, but few of us could bear to put them on. Anything that might make us feel or look less than human was intolerable.

•   •   •

B
y December, the most intense period of Red Cross activity was winding down, and my father's health was worsening. I was still living my life among the same five locations, and always in the same sequence: I'd hit the office first, then the FAC, then the hospital, then the Fish Bar, then finally home for a few hours. But when I woke up on the morning of December 21, something told me to forgo my routine and get to the hospital immediately, before anything else. I'm no psychic, and I can't explain it, but I woke up that morning and knew that it was the day my father would die. And that's what happened, hours after I arrived at Lenox Hill. Surrounded by five of his six children, his wife, some friends, unburdened of the medical machinery that had effected little, it was over. That he had made it through a grueling autumn and died right on the winter solstice at first felt nearly poetic. But the more I thought about it, the less meaningful it felt. It was not a poem. It was not, I reminded myself, part of any kind of plan. It was only death. And all the theology I'd read in the preceding year, all the prayer, all the contemplation of God, even the Red Cross chaplaincy, prepared me no better to wrestle with questions of the soul, of an afterlife, of heaven, much less to answer them. I had arrived at some kind of peace in my relationship with my father, but only just barely. There was so much more I longed to tell him.

There would be a funeral within days, and a larger memorial later on. There would be condolences from friends and coworkers and people I barely knew. In the weeks after a parent dies, there is much to do, so much to take in. It's a busy time. And you keep going and getting through it. And then, when you think that maybe the dust has settled and life will go on, out of nowhere, you get slammed, and everything just shuts down, and you're no longer sure if life really will go on. I'd spent more than two months trying to help other people cope with the plainly awful fact that people we love die, and sometimes in the worst, cruelest, most unthinkable ways. The only predictable thing about death is that it will happen; the only predictable thing about grieving is that it will be hard. There is no getting around it. And inevitably, for me, the events of 9/11 and the events leading to and surrounding my father's illness and hospitalization and death had become one huge, tangled, overwhelming knot of death and sadness and pain and love.

It is not uncommon, when one is mourning, to become physically ill. An angry rash broke out on my arms and across my abdomen. My breath was always short. My appetite disappeared—save for an intense craving for matzo ball soup from the Second Avenue Deli. Sleep was nearly impossible. Frank could not have been kinder or more patient through all of this, nor could my friends at the Fish Bar. But I retreated from everyone. Once the public rites of mourning have been performed, one is alone with one's loss. And I
needed
to be alone with it. I was in no mood for questions. When anyone saw how wretchedly sad I was, they assumed that my father and I must have been close, and I hated feeling like I had to explain that, no, we hadn't been, and maybe that made it a little worse, or maybe not, but maybe if he hadn't left the world at sixty-eight we would have someday been close, though I doubted it, but who could say? Some of the letters I received spoke of a person whom I felt I'd hardly known—not at his best, anyway, nor certainly at my best.

I quit my job at the anti-hunger organization and stayed away from the bar, from nearly everyone I knew, really. Even among people I loved and trusted, I couldn't socialize. I took some small comfort in prayer, but felt detached even from God. I can't imagine having gotten through the sad, busy, difficult autumn of 2001 without the Fish Bar and its congenial fellowship, but what I knew now was that bar culture—like everything else—had limits. It could not fix everything. Necessary as it was, and always had been, in mourning it offered little consolation. It was no match for my grief, which could only be enacted alone, and in private.

•   •   •

S
pringtime, and finally the worst of this long grieving was over. This in itself amazed me, because only weeks before I had not seen a way through it. And the city, too, was returning to something resembling its old pre-9/11 self. If anything, New Yorkers seemed a little gentler with one another, a little more patient. Our rhythm was still a bit off, anxiety lingered, our wounds were still fresh, but we were slowly pulling ourselves, and our lives, back together.

I celebrated my ordination at the Fish Bar with friends, family, and a few fellow seminarians. It was a raucous evening that might even have done the Muggletonians proud. It no longer seemed appropriate to organize a congregation at the bar, but I was promptly installed as Bar Chaplain. I wasn't sure if any bar had had in-house clergy before, but I was thrilled with my new office and took its duties seriously: Delivering a benediction on Saint David's Day, ministering to the populace when asked, even officiating at the wedding of one of Paul's brothers, right there in the bar. One of the bartenders made a little sign, Lucy Van Pelt style: on one side it said
THE CHAPLAIN IS IN
, and on the other
THE CHAPLAIN IS OUT
. And as soon as I walked through the door, when she was working, she'd flip it to the
IN
side.