Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (8 page)

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B
ennington had long been known as a place where teachers and students were pretty cozy. Everyone was on a first-name basis. It was not unheard of for teachers to show up at big campus parties, nor was it uncommon for them to invite their students over for dinner. A strange and wonderful professor of something called experimental music permitted students to write our own evaluations, believing that even if we failed to materialize as scheduled in his classroom, it didn't matter, because surely we had to be somewhere learning something anyway, even if that somewhere was still in bed with a pounding headache and that something was this: tequila followed by Jägermeister was an incredibly stupid idea. My father's objections to my matriculation at Bennington were numerous and voluble. He was a Cornell man like his father before him, and Bennington—with no grades, few tests, no sports teams save intramural coed soccer and volleyball—didn't quite strike him as a
real
college like his own. And, gallingly, the cost of tuition was higher. Moreover, he recalled a journalist crony who'd taught there in the 1980s and often returned to New York on the weekends with stories of conquests among the young women of the college; whether they were true or just so much bogus bravado, they made an impression.

Many evenings at the Pig my senior year, I could be found ensconced at the bar or at a table in David's company, maybe with a few other students, and maybe another professor and other regulars. David drank Scotch or martinis, and when we weren't talking about campus politics, we might be talking about poetry. I was writing my senior thesis on Yeats, an endeavor undertaken with the earnest, focused seriousness of purpose one hopes might also be devoted to international peace summits. Looking back, it was a wildly convoluted mishmash of ideas: I'd set out to try to figure out what Yeats was doing with Irish folklore in his earliest and last poems, but what kept popping up in my reading and my thinking was that mostly his poems seemed to be about his troubles with the ladies. (You might know that when Maud Gonne declined Yeats's marriage proposal, he turned next to her daughter, who also shot him down. Maybe you're even aware of what he'd been up to with monkey glands; I'm not going to go into that here.) But since I was pretty sure I couldn't be awarded a degree—even at Bennington—for writing about Yeats not getting any, I called it his
sublimation of desire
. And if all that weren't enough, I was sure Yeats couldn't quite figure out what to make of himself, and this I called
the unmasking of poetic identity
. Ah, youth.

Although David was not my thesis advisor and Yeats was not his field, because he knew something about everything, and that included modern Irish poetry, he would indulge me, at the bar, in impromptu Yeats recitations. His big number was “A Last Confession,” which he delivered with great feeling and beauty:

What lively lad most pleasured me

Of all that with me lay?

I answer that I gave my soul

And loved in misery,

But had great pleasure with a lad

That I loved bodily.

Flinging from his arms I laughed

To think his passion such

He fancied that I gave a soul

Did but our bodies touch,

And laughed upon his breast to think

Beast gave beast as much.

I gave what other women gave

That stepped out of their clothes.

But when this soul, its body off,

Naked to naked goes,

He it has found shall find therein

What none other knows,

And give his own and take his own

And rule in his own right;

And though it loved in misery

Close and cling so tight,

There's not a bird of day that dare

Extinguish that delight.

I regret that I never asked him why
this
, why this poem, out of them all. It's a sad number, but it is also strong and defiant, and forcefully erotic. And Yeats wrote other poems in the voice of a woman—most famously the ones spoken by the truth-telling madwoman Crazy Jane. What exactly this poem says about intimacy remains mysterious to me, even after hundreds of readings. Here, the desire is hardly sublimated; it is right there on the surface. And here, it cannot be ignored, misery and pleasure are coupled. The woods of North Bennington. That poem. And David himself. Three things I loved, and feared.

As for myself, I'd launch into one of the poems with which my thinking, at the time, had been most occupied: the dreamy, sexy call of the faerie folk in “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” the mournful antiheroics of “Cuchulain Comforted,” or the late-period reckoning of “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” with its irresistible big finish in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, all of which I had committed to memory. When I recall my favorite nights at the Pig, I recall reciting—and discussing—poems with David, and, even better, I recall David flattering me by saying that I was one of the only students he could treat like an adult. No utterance could have pleased me more.

But when we weren't reciting or talking about poetry, David and I were talking about campus politics, or I was nervously trying to hold up my end of arguments about topics he'd chosen, about which he certainly knew more, about which he held far more confident and lucid and interesting opinions. I was in college during the height of the culture wars—this was when Antioch College, a school that shared a progressive history with Bennington, became the focus of national attention for its sexual offense prevention policy, in which, at least as the many parodies would have it, every step on the path to seduction required direct questions (May I touch your arm? Would you take offense if I told you I found you attractive? etc.), and questions of freedom of speech had taken on considerable urgency. But he would quickly tire of discussions of the matter and ask instead why people focused so much on free speech and not enough on freedom of representation. This proved prescient when, that same year, an exhibit of student work in a small gallery outside the college president's office was censored and finally taken down—a state of affairs so contrary to what many of us believed was the spirit of the college that it confirmed our feeling that the school was betraying its own principles.

Another, and far trickier, favorite riff for late-night drunken debate was abortion. David seemed to think that students' arguments in its favor were weak and softheaded, and wouldn't it be much more interesting, really, if we just conceded that it was in fact a kind of murder, and then produce some smart way to justify both? Whenever it came up, and it came up often, I'd squirm uncomfortably on my barstool until I landed on something to say, to which he'd respond by shaking his head and saying, “Can't you be more clever?” And then, stinging, “I thought I could treat you like an adult.”

There was nothing I wanted more than to be more clever and to be treated, especially by David, like an adult, and I hated to disappoint. I often thought that if he ever tired of teaching, he would have made a fine district attorney. In my college classes, I was getting an excellent education in English literature, in critical theory, in becoming a good reader. But these off-hours arguments to which I felt so ill-prepared to contribute, far from the more ordered world of the classroom, were like a shadow university. In them, I got another kind of education altogether, one that would help prepare me for a future full of the kind of whiskey-fueled conversations that come up not infrequently when one spends a good portion of one's life in bars and one is not able to determine and control the subjects that arise in such circumstances, unless one wishes to be deemed a windbag, a control freak, or some other variety of undesirable. If you don't want to talk, you might as well stay at home and drink and not bother with bars. But if you're at the bar, brace yourself: You might be called upon to argue in favor of cannibalism, or recount the history of the Bull Moose Party, or make NFL draft predictions. (I have since been involved in barroom discussions of all three.) You never know. And that's one of the great pleasures of drinking in bars.

And this is nothing new. “The role of the saloon as a popular forum for the exchange of news and views was a continuation of a centuries-old function of tavern culture dating back to medieval England and before,” writes historian Madelon Powers in
Faces Along the Bar
. She continues, “In succeeding centuries . . . people of all classes made increasing use of drinking establishments as marketplaces for ideas. For example, Samuel Johnson, the noted literary critic, was an habitué of the Turk's Head Tavern in London in the eighteenth century. In his words, ‘wine there exhilarates my spirits, and prompts me to free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love: I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions I find delight.'” The flow of discourse in Bennington's classrooms was often stimulating; at the bar—a few whiskeys into a long night—it was even better.

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W
inter, senior year, I stayed in my apartment in North Bennington to continue writing about Yeats instead of taking an internship in a big city during the two-month period, as most students did. During this span, student life seemed more distant than ever—despite the big stacks of books on my desk—and I felt like just any other person who lived in a small town, frequenting its sole bar, shopping in its only grocery store, mailing letters and catching up on local news at the tiny post office near the railroad tracks. With few fellow students around during the break—which was called Field Work Term—those of us who stayed behind closed ranks even further and relied on one another for support and for relief from the isolation which, though lovely much of the time, could also become hard to bear throughout the short cold days and long, dark, even colder nights.

The walls of my living room had been painted by the previous tenant a grotesque shade of rosy pink that looked to me much like the interior of a mouth or, I imagined, a womb. Too broke and lazy and otherwise preoccupied to repaint it, I accepted it and even came to love it; it conferred a feeling of warmth that my barely heated apartment badly needed. I'd spend most of my days in that pink room, listening to Billy Bragg or the Pogues or weepy old folk songs or the local public radio station, going over Yeats's poems line by line and word by word, cultivating some sense of their worth and meaning as I also slowly developed a sense of the sort of person I wished to be when I grew up—a person a great deal like some of my favorite professors, I imagined, maybe even as witty and conversant as David—even if that still felt distant and a little painful to think on. I'd make big cheap pots of soup with lentils and too many spices, and many evenings—after a few whiskeys at the Pig—my friend Rachel would come over and we'd bundle ourselves in sweaters and blankets and eat that hippie soup and drink herbal tea and talk until late late late about books and politics. And boys.

On politics and books and art, we were pretty simpatico. On the boy front, however, Rachel was doing a lot better—or worse, depending on how you looked at it—than I was. They were, at least, a serious part of her life—even if they added up to a whole lot of heartache. I had little going on to speak of in that department, and even if I sometimes fretted about that, my hybrid student-townie life mostly felt full and satisfying and provided enough distractions. The men whose company I kept were a few close friends, gay and straight, a few professors, the local guys at the Pig, and the graduate sculpture students who hung out at the bar, too—young men who liked to break things and build things and use power tools and play with fire, and who were the closest thing to jocks the college had.

Occasionally I would find myself in the predicament of having a little crush on one or another of them, and I'd just try to shake it off and clear my head and get back to the more important business of Yeats and Wordsworth and Blake and philosophy and anthropology and the literary magazine and student activism. I couldn't be bothered with that boy crap, and I had accepted that I was in an environment in which the competition for that kind of attention from the opposite sex was unusually strong: Not only did girls outnumber guys by a pretty wide margin, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I report that among the female population in the student body, the percentage of women who were extraordinarily pretty, stylish, and smart was extremely high. And I wonder if, having gotten the sense early on that I really couldn't compete, I opted out of the game altogether. For my last solid year or so of college, I'd cultivated an androgynous look that relied heavily upon a tweed suit that I wore just about every other day and oxblood oxfords when the weather didn't call for all-terrain monster hiking boots. I knew that something was missing, but I wasn't up to the task of figuring out exactly what that something was, much less trying to get it. I tried to sort it out in a poem:

The bar closes, the students disband. Some, arm in arm.

Others laugh, and sing the chorus of a folk song whose meaning

They had abandoned at the campfire before adolescence.

These are not comrades. And none will say the words that matter

Above all others; the ones that are true are locked in the heart.

Outside, the cold and the stars and the rain and the pavement

Are content with their own speechlessness. And a girl

Walks home alone; there has been something left unsaid.

She clicks on the television, turns down the volume.

She falls into an unmade bed, kicks her shoes to the floor.

When she rises fully dressed in the previous evening's clothes,

In the same dress that, too, had refused to say what it meant,

She cannot remember her dreams. The television is still on.

The newspaper brings no news, and the dishes remain unwashed.

A failure of language; the return of the unfinished page.