Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (11 page)

6.

LATE TO THE PARTY

Puffy's Tavern, New York City

O
ne early autumn evening in 1995, Puffy's Tavern appeared before me like a shimmering urban mirage, like a dream bar vision out of an Edward Hopper painting, anchoring its corner of Hudson and Harrison Streets in TriBeCa in stalwart brick and great plate glass windows. Some nights, Puffy's felt like the saddest damn song Tom Waits ever sang; others, it was vibrant and alive, humming with conversation and cosmopolitan good cheer. Puffy's was scuffed black-and-white tile, barroom green walls gone grayish with ash and age, a battle-ravaged dartboard, sad-faced drunks, and regulars ready with stories to tell—whether you felt like listening or not. And more often than not, I did.

Puffy's was beautiful. In its way. Like an old weather-beaten chanteuse with running mascara who still manages to break your heart as soon as she starts singing. But ask, and anyone will tell you that Puffy's is not what it used to be. Then again, TriBeCa isn't what it used to be, either. And to be fair, by the time I showed up there, both the neighborhood and the bar
already
weren't what they used to be—though they've drifted still further from their former selves in the years since.

Puffy's, in a sense, predates “TriBeCa”; that graceless tripartite designation was, by most accounts, imposed upon the area by realtors when the neighborhood was just waking up—with a hangover—after well over a decade as a sparsely populated artists' enclave, where pioneers had staked their territorial claims and carved spaces first and foremost for painting and printing and sculpting, and only incidentally for living, out of drafty old loft buildings on badly lit cobbled streets. In those days, “TriBeCa” didn't exist; the neighborhood was just downtown, or the Lower West Side (as one friend, who could never quite stomach the new name, still insists on calling it), or where you found yourself when you got off the IRT 1 train at Franklin Street, or the express at Chambers Street—the seedy two-way artery at its southern edge—or if you strayed too far west from the courts after a day of jury duty or from dinner in Chinatown. By the mid 1990s, TriBeCa was on its way to becoming the wealthiest neighborhood per capita in Manhattan, outdoing even the western flank of the Upper East Side. Artists had cleaned up the area, made it habitable, vibrant—and desirable. The thankless result was that bankers and movie stars and others from the ranks of the superrich would, within a generation, swoop in to displace them. In New York City, of course, the rich have always been with us, and they have effectively taken over: the teachers and social workers and struggling artists and writers and performers who populated the city of my youth can no longer afford Manhattan. On this small island, less and less space is available to those who were, and are, responsible for so much of its identity and spirit.

The first time I drank at Puffy's, it was with college friends; we'd all recently graduated. We claimed the far end of the uncomfortable painted wooden banquette that lines the wall opposite the long, dark, imposing bar.
Banquette
is euphemistic; it's a bench, really, likely slapped together with plywood and two-by-fours, God knows when. We got there late one afternoon—a Saturday, probably—and stayed well into the early morning hours. The bartender—an earthy, vivacious woman in her forties, a rarity in New York City bars—held court, expertly mixing cocktails and drawing pints, dancing energetically to “Brick House” or some other loud beat-heavy number issuing from the gorgeous old jukebox while making everyone feel welcome (
loved
, even) all at once. I liked the place. In fact, I felt pretty sure I might be falling in love with it. I made a few return visits with friends, but I had the sense that I belonged there solo. I had never before felt so territorial about a bar, for mysterious reasons.

In September 1995, I was in graduate school, working on a doctorate in English literature, and not long after my first night at Puffy's I started teaching freshman English at the huge community college just a block west of the bar. The Borough of Manhattan Community College has about a million students—I am only exaggerating a little—and like many campuses of its early 1970s vintage, it was designed with specs better suited to a correctional facility than to a university. Drive past it on the West Side Highway and, with its sparse, horizontal windows looking out at the Hudson River like suspicious squinting eyes and its pitiless stretches of drab brick, it looks like a prison.

The campus came into being in the years after four students were murdered at Kent State, after Mark Rudd took Low Memorial Library at Columbia hostage, after student activists tore shit up all over the country. By design, BMCC has no quad, no central space where students can congregate—or protest. The sheer physical hardness of the campus is oppressive. But I liked teaching. I liked my students, who seemed to come from everywhere: Haiti and Poland, Russia and Macao, Serbia and the Dominican Republic and Greece and Ivory Coast and Staten Island. The range of ability and talent matched the international diversity; there were some brilliant people in those classrooms and some insufferable dumbasses. But they were never boring, and I took to teaching pretty quickly and easily. Still, as much as I enjoyed teaching at BMCC, my affection for it abruptly deteriorated outside of the classroom. My office, for instance, was shared with some fifty other underpaid and often embittered adjunct professors of English.

I was living just across town, near the South Street Seaport, in a boxy, dark, charmless apartment with gray industrial carpeting and low drop ceilings. My roommate was a friend from college—a smart, sad Goth with jet-black hair that cascaded nearly to her ass and a constellation of deathy tattoos sprayed about her pale body. Though we had been close as undergraduates, Vanessa and I turned out to be a bad match as living companions. Her Gothic mien was more than subcultural affect; it was deep and hard-earned. She'd lived through personal tragedy that few people at her young age had had to endure, and seemed, at least back then, to carry the heavy weight of loss with her at all times. By comparison, my own sadnesses seemed slight, but they were there nonetheless. Grad school wasn't working out for me. At my tiny college in Vermont, for better or worse, it had been easy to stand out and to be spoiled by the attention—friendship, even—of my professors. At a big school in the big city, I was doing nothing to distinguish myself, and at the same time I had little but contempt for the great majority of my fellow students. In a seminar on the Romantics, when we were discussing Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, I made what seemed to me a winning, if obvious, joke. The first time someone in the room spoke the book's title aloud, I corrected him. “
Fronkensteen
,” I insisted. Either no one in the class had seen Mel Brooks's masterpiece
Young Frankenstein
—which seemed to me not merely impossible, but downright tragic—or they pretended they hadn't. In either case, it felt like one more little depressing moment in a year that was quickly filling up with them. The gloom of my apartment, whose few windows faced only the back sides of other buildings—hardly brightened by my roommate's poster collection (heavy on the Cure) and Sisters of Mercy–centric sound track—only made it worse. The place confirmed my unhappiness and my nagging, if premature, sense of failure. I called it Bleak House.

Puffy's, for all its louche allure, was the perfect antidote to graduate school, to my work environment, and to my housing situation. For a time, I'd go in the afternoons after teaching, return to that little stretch of banquette near the back corner, and quietly grade papers. The afternoon bartender at the time was Louie, a flirtatious painter in his fifties with an abundant head of salt-and-pepper hair, a dense mustache that would not have been out of place on the sepia-photographed countenance of a Union soldier in 1863, and a wardrobe of homespun shirts with wooden buttons, suspenders, and breeches. The first time I met him I was in a foul mood and ordered a pint of Guinness and a Jameson, neat. He smiled slyly. “Girl,” he asked me, not exactly rhetorically, “where you been all my life?”

Most afternoons I'd stick to Guinness, keep to myself, and slog through a tower of freshman essays. But I eavesdropped shamelessly on the conversations among the guys at the bar. It was never anything scandalous: neighborhood news and a smattering of gossip, pretty standard among people who'd known one another seemingly forever. But they were an animated bunch. Bill was a sandpaper-voiced ironworker who'd spent years working on the Manhattan Bridge and had a nose that looked like it had seen more than its share of fights and occupational hazards. He usually had a Yorkshire terrier in tow, wearing a little satin bow in her silky topknot.
“Emma,”
he'd coo at her with gravelly affection, stroking her head and chin. The dog was named after Emma Goldman. Emma was not the only canine in the crowd: Henry, an aging overweight beagle, usually accompanied Walker, a homeless man known to just about everyone in the neighborhood, loved by some, tolerated by others. Probably in his fifties at the time, he reputedly spoke about a dozen (mainly classical) languages and had been a tournament Scrabble champion. Anyone who tried to talk to Walker about the shelter system or encourage him to “get help” was instantly rebuffed. Even I, the queen of the bleeding hearts, who badly wished to regard myself as a helper of humankind and a friend particularly to people who were poor, marginalized, and outcast, knew better than to dare. He made it perfectly clear that he was more than smart enough to seek help and make use of whatever resources existed; he happened to prefer his life the way it was, thank you very much. Walking Henry, who belonged to a friend, seemed to provide Walker with enough money to feed himself and buy the occasional drink. I also got used to the sight of a wiry guy named Ken, a bundle of nervous human energy, who'd stop by, chat with Louie, maybe have a drink, maybe not, and disappear as quickly as he'd arrived. Within a month or so, I'd be working side by side with Ken on the little magazine of literature and art he'd been putting out since 1971, the year I was born.

Everything felt right to me at Puffy's: the look of the place, its tone and cadences, the absence of a television, the presence of the old jukebox loaded with classic rock 'n' roll 45s (“Satisfaction,” “Runaround Sue”) and some curiosities (like Randy Newman's “Short People”), the playing card—a six of hearts—confoundingly affixed to the high ceiling in the front right corner (lodged there, I am told, by a long-ago bartender/magician who liked to entertain his drunks with card tricks). It was comforting and reassuring; it was not home and not school and not the office. The afternoon guys were welcoming and friendly, but politely left me to my Guinness and my work. Then, having finished grading, critiquing, and often despairing over a substantial-enough number of papers, I might reward myself in the early evening with a nice Jameson on the rocks.

For that reward, I would move from the back bench to a barstool up in the front corner. And that was probably the single most important development in my drinking life. I became a regular, a person who belonged to a bar, and to whom a bar belonged. I understood that though I loved the bars I patronized in college, I was only passing through; four years and I'd be gone. But I had, at the time, no desire ever to leave New York again. So why would I ever leave Puffy's—this perfect, picturesque, comfortable spot?

I found myself staying later and later, watching the early evening crowd replace the afternoon crowd, watching one bartender relieve another as the former counted out the till and tallied up his or her tips, then switched over to the civilian side of the bar for a very welcome post-shift drink. Evening, and the locals, the ones whose jobs made day drinking impossible, filed in. Like the afternoon crowd, most of them were nearly a generation older than me. The really, really tall guy. The ponytailed Southern one with the anxiety and the twang. The cowboy, outfitted more appropriately for a day out on the range than on the streets of the great metropolis. The blond guy with the boyish face and the interest in post-structuralist philosophers. They were so at ease with one another, so familiar. They'd bullshit and laugh, and I'd sit a few stools down and listen. They were mostly guys, yes, but there were a few women, too. The one with dark curls and sparkly blue eyes and a great love of beer. The foxy, witty one with a little gravel in her voice; she'd graduated from Bennington in 1969, back when it was
really
cool. The sad, sweet one who slurred her words as she sat below the portrait of her deceased beloved.

Aside from the bartenders, I don't know who talked to me first. Not the cowboy. Not the Southerner. Not the boyish one. It might have been Sonia, with the curls. Or maybe it was Jimmy, the tall guy, who had a deep tall-guy voice and a long face and glasses, and a distinct sweetness about him that was matched by an equally unmistakable watchfulness. He knew everyone there. He knew their stories, their wives, their habits, their histories. And through all the years of drinking together, I sensed that he was the one who remembered, and recorded, what they'd experienced in one another's company. So many of Puffy's conversations, especially among the guys, started with, “Hey, remember that time . . . ?” And, of course, I did
not
remember that time—that time when everyone was dancing on the tabletops, that time when so-and-so disarmed a mugger in the shady little alley behind the bar with his blunt assertion that, really, his day couldn't get any worse anyway, that time when . . . that time when . . . But I was happy just to take it in, to listen, to imagine what a past here, a history here, felt like.

But certainly it was Will, the boyish blond, with whom I had my first substantial Puffy's conversation—fun and lively and
long
—and with whom I felt an instant kindred-spirit connection. I got Will, and he—this funny, smart, deeply charming person—got me.