Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (7 page)

Yes, I was ridiculous. Dublin had been good to me; it had given me everything I had wanted of it and more. And my thanks was to cry over someone who had not, when I thought about it, broken my heart. Who had meant, I understood, only to be honest with me. And there, on the bridge, I laughed at my pride and foolishness, and I thought of the sad, unforgettable last line of Joyce's great story “Araby,” in which a young Dubliner, in the painful dawning of self-awareness, says, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” I didn't have it
that
bad.

As my own misguided anguish abated, I continued my march back to Trinity, past the lampposts where The Poet and I had kissed only hours before, the same shuttered pubs, the same Georgian buildings. To the college gates, where I knocked loudly and one of the guards let me in. “Haven't seen you in a spell,” one said.

“Been busy.” I was drenched, and I'm sure he could tell I'd been crying.

“Right-o,” he said sympathetically. “You get some sleep then.”

I got some sleep. And I knew I'd be okay. I still had Ryan. And Grogan's. I still had my young Socialist comrades. I still had Guinness. I still had Jameson. That weekend, I went west to Galway, just as native Dubliners so often do when they need to get away, clear their heads, sort things out. I drank a lot of whiskey and flirted with a lot of strangers. I slept with an English backpacker in a narrow squeaky cot at the youth hostel. It was true; American girls were easy. I felt better.

•   •   •

A
nd, it turned out, I still had The Poet. Within days of my return to Dublin, I had more or less moved back in with him. Things were different, and, in a way, better. We had an understanding. We were friends. We drank our whiskey at night, our tea in the morning. We shared a bed. We talked. I even switched my return flight to extend my stay in Ireland two more weeks, pushing it as close to the beginning of the school year in Vermont as I could. I didn't feel ready to leave Dublin, even though by then I had conceded that, no, I was not Irish after all. And that was just fine. It was also just fine not to be the most beloved, but loved enough.

4.

SHADOW SCHOOL

The Pig, North Bennington, Vermont

P
oor Tessie Hutchinson. “It isn't fair, it isn't right,” she protests at the end of Shirley Jackson's short story “The Lottery,” that exquisite American Gothic miniature well known to anyone who took high school English in the United States between, roughly, 1950 and the present. No, it certainly isn't fair, isn't right: Tessie, having drawn the slip of paper with the telltale black dot, is about to become the latest victim of a savage annual tradition—a human sacrifice—right there on the village green of her tiny New England hamlet. She is about to get stoned to death by her fellow townsfolk, her neighbors, her people. “The Lottery” is an exposure—distorted and magnified—not only of the brutality that lurks just beneath the serene surface of small-town life, but of the cruelty of which all people might just be capable.

This particular territory, where poor, fictional Tessie breathed her last, is familiar to me. The town in which “The Lottery” takes place is presumed to be modeled on North Bennington, Vermont—where Jackson lived with her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who taught at Bennington College, the very small school situated just up the hill from the very small town. I've read that Jackson sometimes felt suffocated there, and often unwelcome, with four children to raise, a big weird messy house to run, and more talent and ambition than the role of faculty wife generally allowed for in her time.

It's well known that Jackson was fascinated by witchcraft, both in its literary and practical applications. She may have developed this interest before she settled in North Bennington, but it's just the sort of place where such a sensibility can, with little effort, completely take hold. Were witches ever tried and burned there? I doubt it. But I always felt that the spirit of the place smacked of the mystic. Every full moon loomed hugely over the campus and the nearby village, illuminating swarms of fearsome bats fluttering below. One especially gray and ominous midwinter afternoon, I could've sworn I saw a wolf driving a battered old station wagon up Main Street, even though upon reflection it was probably just a hairy guy, of which there is no shortage in Vermont. Whatever or whoever it was, I was spooked, irrationally or not. And then there were the woods, through which ran the shortest path from the village to the center of campus. What kind of forces, wicked or benevolent or neutral, mastered and animated this small forest I cannot say, but many mornings I paused at the start of the path to offer a quick but sincere prayer that I might pass safely through. I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. I am superstitious.

Those woods enchanted me, surely in no small part because they frightened me. Starting in my freshman year, I would repair to them frequently for solace, for comfort, for inspiration, for the hope they extended—a hope fed abundantly by a steady diet of Wordsworth and Yeats and Emerson and Frost—that in them I might make contact with the spirit of nature itself and, by Romantic-Transcendental extension, with God, whatever that might be. There in Vermont, in as much nature as a native New Yorker might ever dream possible, I felt both more deeply connected with the natural world than ever and more set apart from it—out of nature,
supernatural
in the sense I believe, perhaps mistakenly, to be most heartbreakingly literal. In my freshman and sophomore years, when I still lived on campus, my roommate grew accustomed to tense telephone exchanges with my intransigently cosmopolitan mother.

“Where is my daughter?” she would demand without so much as a prefatory “hello.”

“She's in the woods,” my roommate would answer.

“In the woods?”
my mother would bellow. “She's from
New York
. She could get killed there. What is she doing
in the woods
?”

“Communing with nature. Or something. I'll let her know you called.”

My mother knew, even as I wished to deny it, that the woods were not where I belonged. It's true; I am a city person. And while North Bennington could hardly qualify as an urban environment, it offered at least some of the amenities of civilized life; namely, it had a bar.

But the thing about small towns is,
they are small
. People will know all your shit, and you will know theirs, and you, and they, will have to accept that. Commercially, this tiny pocket of northern North Americana had little to say for itself. It had a post office, a general store, a pizzeria, a fancy restaurant where your mom and dad might take you to dinner during parents' weekend or a friend might get a job bussing tables, a gas-station-slash-cigarette-and-beer-convenience store with launderette attached, a bank—and the bar. And there's no way that each and every day you spend in a small town, and pass your time and live your life in these few venues, you're not going to run into someone you know and who knows you. Unless you are an absolute shut-in—like Constance Blackwood in Jackson's great novel
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
—you cannot hide from your fellow townsfolk.

Certainly, as I sat on the front porch of my little first-floor apartment on the village's Main Street, I relished having a convenient vantage point from which to monitor the comings and goings at various hours of those whom I knew to live in North B, as most of us called it, and those whom I knew did not. I passed many temperate evenings on that shabby porch, playing Scrabble or cards with friends, maybe sharing a bottle of cheap wine or a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips, and many mornings with coffee and cigarettes and a crossword puzzle before going to class. From there I could observe an off-campus version of the well-known Walk of Shame on campus, where one might witness over weekend brunch the traffic patterns across the main lawn, and if you knew who lived where, as most of us did, well, you could arrive at all sorts of conclusions. Small, isolated places breed this kind of thinking.

It didn't take much doing to understand why Jackson had allegorized her little community in the most sinister way imaginable, but to a big-city girl like myself, North Bennington was also something new and nearly heavenly: all scuffed picket fences and hilly streets and beat-up clapboard-clad or brick houses that listed to one side or the other, lilac trees that burst into perfumed life every muddy spring, twisty creeks and canals that sang and sputtered. In autumn, Vermont may just be the most magnificent place on earth: its frantic display of so much red and orange and gold, its trees that bleed and flame with the splendor of incipient fatality. But otherwise, there's little grandeur to speak of in North Bennington, dotted as it is with rusty rotting mills and expired factories, sliced by railroad tracks upon which no trains have rolled since God remembers when. North B isn't stately like neighboring Old Bennington, with its neoclassical mansions and phallic-triumphalist obelisk commemorating the Battle of Bennington (which actually took place a town west, in Hoosick, New York), its whitewashed, austere Congregational church and its picturesque graveyard in which generations of students have paid their drunken midnight respects at the grave of Robert Frost. North B is also too settled to be called bucolic. Still, it's charming in its own modest way; it is humble, it is ordinary, a small town populated by families and working people, a handful of college professors, and the few students, like myself, lucky enough to get permission to live off campus. I moved to North B as fast as I could, first into the only college-owned off-campus house—a gray Victorian cube capped by a cupola, just beyond the railroad tracks—and then into the Main Street apartment with the front porch the summer before my senior year.

Bennington College regarded itself at the time as a “self-selecting” school, which may have been just a friendly and parent-comforting way of saying it wasn't hard to get into. They had let me in, after all—a high school dropout with math SAT scores, my brother quipped, that probably wouldn't have gotten me into the National Hockey League. But by then I badly wanted to be a student, and, I hoped, a good one. I wanted to read lots of books and, seduced by the glossy catalog the college had sent along with an application for admission and which I pored over dreamily for many weeks, I envisioned myself hauling great stacks of important literary works across the idyllic campus, trudging through piles of crunchy fallen leaves in hiking boots until I ran into a fellow student, maybe even a professor, and we launched into an impromptu argument about the last novels of Henry James, or about third-world feminist poetry, or something else about which I knew nothing. I wanted to write lots of papers (even if I would chronically turn them in late). I wanted to learn. I entered college in the fall of 1990, about two years after dropping out of high school, a time I'd spent mostly following the Grateful Dead around the country. Because I'd been out of school for a while, I thought of myself, at the ripe old age of nineteen, as a “mature” freshman.

In a way, that was true. For me, college was not my first taste of freedom, but instead a chance to redeem myself, to un-fuck-up as best I could. I was over drugs, but drinking had already become a part of who I was. The one little bar in North B was a major draw to off-campus life. It was the only one within reasonable walking distance of school, and living in town would bring me even closer. I liked my classes, I idolized my professors, I joined about a half-dozen committees. But on campus, socially, I felt dislocated.

When I first visited the bar in North Bennington, as a sophomore, it was still called the Villager, and most everybody called it the V. Seniors, graduate students, and a few professors drank there. And not everybody who spent time there was involved with the college, which gave the students who hung out there a different, more intimate perspective on life in this depressed corner of New England. There were guys like Alex and Adrian, who'd graduated from Bennington in the previous decade but had stuck around and were now more Vermont than Vermonters. And there was a fantastic bartender with a huge, warm laugh, who also happened to be a fine poet. This was where I wanted to be, more than at campus parties. It felt more like how I imagined the real world felt like, and I knew that college wasn't the real world.

By the time I was a senior, the Villager had twice changed ownership and names. For about one miserable year, it was a mediocre restaurant with delusions of grandeur. The new owners made it clear that students were not welcome, no matter how un-studently we behaved. It wanted skiers, it wanted tourists, it wanted anyone but us. The owner eyed us with suspicion whenever we sat down at the bar. She was foolish, because in such a small town, a bar's bread and butter is bound to be the locals, and in this case, the locals included students. Predictably the venture failed, and soon enough, two lovable middle-aged sisters from the Berkshires took over the space and opened an unpretentious bar and restaurant where all (of legal drinking age) were welcome.

It was a refreshing and necessary change of guard following an unpleasant and distressing interlude, and it struck many of us that the sisters' only misstep was in the name they'd chosen to bestow upon their establishment. They renamed it No Baloney, a disconcerting fact that one could not ignore, proclaimed as it was on the sign they hung outside the premises; a sign embellished, no less, by the smiling visage of a plump pink pig. Those of us who had wasted no time establishing ourselves as regulars took to calling it the Pig Bar, and often, even more efficiently, the Pig. Despite this, it was a wonderfully civilized little place. And as dreadful as its real name was, it had a ring of truth and rectitude: There
was
no baloney here, no BS, no airs or fripperies. The food was good in a standard and honest way, the drinks were reasonably priced, the atmosphere unfussy.

After Grogan's in Dublin, the Pig became my second proper local. There, a small group of friends—including a handful of male professors—drank and talked until late most every night. And among the regulars who were not connected with the college, none was more regular than Stan—a sweet, funny sap of a man who worked at the local auto parts shop. And among the faculty, there was no one whose company I kept more often than David, a professor of English literature.

His prodigious drinking habits were the source of not a little gossip and awe on campus. Everybody had heard about the time he had instructed the students in a Beckett seminar to show up at his house to watch a film, and how we banged on his door and called him on the telephone for the better part of the morning until he finally was able to lift himself from his drunkbed, open the door, let us in, and screen the movie. (There was also a rumor, which I never quite believed, that he had passed a student in a previous Beckett seminar who had submitted, as his or her final paper, twenty blank sheets of paper.) None of this demonstrably diminished the quality of his teaching, which was engaging and challenging. He was a tall, lanky, pallid character, handsome in a dissolute, faintly Byronic way.

His intellect was formidable and, to me, anyway, intimidating in its breadth and its rigor. He had a sharp and confident, if not downright arrogant, discursive style that lent itself well to debates, in which he habitually prevailed. As with the woods, I was drawn to him because I was a little bit afraid of him—for all of his cultivation, I still detected a streak of wildness about him—and I was certain that I stood to gain much from his company, if I could muster the nerve to keep it.

And if one drinks, at least sometimes, to try to forget one's worries, well, he had plenty reason to drink (not that he needed one): A big shift was underway on campus. A beloved faculty member had been unceremoniously canned more than a year earlier, and the need for further faculty cuts had been announced—an assessment that, to many students and professors, seemed less than perfectly honest. During my sophomore year, I had been one of the instigators of a student insurgency orchestrated to obtain the economic evidence that such cuts were in fact necessary; many students suspected that something other than a fiscal shortfall was behind the cuts, that the administration regarded a good number of instructors as enemies, that this was a matter of academic freedom under threat. Our well-intended but naively planned student takeover of the college president's and other administrative offices failed to yield the evidence, or lack thereof, we'd sought. We thought we'd been pretty savvy, but in our youthful cluelessness, we had never anticipated that the president and her partisans in the administration would refuse to give us what we wanted, and we had failed to consider the paramount importance of having a strong exit strategy. If our student protest did little to protect the jobs of those whose jobs we wished to protect, it did bring some of us closer to our professors and fortify our alliance. They could be sure that we were on their side.