The Wet and the Dry (16 page)

Gran Festival de Cante y Baile

Con la sensacional actuación de

Pilar Montero

Y su gran espectáculo

Rumbas, fandangas, dos orquestras!

I took all this in as my Drambuie drained away and my feet felt cold. I enjoyed the fishing nets filled with conch shells and the old wooden telephone booths. There were mounted antelope horns, dusty sombreros, and old diving helmets hung next to a small picture of a canal in\ Venice with a gondola busy being
predictably photogenic. From the 1950s, one might have said, like much else at Montero’s, which seemed stuck in a midcentury time warp. The bar as a repository of the memories of ordinary people who will be forgotten.

The cities where one has lived through a life-and-death struggle always possess a vitality in the memory that the places associated with happiness and success can never have. I can walk down a few streets in a few other cities and feel a warm satisfaction, a desire to relive, but if I walk down Third Avenue in New York, for example, there will always be a bitter unease, a sudden ridiculous recall: one winter afternoon long ago I walked in and stole a huge Stilton from the Third Avenue Cheese Shop, a precursor of all the foodie stores now so prevalent in our city. Then, however, it was a novelty.

Down to five dollars and with no credit card, no family, no friends willing to lend any more, I walked in and decided the best way to steal a seven-pound Stilton was to be brazen. Just walk in, pick it up, and walk out with it. It worked. I lugged it home to Bond Street and rationed it with a teaspoon for four days running. Was I sober that day?

Even if they didn’t want to lend me money for food, friends would always buy me a drink at a bar. It was entertainment for them. They could not, in any case, believe that a grown adult in possession of his faculties and living in one of the wealthiest cities in the world was actually hungry and didn’t have the wherewithal to buy himself even a box of eggs. It was so amazing
to them, so incredible, that they wanted to hear all about it. “Here,” they would say, “have a fifteen-dollar cocktail, and tell me why you can’t afford a pizza. You have to have a story.”

But I didn’t have a story. One falls on hard times in a foreign land, and it gets worse and worse, and soon one feels how a drinker feels as he descends downward through the social order while all his incredulous middle-class friends look on with disbelief and half-amused alarm. “It can’t be happening,” they say, and they believe themselves. But it can easily happen. You miss a rung on the ladder, and suddenly the ladder doesn’t exist.

Later, those same friends would say, with obvious relief and a desire to clear things up a bit, “Well, of course, we knew you were drinking.” It was their excuse for not quite believing it at the time, and their way of providing to me a conceptual framework for understanding such a near-disaster. I remember Quentin Crisp, who used to live around the corner off Second Street, and who sometimes came to Bond Street for tea, regal in his threadbare velvet hats, saying with grand and queenly authority: “If we got what we all deserved, we’d starve.”

Coming from a man who lived in poverty, if more genteel poverty than mine, this seemed consolingly apt. One is responsible for one’s own shipwrecks. Anecdotes mean nothing.

Still, looking back on this period, I cannot avoid asking myself if I really was drinking then but cannot remember it, or worse still if I refuse to remember it. It might have been a bacchic disorder after all.

In the winter of 1995 I stayed in a small Vermont village called East Dorset at a writers’ colony. Having run out of money
yet again (and in a place where credit was never extended in the single haute-bourgeois grocery store), I resorted to nocturnal sallies armed with a broomstick to knock down apples in all the gardens surrounding the writers’ house—which itself was occupied by five lesbians from whom I could not cadge even a biscuit. Night after night I gorged on apples until the denuded trees drew attention to themselves and gossip began to circulate among the three hundred inhabitants of East Dorset. An apple thief was abroad.
Aux armes citoyens!

It could not have been me, that mad and famished person cooking crumbles and tarts and pies every night in the small hours until the whole house smelled like an apple barn. But it was certainly me with the bottle of vodka I had obviously decided to spend my last twenty on, roaming around the moonlit roads singing to myself and abusing the dogs. The soles of my shoes had come away, I was in a tattered overcoat and a fur hat, but I was alive, and I had my bottle. Eventually, however, I was asked to leave. An old lady had spied me knocking down her apples one night: it simply wouldn’t do, not among people dedicated to the finer points of creativity!

Onward, that winter, deepening into misery. On Thanksgiving Day I took a bus to Albany, the only person on it. I waited at the Albany bus station in a snowstorm and had the $6.99 Thanksgiving dinner, which I paid in quarters to considerable African-American amusement. By nightfall I was house-sitting in a ski lodge on top of a small mountain near Hunter, whence I had been taken by the four Albanians from Queens who rented it all winter for their skiing weekends.

How far can one fall while enjoying, in some strange way, the velocity occasioned by a failure of the parachute? Within days the chalet was snowed in. There was a bike on which to sail down to Hunter, where a lonely store stayed open till dusk. I took it one day, bought a half bottle of cooking brandy and some baked beans, and tried to cycle back up the frozen mountain.

By nightfall I had abandoned the bike and the cans of baked beans, which were later found by a family living by the road and returned to me. (“They was lying in the frozen river,” the mother said, “like dead things.”) There was nothing to eat in the house but cereal and condensed milk, but the addition of the brandy made for a meal. And then at ten, the other five lights on the top of the mountain shut down, and the dark night of the soul began. Wrapped in wool and blankets, alone with a glass and a great deal of time, I had, at that moment, little idea as to why exactly I was there.

In writing about drink, one is forced to acknowledge that its effects are never calculable or short term; nor are they the scripts that a taste for redemption and confession are liable to bequeath to us. Often it is just blankness, a nonbeing, a failure to show up for life during weeks and even months. I was rescued from my chalet existence by the appearance, one sparkling winter night, of the elderly architect who owned the land on which it was built and whose magnificent mansion—unnoticeably unlit so far—lay next door. He invited me round for dinner at once, with a flurry of “dear boys.” In my rags, I stumbled over to his house like a medieval mendicant.

A fairy tale is never reassuring. Inside his house the architect
stood with a little dog in front of cathedral windows, on the far side of which a waterfall plunged down between snow-white rocks. There was a table set with two places, a tall candle, and a bottle of burgundy. Would there be a price for drinking it and eating the food?

“Dear boy,” he cried, seeing me, “I have everything ready. James is making us lamb roti with couscous. Sit. I have a bottle of Charmes. Let’s make ourselves comfortable now, shall we? You look quite awful in that coat. Let’s find you something better. And let’s brush that long hair of yours. It’s awfully pretty, but you’ve got it in a fearsome tangle. My, what a savage you are.”

I think back to other bars in New York, where I spent most of my time when I could get a few dollars free—to the St. Regis Hotel, when someone else was paying, and to the places in Red Hook that I could reach with a long walk through the projects. The Liberty Heights Tap Room, delightfully estranged near Coffey Street, with its buildings that have the liver-red oxide color of Cambodian roads. I dream often enough of the Liberty Heights Tap Room as I lie in strange beds in strange cities, nostalgic for something I cannot put my finger on. A bar is like a second home, a refuge.

“The bar,” as Luis Buñuel once wrote, “is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable—and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn’t like to talk.”

How much time has been spent in these places? Years,
decades. Remembering them is like remembering faces. There are hundreds, and yet only a few are precious.

There is the bar at the Dukes Hotel in London, where they mix your dry martini from a trolley by your armchair. (I usually walk out from St. James’s Place, cross over to Green Park, and collapse on the lawns.) I recall epic sessions with Mountbatten’s nephew Michael Cunningham-Reid at the Mayfair casino in Nairobi while I was covering the murder trial of his friend Tom Cholmondeley during a long, exasperating winter: gin and tonic straight up, prostrate in the upstairs bar gazing up at murals of camels and men in pith. The colonial touch. An empire drowned in booze, the talk lapsing into incoherence. Lamentations that “nobody bloody drinks anymore.” And who could exceed the splendor of the bar at the Muthaiga Country Club in that same city, or the cool whitewashed elegance of the Hope and Anchor in Phnom Penh, with its enormous fans and its bottles of DeKuyper.

Such places are scattered around the world, sanctuaries from the boredom of travel and the discipline of loneliness. Their ease and convenience can only remind of the terrible periods when their absence made life desperate. That winter on the mountain in Hunter, for example: for when the philanthropic architect had departed for his annual winter sojourn in the South of France, taking his largesse with him, and when I could no longer play the fool in exchange for a bottle of Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes every other night, I was back to the distress that had confronted me just prior to raiding the Third Avenue Cheese Shop.

One night, when the snow was coming down and the
electricity was out, I thought that my benefactor would not mind it so much if I availed myself of one of his bottles from the cellar, so long as I left him a witty IOU. He would surely understand. Accordingly, I made my way in the darkness and tumultuous snow to his back door, where there was a cat flap at the bottom. Inserting my whole arm through this little aperture I could open the kitchen door itself and let myself in. It worked perfectly.

Rarely does one get to know how a burglar feels, entering another man’s house and wandering through it in the dark, among the structured possessions and casual debris of an entire existence. It gives one a sense of filthy power. But I was not interested in voyeurism. I went straight down to the cellars where there was also a line of enormous freezer units. I found the wine racks easily enough and plucked out one, then two bottles of the Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes. It would be for several hundred dollars, but I would write the witty IOU anyway. Then, as I was passing the freezers on my way out, I thought that since I had now incurred a debt of several hundred dollars, which I didn’t and would never have, I might as well throw in a frozen turkey as well. If I was going to slake my thirst, I might as well deal with the hunger side of things as well.

Inside the freezers there were the largest frozen turkeys I have ever seen. One was graspable, but barely, and so I staggered back upstairs with the two bottles and the enormous glacial bird slipping constantly from one arm. I stumbled back out into the snowstorm and the impenetrable darkness and began to run gleefully back to my miserable shack. I daresay that I
have never felt such a sense of personal triumph, such a complete lack of shame or moral compass. However, as I was sliding across a great expanse of frozen snow, the architect’s security system suddenly sprang into vociferous life. Arc lamps cunningly mounted on the roof flashed on and a siren wailed across the mountaintop. Caught in the crosshairs of four beams, the thief was illuminated and transfixed.

My architect had once told me that his system was directly wired to the Hunter police station. And so, pursuing a drink, and because I could not do without, I barricaded myelf in my shack with a frozen turkey and two bottles of Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes. Drenched in sweat, I hacked the bird into four pieces with a wood ax that the Albanians had marked with the instruction label
FOR BEARS
. I caught sight of myself for a moment in the mirror that hung in the front room: bare-chested, sweating, heaving an ax, and surrounded by shards of frozen turkey.

“Time to get a life, you sorry fuck!” I screamed at myself.

When silence and security had returned, however, and the police had still not come, I opened the first bottle of the ’95. I drank it in a soup bowl. “Aromas still on the rise,” I wrote in my witty IOU, which I later left under his doormat. “It’s not a bad year at all, old chap.”

Getting a Drink in a Civil War