Beware the Solitary Drinker (2 page)

We ate breakfast in the greasy spoon at 106th and went to my apartment. She wanted no part of romance. Very tired, she nodded off to sleep on my couch, and whatever amorous intentions I had were doused by her sleepiness. “I'm too confused,” she said before she slept.

I sat for a long time in my old stuffed easy chair sipping scotch, watching the remnants of a late-night Peter Lorre movie, remembering women I'd known, every few seconds turning to look at Angelina's face as she slept.

In the morning, she cried softly over coffee at my cluttered kitchen table, then threw herself on the couch again. “I give up,” she said. “I'm staying right here. I'm your responsibility.”

That afternoon we went to the Marlin Cafe, an old neighborhood bar, lately taken over in the evening by Columbia students in some subdued version of bohemianism. In the daylight, it was still a place for old men to stare into their seven ounce beer glasses. We talked for a long time; mostly she talked and I listened. She told me she was molested when she was ten and her mother never forgave her.

“‘That's what ruined you,' my mother told me all my life,” Angelina said. It sounded as though she believed it, too.

She was raped again when she was twelve by a friend of her mother's—though this one she had never told anyone about—and began running away from home and having sex with men when she was thirteen. She moved in with a thirty-two-year-old sculptor when she was fifteen, about the time she became a nude model.

“My mother disapproves of sleeping around almost as much as I do,” she said, waving those eyelashes and smiling shyly, just after she told me the number of men she'd slept with was in the hundreds and she'd never had an orgasm. “It's so mechanical. It gets to be like shaking hands—undress, put in my diaphragm, and screw.”

Angelina stayed at my apartment for a couple of weeks watching
I Love Lucy
reruns and reading fashion magazines. At night, she hung around Oscar's making friends with the regulars. She did this methodically, I realized later, checking out each man who entered the bar as if she were looking for someone.

“I think it's really nice that we're friends and not lovers,” she said when we talked about it.

“Me, too. Getting laid is bad for you at my age.”

“It would ruin everything if we were lovers.” Her voice wavered, and she looked helplessly into my eyes. I knew she would go to bed with me if I really wanted that. For whatever reason, gratitude, habit, need, she would do it. But I shared her foreboding: I knew something terrible would happen if she did.

The regulars at Oscar's adored Angelina. She flirted with everyone, moseying from one barstool to the next, lapping up the barflies' attentions and enjoying the jealousy she created. Everyone had a crush on Angelina, and she made each of the winos feel in turn that she had a crush on him. Maybe she did.

Angelina found something to like and admire in everyone. This generosity toward her fellow suffering humanity went over extremely well with the winos, most of whom had run out of things to like about themselves years before.

Sometimes, Angelina had dates she met at the bar, and some nights she didn't come in at all. Usually, when she met a guy, she'd stay out all night, not returning to my apartment until the next day. On those days after, she was withdrawn, staring at the TV, not talking, depressed, and getting on my nerves. I hated the sound of the television.

Sometimes, her dates kept her away from the bar for a week or so, but sooner or later she'd come back for a night with the regulars. Back with a couple of new lousy jokes that everyone would laugh at. Whenever I looked up, someone's arm circling her bony shoulder, she was raucously laughing her way through the joke. The joke that was always vulgar—about balls or tits or vaginas—and never really funny.

Oscar's really became a bar late at night after the dinner crowd thinned out. Around ten-thirty, the rock and roll band set up, and the respectable people went home. Then the winos filtered in one at a time. They weren't really winos unless they drank alone. Beware the solitary drinker, the old-time bartenders had told me years before. Now, here they were, all of them—solitary drinkers.

A few of the regulars were in their twenties or thirties, but most were older, some in their sixties. Pretty much everyone had traveled many roads and had many stories to tell. As long as they told them to each other, I didn't mind.

My stock had gone up considerably because Angelina came to see me. And I have to admit my night brightened considerably each time I saw her. But Oscar's of the Upper West Side was a bar any number of women came into on their own. The women who frequented the place liked me well enough. Most women like the bartenders of the joints they drink in. But most of them didn't like Angelina. This was mostly because the men were so taken with her, and she didn't have any scruples about going to bed with men—except me. I put up with the dirty looks and snide remarks from the other women and with Angelina's outrageous act, despite my certain knowledge that her flirting and carelessness would lead to trouble, because I couldn't help wanting to have her around. As she was for the stumblebums, she was the excitement in my life. But there was more. I knew, without knowing it, that beneath the flamboyance, the craving for attention, the lewdness, and the recklessness, Angelina was as gentle as anyone I'd ever known, except maybe my mother.

Not surprisingly, Angelina's sashaying from one barfly to the next caused a good deal of jealousy, and the jealousy caused more than a few shoving matches, do-si-dos, and step-outsides. The closest we got to a fistfight was when Nigel Barthelme, one of the smitten regulars, felt called upon to defend her honor against the barbs of a certain Reuben Foster, another regular. Fed up with her antics one evening, Reuben called Angelina a slut and a prick-teasing little twat. Angelina took umbrage.

“I can't believe the assholes in this place,” she said.

“It's three in the morning,” I reminded her. “You're in Oscar's on Broadway. Who'd you expect, Prince Charming?”

Nigel stepped in, though. Maybe he thought he was Prince Charming. Reuben knocked him on his ass. Duffy, the doorman, grabbed Reuben while I picked up Nigel. Reuben, well into his fifties, hadn't lost his upper body strength; his torso was the size of a fifty-five-gallon drum.

“Nigel,” I said as he squirmed to get back to the fight, “if you don't stop, I'm going to whack you.” Something had snapped in him: he couldn't stop if he wanted; his face was twisted with hatred beyond rage. He actually scared me, but I was inside his arms so he couldn't hit me, and since I was bigger and heavier, he couldn't get me out of the way. I talked to him, my face inches away from his contorted mouth and his foul, labored breathing, trying to talk reason, and looking into his eyes that, like a blind man's, didn't look back.

“She's not a slut,” Nigel screamed—a point I didn't think even Angelina would argue too strenuously.

“They're all sluts,” said Reuben. He wasn't angry and he didn't show drunk, despite a half-dozen undiluted rums. On a good night, he was steady on his feet after a dozen.

“Reuben!” I bellowed, while I crushed the squirming Nigel against the partition wall, “Take a walk or I'll bar you from here, too.” Reuben had to consider this threat since he'd already been barred from a couple of the other bars on our part of Broadway and was running out of places to drink.

He also liked me. “C'mon, Reuben,” I said more softly, “do me a favor, take a walk for a half-hour.” Grumbling about twats and sluts, he picked up his money from the bar, leaving a couple of bucks for me, and walked out. Reuben was a tough guy, and I liked having him around the bar; two or three times he'd helped me drag someone out, and once he'd pulled a drunk off-duty cop off my throat. His problem was that he hated women.

After four marriages, he hadn't learned; he'd still engage any woman, particularly a young woman, who happened into Oscar's. An aging hipster, who'd drunk in the West End with Ginsberg and Kerouac, he was a light-skinned black from an old New England family who had graduated from Oberlin College and still read novels and philosophy. He was one of the folks who made life a bit interesting at Oscar's. The college girls from Barnard and Columbia who wandered in now and again found him eccentric and charming. So did Angelina. She probably spent more time with him than with most of the other regulars, leaving him panting after her most nights there at the bar, still in fond pursuit of his biggest problem.

Nigel's brain returned to the fold a few minutes after Reuben left. I let go of him, Angelina took over comforting him, and I went back behind the bar.

Nigel Barthelme was another of Angelina's conquests. He was already part of the scene when I began working at Oscar's, having established himself as a kind of gofer. If I needed something from the liquor store to tide me over until Oscar paid the liquor distributor's bill, or the chef, Eric the Red, needed some hamburger meat from the market at 110th Street, Nigel would trot off to get it. Whenever something broke, Nigel ran to his apartment for his tool kit and came back and fixed it. But he wasn't your typical gofer. He had a good job doing something with computers in the financial district. Nor was he your typical barfly, as most of the time he drank ginger ale. He'd never really be an Oscar's regular since he considered his day job more important than his drinking.

Yet the four walls closed in on him late at night, too, like they did the rest of us. He was a night owl, and if you wanted to go out late at night on the Upper West Side, your choices were limited in 1983. Oscar befriended Nigel, word had it, because Oscar believed him to be descended from a wealthy family—and there was nothing that impressed Oscar more than wealth.

Angelina snatched poor Nigel up the first time she saw him come in the door. When he spied her that first night, he stood in the doorway gawking like he'd just fallen off the turnip truck. She looked up from her drink once, then looked up again. In no time at all, he was sitting beside her. This night, she was at first her cheerful self, then later much more serious than I was used to seeing her. Just before closing, she looped her arm about Nigel's shoulder and leaned heavily against him as they rolled out of the bar into the Broadway night. He seemed so taken with her, and she acted so differently with him than with her other conquests, that I thought she might have found something with Nigel. But he was back in the bar a couple of nights later nervously looking for her, and she was nowhere to be found. He looked for her every night for a week, asking me with fake casualness if I'd seen her.

I had seen her in actual fact because when she needed to be alone and get some sleep, she came back to my apartment, usually during the day, and curled up on the couch. But I didn't see any reason to tell Nigel this. His pining around the bar at night was bad enough; I didn't want him on my doorstep during the day also.

The time came, though, not long after this, that Angelina stayed away from the bar for quite a while and even stopped showing up at my apartment. I worried but then heard tell she'd been making the rounds farther downtown. When she finally did come back to Oscar's, she was in the chips. She bought the regulars drinks, tipped me five bucks when she bought a round, and tuned me up every half-hour from her packet of blow. She'd found a job at Hanrahan's on 65th Street, she told me, and I figured it must be a gold mine. She said she'd found herself a sugar daddy, so she would be my sugar momma.

That night, she left with Duffy the doorman. Her leaving cast a pall over the bar; the laughter and the good times gave way to steady, solitary, hard drinking, the kind usually disguised by the good time. We all shared an unspoken belief that she was throwing herself away on Duffy, but I doubt any of the rest of us planned to build her a house in the country. Even Nigel drank that night. So did I. Losing Angelina was one more failure added to a long string, so each of us, mired in the remembrance of a lifetime of losses, settled in to feel sorry for himself.

Nigel turned out to be an awful drunk, belligerent, foul-mouthed, contemptuous, and nasty to everyone. I finally threw him out around three. The next day, he was back, sheepish, contrite, diffident, wearing dark glasses instead of his coke bottles, his face even whiter than usual.

“You see now why I don't drink often,” he said.

“You're one of the worst drunks I've ever seen,” I assured him. “Maybe you should try drugs.”

“I'm worse,” Nigel said.

From then on, when Angelina did return, she and Nigel might talk or they might not, but I could tell the flame had gone out. Nigel pined after her, and she toyed with him. Still, he took it like a man, hanging on, being her friend, waiting for the day she'd come to her senses and realize he was the one for her.

During this time, too, Nigel and I took to hanging out together. Since he was often around at closing time, we'd have breakfast at the Greek greasy spoon, sometimes with Angelina, sometimes with some of the other leftovers from the bar. We regaled each other with stories of our pasts and commentaries on the state of the world and nation. Nigel liked to argue politics—bait me would be more like it. Late at night, with the greasy smoke of the Greek's grill as a backdrop, he'd pontificate like I imagined those Russian-royalty hangers-on displaced by the Bolsheviks did in the Paris cafes. An eloquent defender of privilege taking on the half-sloshed mouthpiece of the great unwashed, we bored to tears everyone around us.

Other nights, we went to my apartment or to Eric the Red's to smoke dope and listen to music, except that Nigel didn't smoke dope either. He seemed perfectly content, sitting there straight while we got stoned. He said he'd lived in the East Village in the mid-seventies when he'd been a roadie for groups like the Doobie Brothers and Aerosmith, and had been drugged out enough in those days. He did seem like a counter-culture leftover trying to go straight—a little off-kilter with the aura of having taken one trip too many.