The Wet and the Dry

by Lawrence Osborne

  Not in the holy Vedas, am I

  Nor in opium, neither in wine

  Not in the drunkard’s craze

  Neither awake, nor in a sleeping daze

  Bulleh! to me, I am not known

  Bars in a Man’s Life

  The term bar was first used in English in 1591 in Robert Greene’s drama A Notable Discovery of Coosnage. Greene was England’s first professional author and during his short life was known for a polemical attack on William Shakespeare. Did he invent “the bar”? The Victorians objected that the true bar was theirs. They claimed that Isambard Kingdom Brunel invented the bar to serve customers of his new railway at Swindon train station, or else that the Great Western Hotel at Paddington Station in London was where the first one opened. But either way, the bar is English.

  A University Wit, a rake, and a drunkard, Greene was famous for his pointed red beard and for dying from a meal of Rhenish wine and pickled herring. His hilarious attack on Shakespeare is dead-on. He married a rich woman named Doll and spent all her money. He lived from scabrous pamphlets delighting in the seamier side of London and died as an indebted dandy. An allegorical image shows him sitting at his writing desk in his funeral shroud looking like a human turnip.

  He was known in Elizabethan London for the Coney-Catching pamphlets, thinly veiled memoirs disguised as fiction, or vice versa, in which rakes and con men defrauded the upper classes to satisfy their vice habits. It was in this context that the word bar first arose. It was a new social space used by a new social class like Greene himself. A place to cheat, carouse, stand apart, boast, whore, and be left alone. But a place, also, in which a free society can conduct its informal business.

  Greene is also said to be the model for Falstaff. In his deathbed book A Groat’s-Worth of Wit, he wrote of himself that “his immeasurable drinking had made him the perfect Image of the Dropsy and the loathsome scourge of Lust tyrannized in his bones.”

  When I sit in Montero’s in Brooklyn, once (and for more than a decade) my local bar, I think of Greene, dead at thirty-four of a pickled herring. I am in a place of his invention, or so I like to think. I, too, am the Image of the Dropsy.

  This little stretch of Atlantic Avenue as it dips down toward the East River used to be the haunt of the longshoremen. Montero’s is the last vestige of that time. The old feral New York has vanished, having served up to its progeny, like so many bad dishes, one difficult experience after another. The first years of arrival in New York were bad times for me, an age of poverty and crisis, but all the same Montero’s was my bar during that icy age, and whenever I go through its door today (plumper and now armed with a credit card that works), I feel a slight panic, a regret for so much time wasted trying different kinds of Sauza tequila with the local drunks, all of whom are now dead: characters who live on only in the unconscious of a sobered-up English exile who should have gone the same way as them.

  One needs a bar almost as much as one needs oxygen, or shirts. Montero’s was cheap and dangerous, and they served Vodka Cherry Bombs for three dollars. It is no doubt only a shadow of its former self. Its sign is red neon, hung above its door like something advertising cheap funerals. It seemed to be open all the time, which a bar should be. It was a dive with frills then. It looked like the boudoir of a disorganized Spanish madam. The women there were wonderful authentic sluts, a type that has been eradicated from the city by the police commissars who have so boldly improved all our lives by making our neighborhoods safe for Chihuahuas and homemakers.

  There was a bell on the bar that bore a sign that read “Ring for merriment.” Was Merriment a man armed with a cleaver? I never dared ring it, in case Merriment actually showed up. One looked through a bead curtain to the nether room where the pool table stood and where fights always began. The fights were very entertaining. They were squabbles over women and infidelities, and they usually ended under the pool table with a knife brandished at awkward angles by a man with no pants on. It had style of a kind, and the police were never called. There was a brothel upstairs, so they said.

  Montero’s was my local bar after I moved into State Street. The neighborhood was cheap and cheerily violent in those days. It was the Brooklyn of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters. Montero’s was often open at three in the morning, with men sitting perfectly motionless at the bar, their mouths hanging open. Heroin was also easy to score in the bodegas.

  Even in the bar, the atmosphere was of imminent violence. The decorations encouraged it. There were clippers and schooners, with sextants on ledges and a cash register with little Central American flags. There was a photograph of a contortionist in the streets of Paris surrounded by trumpet players, and little B52s hanging from the ceiling on strings. Bullfight posters for Toros en Sada and the Great Manolete. There were pictures, too, of Joseph Curran, leader of the National Maritime Union from 1937 to 1973. A decor of anticipated intoxication.

  In that place I encountered some hellish specimens, men pickled in Sauza and gherkin juice, with eyes colored by their own piss. Women drenched in some indefinable fluid, wild-eyed and smelling of cherries, with veins like nautical knots in their necks.

  I found some drinkers who were legally blind. Blind as coots sitting there at the bar with a Cinzano and a cigar, night after night fading away and chewing cuds and following invariable baseball games through taped-up glasses. Every time I came in, there they were, as if they never moved, not even to sleep. I found myself on Schermerhorn every night, that suburb of Africa in those days, walking half dead past signs that read Clean your blood, past tenements cloaked in rotted ivy and Paco Jeans murals and Pioneer Warehouses with their stone scallops. There was no Atlantic Center then, just the old Temple Square fringed by check-cashing joints and gem pawnbrokers, with phantom lettering suspended in the air around, spelling things like Tinners Supplies and Gaswat Furnaces. It was a little corner of vital hell unmodified by the gaunt mass of the Baptist church.

  Montero’s. I remember everything about that place. There was a store called Dixon’s next door selling ovens and gas meters and a peritoneal dialysis center. There was a disabled veterans certificate in the window of the bar. The days of the Marine Square Club, of which Joseph Montero had been a president, were all but forgotten, sucked away into the past. There were life savers above that bar, from ships like the Houston and the Robert E. Lee, and a photograph of the old recreation pier at State Street. That snapshot of the Parkway Hospital dinner-dance of 1951, in which every woman looked elegant and beautiful—would that be true now? Photos of Spain, of ships bordered with butterfly wings, of flamenco dresses, and of Pilar Montero as a dancer with castanets and the following bill for a long-forgotten event:

  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.