Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) by Schaap Rosie

Author:Schaap, Rosie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

7.

ED

Liquor Store Bar, New York City

Because of the rats, in the summer of 1996, I’d get home from work and trade in my sandals for a pair of tough, thick-soled hiking boots—the scarred survivors of four Vermont winters—no matter how stupid they looked with a sundress. New York summer weather is usually miserable, but in TriBeCa, where construction projects seemed to be underway on every block—converting old loft buildings into expensive condos—the dust kicked up by the jackhammers and the power of all those generators magnified the sticky, sweaty, wretched haze and made it all feel even worse. And the construction brought out the rats in force, so I’d stomp in those huge heavy boots, lest one or two brazen little bastards dared skitter across my feet, to and from my sublet apartment all the way west on Harrison Street, along the cobbled and badly lit streets of the neighborhood, past Puffy’s up at the next corner, past the restaurants Chanterelle and Nobu, where limos queued up to drop off big spenders, past the Fourth Estate, the magical store on Hudson that traded in precious Persian carpets and international magazines, where the amiable owner listened to opera on the stereo and offered visitors a glass of wine, past the Greek diner and the Korean grocer, across North Moore Street, past Walker’s bar and restaurant at Varick Street.

I loved those streets. How well I’d come to know them, how confidently I felt like they were mine. I wasn’t afraid of the dark alleys that shot off the side streets like rusted spokes; I was young, and on good days I felt invincible. I had fallen madly back in love with the city where I was born. One more block east, past the firehouse, and then across the street and a tiny backtrack south, to the corner of West Broadway and White Street, and there, at the end of this zigzag circuit through the neighborhood, was Liquor Store—the bar for which I’d all but abandoned Puffy’s, on the ground floor of an 1825 vintage, landmarked, whitewashed Federal-style townhouse with a gabled black gambrel roof.

After a year in the apartment I’d nicknamed Bleak House, I’d lucked out in finding new quarters just a block from Puffy’s Tavern, the bar where I had spent the great majority of the previous three hundred and sixty-five nights of my life. But by then, I’d started to grow weary of Puffy’s. I wasn’t the only one. Several Puffy’s regulars had already started drifting a few blocks away to Liquor Store or, as some insisted on calling it, the No-Name Bar. (In its first few months of existence it didn’t have a name, and some people preferred it that way.)

Its charms could not be denied. Liquor Store was the sunny allegro to Puffy’s dark penseroso. It was well worth trekking a few extra rat-filled streets to get there, straight past many other bars to which my allegiance might have shifted. But Liquor Store stood out from the corner

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