One To One; Rosie Schaap, "Drinking With Men"

Hello, I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York. Welcome to One to One. Each week we address issues of timely and timeless concern with newsmakers and the journalists to report on them with artists, writers, scientists, educators, social scientists, government and nonprofit leaders. We speak with each one to one. Rosie Shap doesn't fit any conventional mole. She's been a fortune teller, a librarian at a paranormal society, a minister, a teacher, a manager of homeless shelters, and a barkeep. She's also a contributor to NPR.org and writes the drink column for the New York Times magazine. And now she's written, drinking with men, a memoir, a chronicle of her life as lived in the bars that have been her second homes.

It's just been published by the Riverhead Books Imprint of the Penguin Group. Welcome. Thank you, Cheryl. I'm very happy to be here. So why write a memoir centered around the bars in your life? Well, I hadn't really planned on that. It came up because of the first chapter, really. The first chapter takes place when I was a teenager living in suburban Connecticut. I'd grown up mostly in New York, but we moved to Connecticut when I was a teenager. And I came into the city once a week to see my psychoanalyst like any self-respecting Manhattan raised kid. And it was back then that I discovered the barcar on the Metro North commuter train. And just something in me responded to that loud, smoky environment. And as I wrote that for story, which I had in mind for the radio show, The American Life, and they aired the story, as I wrote that for a story, I thought of all these other things that happened in bars over the years.

And thought about the ways in which bars really shaped me as a person. And it wasn't until I started writing about them that I realized that's what had been happening over a couple of decades in about a dozen bars. Which bar gave me something very important in my life. So when you were in the barcar on the train, you were only 15, but you were drinking. Yeah, I was buying your drinks. Well it wasn't quite that simple. There was no way that the Metro North barcar staff would serve an underage person like myself. But at the time I was also really into tarot cards. And one night I took out my cards and gave myself a reading. And suddenly all these grown-ups you'd never uttered a word to me before were interested. So I had my little racket trading tarot card readings for beers for a while. And you wrote that it was the attraction, the attention that you got, that was a feeling. Yeah, it was. I think I don't think I was alone as a teenager really wanting some attention from grownups other than those in my family, and I definitely got that in that barcar.

Okay. So at 16 you dropped out of high school, you came a deadhead traveling around with California with a group of people on the Grateful Dead tour. What possessed you to leave your middle-class family to drop out of high school to leave your family and do that? And to travel the whole country, I wound up in California, but saw a lot of the country. Well that was a big part of it. I was a really restless high school student. I think I was one of those kids who paid attention in the few classes I was really interested in. I liked my English classes just fine in social studies, but I was impatient with many other subjects, and I had started going to Grateful Dead concerts when I was still living at home with my family. And I knew that in that world there was a kind of ready-made way to see the country, which seemed very romantic to me with a capital R at the time. I couldn't see myself jumping freight trains.

I couldn't imagine that kind of really nervy, woody-gustry kind of life on the road. But piling into someone's VW bus for a couple of weeks to see a bunch of concerts, that seemed really doable to me, and like a lot more fun than high school. How long did that last? I mean, that period of my life was really two years of my life. I wasn't traveling the whole time or seeing concerts the whole time, but that's how I was living my life. So we're talking a lot of drinking, drugs, sex, and music? That's what we're talking about. And my parents were thrilled, as you might imagine. Yeah. So you moved out of that period, you came out of that period, and you went to Bennington College in Vermont. How did you get your high school diploma? Did you get it to Bennington? I got a GED. I got an equivalency diploma. OK. When I left high school to go on tour, there was a little negotiating I had to do with my mom. And I had a meeting with my mother, my high school guidance counselor, and one of the promises I made was that I would get my equivalency diploma and go to college someday. I made that promise, and I'm glad to say I kept that promise.

OK. So you wound up at Bennington College in Vermont, which was a very artsy Bohemian type school. And in the summer of 91, you wound up spending a summer studying in Dublin, where you discovered Grogan's Castle pounds. What was about this bar that I feel to you? One of my all-time favorites, and it's still around, and I still go there when I rhyme in Dublin. You know, I think before I went to Ireland, I had a movie we've all seen movies, we've all seen images of Irish pubs, their legendary for good reasons. And I think what I really had in mind before I went there was something different from Grogan, something a little prettier, frankly. Grogan's isn't one of these postcard perfect looking pubs. But what I've discovered about the bars I love generally is that what makes them or breaks them are the people in them. So Grogan's may not have been the most beautiful pub in Dublin, but the mix of people, of older people, younger people, men and women, a lot of artists, a lot of poets, but also a lot of, you know, really old-school town and outers, it was the mix and the liveliness

of the conversation there and the openness, you know, within one night of hanging out in Grogan's, I felt totally welcome and totally certain that I'd met people I'd want to stay friends with my whole life and that's proved to be true. You know, I think for people who love bars, some of us have a kind of good, kind of bar radar. You can walk into a place and if it has this really strong sense of itself, it's not hard to fall in love instantly and know that you've arrived in the right place. And that's exactly how I felt in Grogan's. Okay. So back at Bennington, you're senior year, you discover the pig bar and you become a regular. What does it mean to become a regular? You know, that's a harder question to answer than it should be. At a certain point in my life, it really meant I was at a bar, maybe not every night of the week, but probably at least five. I mean, really, it was as much a part of my life as being in class at that time I was still a student or being at home.

It was absolutely part of my daily life. That's changed over the years. I mean, I think a real regular, I think of the little bar where I work in Brooklyn. When we see, I'd say three times a week, that seems about right. That's about what I can manage now. I'm not a five night a week or any more. But back then, in college, you know, first, now I was of age, I could go into a bar and assert myself in order without having to do something I shouldn't be doing. And it was also just a very welcoming, small town, cozy bar. And I think because I'd been out of school for a couple of years before I went to college, I liked that at that little bar, it wasn't just students, it wasn't just teachers, it was a mix of local people and people from the coke. And then there was a bar down the road, the man of Kent bar where you said, you learned the unwritten code of honor of the bar and what's that code? That code has so many pieces.

I think part of it, and I see people transgress this often, when you come into a bar and you sort of read the tone of the place, don't let your fun get in the way of everyone else's fun. You know, that's not what a good neighborhood bar is for. Don't get in anyone's way, don't block the roots to the bar or to the rest rooms. Have some sense of deference, and I know it sounds funny when we talk about bar culture. But I think a little pull of test goes a very long way. Say please and thank you to the people serving your drinks and your food. Seems really obvious, but it often doesn't happen. If you're going in there with friends, and the man of Kent, another great mix of people, there were always bikers there, and there were often students there. What are some of the bikers that are always ready to fight? Did you fight? The bikers always angry, and they're always ready to fight. You know, I haven't always found that.

I mean, it's like the great scene we were talking a little bit earlier about bar scenes and movies, and Peewee's big adventure. There's that hilarious scene where poor Peewee winds up in this biker bar, and they're going to kill him, and he winds up basically charming them. I've met some nice bikers and bars, and I think maybe they have their own rules. At the man of Kent, it was one of these places where the presence of the owner and the bartender was so strong, he was a great guy, John. He just stopped working there last year. You knew you had to behave in there, so if I brought in friends who didn't have quite as much bar experiences I had, like listen, this is a place with a mix of people, and we're not going to sit and shout and get rowdy. It's not a place where you're going to drink, you know, 20 shots and get completely hammered. You're going to enjoy some really good beer, and just a really distinctive, unusual atmosphere in a bar. I mean, it felt like a little... It's a road site, can we? Yeah, I mean, on the outside it just feels like a little road house, which is certainly a draw for bikers, but walk in, and it's like you're walking into an English village. It's an interesting, wonderful place that way.

After you graduated from college, you moved back to New York and you discovered several bars downtown. Tell me about some of them. Well, my first, the first bar where I became a regular, when I moved back to New York was a place called Puffy's Tavern in Tribeca, and it still exists. It's changed hands a few times since I was a regular, but I had a sense that, you know, in the mid-90s, that neighborhood had already started to change so much. It really had been this kind of hidden away artist enclave, and it was getting very prosperous, and people were just starting to get pushed out of their loft spaces. So I knew coming into Puffy's, which really just has this classic bar look. It's on a corner, it has tiled floors and high ceilings and lots of dark wood, and that look really appeals to me, that kind of timeless corner bar, Edward Hopper kind of look. And again, the people were just so welcoming right away, and even as a native New Yorker, I realized I had a lot to learn about the city I was born and mostly raised in, and they

could tell me stories about New York in the 70s and the 80s that was very different from the New York I knew, stories about Max's Kansas City and CBGB and all the great punk bands they saw when they were just starting out, and all the artists they knew when they were just starting out, and so it was kind of like a bar as an art history and cultural history classroom, but in a really fun way with me. Now, your roommate thought, I guess, how often did you hang out there? A lot. Okay. I was definitely the most intense period of my bar regular hood. Your roommate thought you were a screw up in an alcoholic, were you a screw up? Yes. Yes, I can absolutely, I have no choice but to cop to that. It was a very unsettled time in my life, and I think this is true for a lot of, I can't speak for young men, but I've known a lot of women in their 20s, and a lot have been responding to the book in a really, really moving way. I think it's a hard time. I think young womanhood is hard.

What are we going to focus on? What are we going to make of our lives? What does it care about most? Is it starting a family? Is it really launching a career? I didn't know, and I had a lot of anxiety, and certainly my way to offset and diffuse some of that anxiety, was to spend a lot of time in a bar. But then we'll be back with more, with Rosie Schaff, author of Drinking With Men, after the following message. Ma, guess what, I went back to college. No, I didn't quit my job. I'm finishing my degree with a CUNY online bachelor's in business. I interact online with real city university of New York faculty on a schedule that fits my busy life. Ma, you should look who's teaching a CUNY. And it all leads to a high quality bachelor of science, degree, and business. I like an attend class anywhere, anytime, yes, ma, I'm even at your house Friday night trip dinner. The CUNY online baccalaureate, get back to business. Welcome back to One to One.

I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York, and I'm talking with Rosie Schaff, who writes the drink column for the New York Times magazine, and is the author of Drinking With Men, a memoir. It's just been published by the Riverhead Books Imprint of the Penguin Group. So you discovered another bar in liquor store, which is also in Tribeca, and you talk about whether a lot of bright artist law students, bankers, kitchen workers, a real mix, European expatriates, you talk about finding safety in the superficiality of bars, what's that about? Well, I think a bar is often a place where we go expressly not to be at work and not to be at home and leave whatever might be troubling us from those two most important parts of our lives outside the door. So in a way, a pleasure of the bar is that you don't have to impress anybody. It's not a job that you have to perform well. It doesn't have the responsibilities that one has at home.

It's a place really just to relax and let all of that go a little bit. But as I've learned, that can really change when you become really close to and invested in the lives of people you get to know in bars. And you met Ed. I did one of my favorite bar buddies of all time, who was an artist and a great listener, you said. And sometimes that feels like a precious commodity in a bar. Sometimes there can be an awful lot of talking. I think in Ireland, this is handled very well. There's something in Irish life called crack. It's kind of the everyday discourse and conversation and it's always best if no single person is dominating it. But this happens a lot in bars. So to find someone who's a bar friend who turns out to be one of the greatest most empathetic listeners you've ever met. He wasn't a guy who talked a lot, but he was a guy who listened a lot. Okay.

Was he much older than you? He was. Yeah. Now, at some point you're working as a librarian for a paranormal research organization. We won't even go into that. Right. I'm not going to bend any spoons here today with my mind. You moved to Brooklyn. Yeah. You meet Frank, a graduate student and a fellow teacher who you take and introduce to your friends at liquor store, he's a normal thing start to happen to you is normalcy inconsistent with being a bar regular or is it consistent with being a bar regular? Well, I think for a woman, it is inconsistent. One reason I wrote drinking with men was because I realized, you know, whenever I really fell for a bar, I'd invite my closest women friends to come and have a drink and they'd always have a good time, but they didn't feel they had to come back the next night or the next night and I wondered what that said about me and of course, I couldn't not realize that as a regular, I was always outnumbered by men. So bar regularhood isn't exactly a normal condition for a woman, right? For a man?

A little more normal. Okay. So yeah, there definitely was some kind of tension there, something a little anomalous going on. Okay. Wishing house, you got interested in religion, decided to train to become a non-sectarian minister. Worked as an emergency minister to those who lost people on nine of them. I love when you were talking about you, you spent a time at a unitarian church and you liked them, but you sort of, you wish the unitarians were like Pentecostals. Yeah, which doesn't work that way. I found things so appealing about the unitarian tradition, it's openness, it's openness both to all kinds of people and to all kinds of questions. But you know, that sort of ecstatic religious experience that one might see in a Pentecostal congregation. You're not going to find true, I know I'm going to the unitarian church and that's fantastic. But I wanted, yeah, this combination that just doesn't really exist. Your father goes into the hospital for routine operation, winds up getting sick and dying. What year was that?

That was 2001. Oh, really went into the hospital just around 9-11. So for me, those two events, 9-11 and my father's sickness and dying are completely bound up together. What's the difference between a die, a bar and a die? What makes a die? A die is definitely a certain kind of bar. A die really doesn't care what it looks like. A dive has this kind of undeniable, loose charm. Sometimes I really want to dive someplace, a little dank, a little dark, maybe to some people a little depressing. But one thing that drives me a little crazy in a dive is I wish they would pay a little more attention to keeping the toilet paper in the women's restroom stocked. This is something they don't seem to care about as much as a good lean corner bar. But that's what makes it a die. You're not going to walk into a dive and ask for a not so dry martini made with such and such gin on the wet side with a perfect twist of lemon.

Dive bar tender will look at you and pour you a glass of gin. Right. So it's a very different, it's a special kind of bar and I love many of them. Along the way, you and Frank get married, he's a great guy, you have a normal life. But then it was in a bar in Montreal that you discovered that you didn't want to be buried anymore. Yeah. And I should make clear, it didn't happen just like that. It was something that was slowly happening. He was an academic, he had gotten a tenure track job in Pennsylvania and we felt very lucky that he had found a tenure track job in the humanities that wasn't too far from New York. But it was still kind of far and it meant that we were living in two different places. And you did not want to go to Pennsylvania. Not at that time, I had just started a new job, he was just starting a new job. As you could see, my resume at the time was already a bit of a hodgepodge of this and that. And I wanted to really stay in my new job for at least a year or two and start to build that.

And he of course had to start this job. So we were dividing our time and seeing less of one another. And I mean, you had taken him to some of the bars and he loved bars. Oh sure, he loved bars. He really? He was an interesting, well he was an interesting person in many ways. But interesting in bars because he was a shy guy, I'm not a very shy person, he was. But he still enjoyed them. I mean he didn't feel as I've felt most of my life that you can just walk up to anyone and start a conversation, that wasn't his way. So he eased into it a little more slowly but there were certain bars, especially the Fish Bar, a little tiny bar in the East Village, a wonderful, very sweet, very small bar where he really felt at home and that had a lot to do with people who owned the bar who were just so much fun and so friendly and said, and there was no pressure for you to, I mean that's another thing about a bar. You don't have to be on, you know, there's no on in a bar, just be there, that's fine. So he felt really comfortable in that particular bar community.

Now you would find that you would be a regular to bar and then eventually you would move on to another bar. Is that typical that a bar sort of loses its, I don't know. I know it makes me sound a little far after a while and you just move on to another bar. I don't know if it's typical, I mean for me some of the bars I loved closed, gone, done, nothing you can do. This is true of liquor store and good world. There is management change, there are policies changed in some way, you know, so much can change in a bar, you know, a few of your favorite bartenders leave, a few of your favorite regulars move away and it feels kind of like the whole character of the place is shifted. Or in the case of so many of these bars in Tribeca, just the whole character of the neighborhood changed so much. So was there, did you get a revelation in Montreal or what was it? You know, it was something I hadn't expected to happen but when Frank started working in Pennsylvania, I thought I was going to be painfully, miserably lonely and I discovered

that being alone suited me very well in some ways and it wasn't so much, I think that's what it was about. I kind of came to understand that in some ways I needed to be alone, at least for a while. I mean, we never actually divorced and we went through a lot of counseling and I had kind of forgotten, I think especially as a writer in some ways, that having a lot of time on my own was incredibly valuable to me. Right. Now the good world bar on the lower east side was your last really regular bar, very male, you actually got into watching soccer men. Yes, yes, yeah, that was one of good worlds great gifts. To me, I'd always liked soccer but I think in a typically American fair weather world cup kind of way and one of my really good friends who I first met at liquor store but really

became friendly with a good world, a lifelong fan of a London club called Tottenham Hotspur. It was a very soft-sail, gentle kind of guy, not one of these sort of aggressive sports fans, people sometimes think of when we think of sports fans but he sort of gently brought me into this game, into the fan community of this team. As a lifelong Mets fan, I was perfectly accustomed to rooting for a team that loses a lot, which is what was going on when I started following the game and just very quickly became completely into it so much so that my weekends got arranged around Tottenham matches. I was reading about them and they're doing great right now so it's funny for me to be supporting a team that's actually winning quite a lot now. At some point you decided that you were tired of drinking with men. Yeah, yeah, yes and no. Yes and no.

I still do it. You still drink till you do it. Not as often as I once did. But you work as a bartender, you work on the other side. I do. Part-time. Yeah, just one shift a week. Uh-huh. And I love that. And I tell a lot of people I know who freelance and in occupations that are often quite isolated that one day a week behind a bar is a great counter to that. It's very physical. I have to be on my feet for seven hours. Obviously I have to talk to people in some ways it feels like the opposite of writing to me. You know, I'm not just in my own head, I'm not on my own, I'm in this very social environment and when you're a bartender you're kind of in control of it and I really love it. I hope I never have to give up my one day a week. How would you sum up what bars have contributed to your life? Bars have given me more than I ever could have imagined. I mean first and foremost, community in a very real way. I know that even among some of the bars where I'm not an absolute regular anymore, I can

still go in there at the end of a hard day, run into someone I know, have a great conversation, have a drink and feel better. I don't want a drink at home alone, that's never been interesting to me. I want to be in the company of other people who might tell me a story, tell me a bad joke, be there. So a kind of community that has been more varied and complex than I imagined in some ways there is that easy superficial part of it in other ways I've made really great friendships that have lasted forever with all kinds of people. Mm-hmm. Okay. Interesting book. You need to. A unique way of looking at one's life. We're out of time. I want to thank Rosie Schapp for joining us today, drinking with men, a memoir. It's just been published by the Riverhead Books imprint of the Penguin Group for the City University of New York and one to one. I'm Cheryl McCarthy. If there are any people you'd like to hear from or topics you'd like us to explore, please

let us know. You can write to me at CUNY TV 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016, or you can go to the website at CUNY.TV and click on Contact Us. I look forward to hearing from you.