The enemy you know
As I hope to establish over the course of this project, I like drunk women. I do not like them in the way that frat persons like them, with some hope that they will become unconscious. Frankly, unconsciousness bores me. If I wanted to hang out with beings that lacked sentience, I would get a cat. No, I like them because, somewhere in my childhood of reading a lot of Tennessee Williams and watching Days of Wine and Roses over and over, I got the idea that alcoholism, like TB, is romantic.
Obviously, I’m not the only American to think so, but I am the best American writer to think so (cf. O’Neill). (Just as obviously, Christopher Hitchens beats me on the international scale of drunkenness and writing. But I am willing to meet him at 3am at any New York bar of our mutual choosing and really write some snarky obituaries for celebrities.)
So when I say “drunk women,” you are to think “Dorothy Parker,” not “the girl in my psych class I totally wanted to bang but she was with that asshole Mike.” When I say “drunk women,” you are to think “women who are so secure in their own charm and intelligence that they can afford to be stumbling into things and smacking people.” Also, they are depressed, like me. Do we have an understanding?
Naturally, such sophisticated souses are hard to find these days, unless you hang out in the Hamptons with people in tennis sweaters. Since I’ve only been invited to the Hamptons in that polite way (“You definitely need to come out this summer.” “All right, when?” “You definitely need to come out this summer.”) I have to stick to the barflies at my local. Admittedly, they don’t know the Cheevers, but the effect is much the same. They are sly, smirky, secretive, supple, and very, very incapable of operating machinery.
In particular, at The Bar there are many regulars, all of whom get drunk a lot. They are all middle-aged men, or younger men working hard at catching up. Often these men will have alcoholic girlfriends join them. However, there is one woman among the regulars, who I consider the best-looking woman ever to systematically go out drinking by herself to the point of collapse. Her name is Teresa. This is her story.
Not that I know her story. These kinds of relationships don’t much allow for that. The last time I saw her, in place of “Hello,” she said, “You should buy me a drink, ‘cause then maybe I’ll talk to you,” and then wandered off. This adds to the mystery. The mystery being, “What is going on in that head?”
The pattern seems to be that she arrives, loudly complaining that she can’t stay, wearing some outfit that, while not overtly sexy, nonetheless involved careful planning. She orders up whiskey and is hit on by strangers ceaselessly. She plays maudlin songs on the jukebox and smokes Euro cigs on the stoop to the acclaim of passersby. She shoots pool while her depth perception holds out, and then zigzags off down the street, always unaccompanied. The total running time is, let us say, four to six hours. So I’ve heard. I don’t know what, if anything, she does the rest of the time. This is enough.
Once when I said hello to her, she replied, “Are you talking to me because I’m the only girl here?” Sort of. But not exactly. “I’m talking to you because you’re interesting to me,” was my lame reply. Even more horribly, she melted instantly. With my heavy-handed sensitive approach, I hit her where it counted. I felt guilty but pressed on. “How’s the pool game?”
“It sucks. I keep scratching,” Teresa said. “Do you want to play with me next game? No one wants to play.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t play pool.”
“You want to buy me a drink?” These are the two useful categories she has for men in the middle of the night, pool players and suckers. Since I don’t play pool, I bought her a drink. She leveled her gaze at me over the ice in her Jameson’s, with real gratitude. We toasted. We drank. Without putting her glass down, she reached back to take out her hairclip.
“Hey, look, don’t let your hair down, it’s too much,” I said. She smirked. She shook out her hair, she pulled off her glasses. She stared at me, lips parted, through her hair and began posing artificially. Maybe she knows I’m a photographer.
“That’s really lovely,” I told her. “You’re really something. Look, I’m setting up some group photo shoots, do you want to be in them?”
But she didn’t reply, or listen, she just kept flipping her hair around, giving me complex facial expressions, and running her hands over herself.
Again, we can only wonder, “What is going on?” It’s for this that we must love the Other.
by Jack, September 22, 2003 2:27 PM | More from Drinking & Women | More from Teresa
Within the Chronology
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