The most years of our lives
During that ended era, the 1990s, there was an elongated and still unpaid-for period in which I sat in bars with a guy I knew, as contrasted with my modern policy, in which I do that alone or with girls. It was that inevitable transition from college to the stunned denial of lack of college, during which you still hang out with frat brothers, and we tried to keep the inebriation at its usual award-winning level. (As I believe I’ve alluded to before, our fraternity was written up in both New York Magazine and the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times for retro-progressive “drunkenness” well in advance of the national return of “cocktail culture”. I’m most proud of having been listed along with Tara Reid, Robert Downey, Jr., and a whole slew of British TV presenters in miniskirts as “Who’s Drunk in the ’90s”. My mother has the clipping, as do theirs.)
We didn’t have jobs. We would sit in bars wearing black, drinking middle-shelf whiskey, and pretending to smoke Nat Sherman’s. I don’t really know how we afforded to do that, and I think the secret is we didn’t, or at least I didn’t. He was the wealthy one; I was the witty, sexy, and depressed one. He was depressed as well, of course, and rich and well-connected. In fact, our good qualities could have been added together to make the perfect man, but, alternately, our depression could have been added up to make the perfect suicide. We sat around bars, drinking of their liquors, complaining to each other about how we were depressed, and then we’d look for girls sort of half-heartedly, because, of course, women are soul-stealing bitches, etc., plus we couldn’t ask them what classes they were taking and if they knew Marge Pengel because hadn’t we seen them over at Marge’s party?
We were particularly mournful that we were no longer in our teenage years. I had turned the big Two-Two and he was ten months ahead of me. I know it must seem odd to you that we were upset at leaving that problematic age, but we didn’t know any better. Our teenage years had been the years of our greatest success. Before that was misery. And the future was an endless decline. We called the happy sojourn “The Most Years of Our Lives.” They were the most years we’d ever had at a go. The idea was that life so far had broken down like this:
0-3: Not really a person.
4-8: Some residual happiness.
9-12: Puberty strikes.
13-19: The Most Years of Our Lives.
20-22: Disaster.
In our teenage triumph we had learned how to drive cars, drink liquor and snort drugs, exit the Midwest, and take bras off of people without needing their cooperation. In other words, we were much more adult and sophisticated than our parents ever were (except the cars). There was nothing more to learn. There was only the inescapable ossification of our talents. To paraphrase Tennessee Williams paraphrasing Chekhov paraphrasing Johnny Cash, we wore the black because we were in mourning for our lives. I would have also worn sunglasses day and night but that would have implied we were living la dolce vita, which we assuredly were not.
One particular night we were ensconced at our bar of routine, draped in black (black velvet in my case, because I am a gentleman), drinking whiskey, and to our mutual relief, out of Nat Sherman’s. I was entertaining the barman by occasionally sighing and saying, “It reminds me of her.” Every time I made him laugh our bill seemed to go up. This confused me so I needed to drink more, which had a similar result. We were in a kind of trendy lounge, as that age of public drunkenness required. Every historic period has its setting for drunkenness, be it the Globe Theatre, Delmonico’s, Harry’s Bar, Trader Vic’s, or Wal-Mart. New York Mid-Nineties (the time of my Second Wind, which would be coming a bit after today’s episode is over) meant loungy dark spaces which were not really for heavy drinking in the same way that scratchy oak rooms were. No one was really getting drunk there except me, my friend, and the bar staff.
But the place began to fill up with amateurs anyway, and they surrounded us with their elbows. It was a mixed blessing. A crowded bar meant shoving. But it also meant women would have to squeeze up against you to get the bartender’s attention, and since we were always so much better at doing that for them, it passed for an entrée.
As I’ve already explained, my friend and I only made one attractive man together, but that wasn’t how sex worked on planet Earth. Thus, any given woman could only go home with one of us on any given night. Since women were the destroyers of all that was good and holy, it didn’t bother me if this was him and not me. In fact, it became a kind of game for me. My wit and charm were often what cemented the young ladies to us after he had called out for their drink and paid for it with his heavy wallet. He needed me to get them interested. But it didn’t mean I begrudged him any eventual success he obtained via the very women I had brought our way; instead, I saw it as a way to experiment. What could I say to this woman that might be intriguing, without having to worry about the consequences, either that she’d hate me or that I’d have to take her home? Although when they hated me, they hated me, but they generally went home with him. He had the money, of course! He made that clear.
Because of my phase of keeping women at arm’s length and generally staying in my brand-new apartment, with the pride of ownership, when not at the bar, for my heroic epithet he called me “the wily hermit”. I didn’t mind. I knew it was just a phase, and that I would be tearing up the streets again soon enough. We didn’t know what to call him.
Among the elbows emerged a lovely young girl whom my friend seemed to know. We all chatted for a bit as she sipped the mojito that I had ordered and he had paid for. She had bright eyes, mojito-dimming, and a kind of fuzzy halter top that no doubt was only comfortable on the outside. Setting the unfinished drink on the bar as a kind of collateral, she slunk off to the ladies’ room.
“She seems charming,” I said, or words to that effect, such as “Dude, fuckin’ awesome.”
He nodded thoughtfully but offered nothing.
“What, you’re finally finding a girl you don’t like? What’s wrong? You have some kind of history? I saw that you knew each other.”
“No, no real history. She’s just nervous.”
“Nervous? I didn’t get that. What does that mean, anyway?”
He said, “She’s just sort of the nervous type. Didn’t you see it in her eyes? I can’t deal with that.”
“What do you even mean, nervous? Is that some kind of code?”
He pulled at his Beck’s back. “She was raped,” he said. He took another slug, and added, “Ceaselessly.”
That was how he got his epithet, which was “the worst person in the world.” It was times like these that let me know the Most Years of Our Lives were at an end.
by Jack, November 20, 2004 4:19 PM | More from Drinking & Women
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