Beware the Solitary Drinker Read Online Free Page A

but cheerful in others. She liked having money and had a lot of it.
    ***
    When I saw Angelina now, it was unexpectedly—late at night in the bar or out of the blue in the early afternoon when she stopped by to have breakfast with me. I would call her, too, once in a while. I’d gotten over my crush, except when I was drunk and looking right at her, remembering how beautiful her face was against my pillow. She kept me up to date on auditions, her new discoveries and ambitions as they came and went—to open a boutique in the Village, a gallery in Soho, to sing with a piano player on the East Side—and her flirtations. She also wanted to be a bartender.
    â€œYou move so fast,” she said after watching for an hour one busy Thursday night. Already a little drunk, she sat at the corner of the bar nearest the door, very alluring in a white satin shirt opened two or three buttons along her chest. “I want to go to bartending school and be like you.”
    â€œNumber one, you don’t want to be like me,” I said. “And number two, you don’t want to go to bartending school. All you learn there is how to mix drinks. You need to work behind a good bartender to become a bartender.”
    That’s how I’d learned, the hard way, bar boy to service bartender, finally to the front bar. It wasn’t the way things were done anymore. But I still had the attitude: you had to pay your dues. It rankled on me when some amateur walked behind the bar into a hundred dollar a night gig because he or she knew someone or had a pretty face.
    I’d learned to pour with both hands, to make sure that the bar stations were all set up when I took over a shift, and to make sure that the bar was clean and stocked when I left a shift. I learned about working with my head up and always knowing everything that was happening at every moment. I learned how to make a good living, which means being alert for walkouts, for spotters, controlling the waiters and waitresses so they didn’t become independent contractors. I learned to know who was trouble the second he or she entered the bar.
    Later that night, Angelina, swaying to the music and seeming to caress the microphone with her mouth, sang a song with the band. A Tracy Nelson song that said: “It’s a nickel for a donut and a dime for a dance but it’s an arm and a leg for a little romance.”
    The band loved her. Young as she was, she could really sing the blues. They talked with her at the bar on their breaks about taking on a female vocalist. Angelina was thrilled and left around two, when the band finished up, to rehearse a couple of songs and party with the band back at their apartment.
    â€œI won’t go if you don’t want me to,” she said before she left. I had something going with a young fluegelhorn player who’d been at the bar for a couple of hours with some of her fellow musicians. They left; she and her girl friend had stayed. She had a cherubic face, green eyes, and dark eyebrows. Dressed in her black tux, carrying her horn, she was winsome, and impressed that I’d heard of Mendelssohn.
    â€œIt’s okay,” I said to Angelina.
    She looked at the fluegelhorn player, who was looking at her, and said, “I’m jealous.”
    I knew the band and liked most of the guys. Something like the Grateful Dead, they were stuck in a time warp, all of them well past the age for playing rock and roll in a neighborhood bar. But they wrote their own songs, played with tremendous energy, loved what they were doing. Max was the leader, wild on the keyboard, a drinker, a doper, and a carouser. His father was a Presbyterian minister in Massachusetts, so sometimes late at night, when there weren’t any women to chase, we would compare notes on fathers with strong belief systems. Angelina would be fascinated with him I knew, and he had fewer residual principles than I did, so I expected he would take her to