The Wet and the Dry (15 page)

He smiled and jiggled his head again, and later, as I was driving back to F6 in Islamabad, I took out the beer, a bottle of Strawberry Gin, and a Gymkhana blended malt whisky they had given me and looked at the pretty labels. I felt like a heroin trafficker, though technically I was doing nothing illegal. I drank them alone in my room that night, sitting on a terrace filled with crows and listening to muezzins competing in the
dark. It was, in a sense, like drinking alone at a bar when you have no one to talk to.

I tried the Strawberry Gin, assuming it would be too strange to stomach, and found instead that it was childishly comforting, well made, as if by people who knew its charms inside out. I would never have drunk it anywhere else. But it was a supremely delicious drink at that moment, and as I lay on my Spartan bed listening to the name of God ringing through empty streets, I felt a subtle intoxication reaching the ends of my fingers and the tip of my nose. A Pakistani fruit gin. What could be more seditious?

A week later my hennaed friend got me an invite to a private party not far from where I was staying in F6. I decided to bring my bottle of Gymkhana as a present, carefully disguised in a paper bag. The house of the affluent hosts—anxious as always about their anonymity—was one of the low, flat-roofed white villas surrounded by dry gardens and high walls that seem to make up most of Islamabad’s housing stock. Inside, behind the discreet high doors and shutters, the house was filled with a mixture of Islamic art and reproduction Louis XV chairs, with cut-glass ashtrays and leather poufs and Kashmiri rugs. It was an older crowd dressed in Shetland sweaters and tailored shirts, businessmen and import-export men and their impeccable wives, and at one end of the long front room stood a little bar with a server in a bow tie. He was pouring out tumblers of Black Label and imported cognac, and the men were sipping from
them as they sat in the Versailles chairs, assured that they were behind closed doors and that everyone knew everyone.

My friend asked me to relate the company a trip I had made to Murree the day before. I had driven myself two hours out of Islamabad to the old British hill station where the Murree brewery was started 150 years ago. I had visited the old brewery ruins, Victorian picturesque, and the abandoned British church, now surrounded by barbed wire, and finally the Pearl Continental Hotel, where I had had an eerie lunch overlooking the snowcaps of Kashmir.

“Is there still a bar there?” they asked.

Well, I said, that depends what you call a bar. After lunch I had asked the staff where the bar was—it was by now a familiar exercise—and they told me it was outside and on the ground floor next to the swimming pool. Off I went. After a half-hour search I eventually found an unmarked obscure door with a glass window that looked like a storage room. I knocked. A panicked face quickly appeared on the far side of the glass. We gestured to each other; me, upending a glass to my lips, he wagging his finger in a frantic negative. We pantomimed for some minutes. End result: no drink.

“Ah,” they said, jiggling their heads, “we’re glad there’s still a bar at the Pearl Continental!”

They said it as if civilization had not yet fallen to the White Huns, and I had no idea what they meant. I opened my bottle of Gymkhana, observing that it was good to drink something local instead of the ubiquitous Black Label, and this was greeted with a chorus of approval.

We poured it out. It was not Murree’s top whisky, but I thought it was a pretty good drink all the same. I noticed that everyone licked their lips contemplatively and stared down into their glasses for a moment. Was it a drink they knew so well that each bottle had to be savored for minute differences from the last one? Someone put some Rabbi Shergill (a Punjabi techno pop star) on the CD player, and soon half the room was dancing, some of the men holding their tumblers of Gymkhana aloft and twirling their women around. I recognized the song at once because it was a number-one hit in India, a beautiful techno rendering of a mystic Sufic poem by Bulleh Shah, the eighteenth-century Punjabi poet buried in Pakistan. Bulleh writes that he is “not the believer in the mosque,” that he is neither Hindu nor Muslim nor Parsi, and that indeed he does not know who he is or what he is. Shergill’s lyrical video of “Bulla Ki Jana” comes over as a plea for peace and tolerance in the Sufic spirit, strung along on the rhythms of global dance music.

“It reminds us,” one of the women said, “that Pakistan was once a Hindu, a Buddhist, and a Sufi culture, and that all those things are still in us somewhere.”

Did the Sufis drink? Did wine once flow through these parched hills when Bulleh Shah was alive? It was unclear. In the present moment, the alcohol seemed to have gently spread through the whole gathering, bringing everyone to life. A man waddled up to me and collapsed onto the same sofa. He was clearly mildly intoxicated, and he was enjoying it. He could say things that later he could disown.

“This country is fucked,” he said simply in English, looking
me dead in the eye and smiling. “We’re going to be run by a bunch of clerics one day. We’re going down the drain, down the drain.”

I looked down and saw that the bottles on the coffee table were all empty. The barman was mixing cocktails—margaritas, as far as I could tell, with salted rims—and it was already long past midnight. The Koran had been forgotten, or shall we say revisited, and I picked out the strange words from the music, words after all written by a Muslim who had disavowed the religious orthodoxy of his day. They cut through the pessimism of the man who had fallen asleep beside me and seemed to move the hips of the people dancing to Rabbi Shergill:

Not in the holy Vedas, am I

Nor in opium, neither in wine

Not in the drunkard’s craze

Neither awake, nor in a sleeping daze

Bulleh! to me, I am not known

Bars in a Man’s Life

                                  
The term
bar
was first used in
English in 1591 in Robert Greene’s drama
A Notable Discovery of Coosnage
. Greene was England’s first professional author and during his short life was known for a polemical attack on William Shakespeare. Did he invent “the bar”? The Victorians objected that the true bar was theirs. They claimed that Isambard Kingdom Brunel invented the bar to serve customers of his new railway at Swindon train station, or else that the Great Western Hotel at Paddington Station in London was where the first one opened. But either way, the bar is English.

A University Wit, a rake, and a drunkard, Greene was famous for his pointed red beard and for dying from a meal of Rhenish wine and pickled herring. His hilarious attack on Shakespeare is dead-on. He married a rich woman named Doll and spent all her money. He lived from scabrous pamphlets delighting in the seamier side of London and died as an indebted dandy. An allegorical image shows him sitting at his writing desk in his funeral shroud looking like a human turnip.

He was known in Elizabethan London for the
Coney-Catching
pamphlets, thinly veiled memoirs disguised as fiction, or vice versa, in which rakes and con men defrauded the upper classes to satisfy their vice habits. It was in this context that the word
bar
first arose. It was a new social space used by a new social class like Greene himself. A place to cheat, carouse, stand apart, boast, whore, and be left alone. But a place, also, in which a free society can conduct its informal business.

Greene is also said to be the model for Falstaff. In his deathbed book
A Groat’s-Worth of Wit
, he wrote of himself that “his immeasurable drinking had made him the perfect Image of the Dropsy and the loathsome scourge of Lust tyrannized in his bones.”

When I sit in Montero’s in Brooklyn, once (and for more than a decade) my local bar, I think of Greene, dead at thirty-four of a pickled herring. I am in a place of his invention, or so I like to think. I, too, am the Image of the Dropsy.

This little stretch of Atlantic Avenue as it dips down toward the East River used to be the haunt of the longshoremen. Montero’s is the last vestige of that time. The old feral New York has vanished, having served up to its progeny, like so many bad dishes, one difficult experience after another. The first years of arrival in New York were bad times for me, an age of poverty and crisis, but all the same Montero’s was my bar during that icy age, and whenever I go through its door today (plumper and now armed with a credit card that works), I feel a slight panic, a regret for so much time wasted trying different kinds of Sauza tequila with the local drunks, all of whom are now dead:
characters who live on only in the unconscious of a sobered-up English exile who should have gone the same way as them.

One needs a bar almost as much as one needs oxygen, or shirts. Montero’s was cheap and dangerous, and they served Vodka Cherry Bombs for three dollars. It is no doubt only a shadow of its former self. Its sign is red neon, hung above its door like something advertising cheap funerals. It seemed to be open all the time, which a bar should be. It was a dive with frills then. It looked like the boudoir of a disorganized Spanish madam. The women there were wonderful authentic sluts, a type that has been eradicated from the city by the police commissars who have so boldly improved all our lives by making our neighborhoods safe for Chihuahuas and homemakers.

There was a bell on the bar that bore a sign that read “Ring for merriment.” Was Merriment a man armed with a cleaver? I never dared ring it, in case Merriment actually showed up. One looked through a bead curtain to the nether room where the pool table stood and where fights always began. The fights were very entertaining. They were squabbles over women and infidelities, and they usually ended under the pool table with a knife brandished at awkward angles by a man with no pants on. It had style of a kind, and the police were never called. There was a brothel upstairs, so they said.

Montero’s was my local bar after I moved into State Street. The neighborhood was cheap and cheerily violent in those days. It was the Brooklyn of Paula Fox’s
Desperate Characters.
Montero’s was often open at three in the morning, with men sitting perfectly motionless at the bar, their mouths hanging open. Heroin was also easy to score in the bodegas.

Even in the bar, the atmosphere was of imminent violence. The decorations encouraged it. There were clippers and schooners, with sextants on ledges and a cash register with little Central American flags. There was a photograph of a contortionist in the streets of Paris surrounded by trumpet players, and little B52s hanging from the ceiling on strings. Bullfight posters for Toros en Sada and the Great Manolete. There were pictures, too, of Joseph Curran, leader of the National Maritime Union from 1937 to 1973. A decor of anticipated intoxication.

In that place I encountered some hellish specimens, men pickled in Sauza and gherkin juice, with eyes colored by their own piss. Women drenched in some indefinable fluid, wild-eyed and smelling of cherries, with veins like nautical knots in their necks.

I found some drinkers who were legally blind. Blind as coots sitting there at the bar with a Cinzano and a cigar, night after night fading away and chewing cuds and following invariable baseball games through taped-up glasses. Every time I came in, there they were, as if they never moved, not even to sleep. I found myself on Schermerhorn every night, that suburb of Africa in those days, walking half dead past signs that read
Clean your blood
, past tenements cloaked in rotted ivy and Paco Jeans murals and Pioneer Warehouses with their stone scallops. There was no Atlantic Center then, just the old Temple Square fringed by check-cashing joints and gem pawnbrokers, with phantom
lettering suspended in the air around, spelling things like Tinners Supplies and Gaswat Furnaces. It was a little corner of vital hell unmodified by the gaunt mass of the Baptist church.

Montero’s. I remember everything about that place. There was a store called Dixon’s next door selling ovens and gas meters and a peritoneal dialysis center. There was a disabled veterans certificate in the window of the bar. The days of the Marine Square Club, of which Joseph Montero had been a president, were all but forgotten, sucked away into the past. There were life savers above that bar, from ships like the
Houston
and the
Robert E. Lee
, and a photograph of the old recreation pier at State Street. That snapshot of the Parkway Hospital dinner-dance of 1951, in which every woman looked elegant and beautiful—would that be true now? Photos of Spain, of ships bordered with butterfly wings, of flamenco dresses, and of Pilar Montero as a dancer with castanets and the following bill for a long-forgotten event: