The Zola System

Assholes Anonymous

I drink a lot.

When I revoked my Loser Bar privileges in April, I took my drinking practice down the road six blocks. The whole point of that blog was to break free of drinking excessively all night. I failed.

I walked into Barfly and saw Donnie the 3^rd Avenue Drunk. Donnie is a freelance graphic designer who had been laid off from his job at an advertising firm in the early ‘90’s. He was drinking his usual double Johnny Walker Black on the rocks. After nodding a hello, I found a seat at the other end of the bar next to two Guylanders wearing pressed Oxford shirts. Donnie, who looks like a feminine version of the Gorton’s Fisherman with his auburn hair and white beard, is quite adept at telling you all about how things used to be better in the area before you arrived, in small, snippy bits designed to dismiss, not my idea of a relaxing evening.

We had been drinking in the same joints on 3^rd Avenue for years but didn’t really strike up a conversation until I went into Caliban’s, a now defunct bar at 26^th and 3^rd, to meet friends for an early drink in 2004.  Although I walked by the place for 11 years, I never ventured in because I overheard Donnie tell one of the barmen in the Loser bar it was his regular haunt. The last thing I wanted to do was be judged by bar people like the 3^rd Avenue Drunk, although I did the same thing at the Loser Bar.

He was one of a group of regular’s that life passed by as they that gathered daily at the corner of Caliban’s bar. Their profiles and backs were always in the large windows overlooking 3^rd Ave. Just like the Loser bar five (six if you add me), this group, all in their late middle age, made sure anyone who popped in for a drink, burger or just to watch a game would feel uncomfortable. They excelled at bar stool sniping.

The center of this universe was Linda, an underemployed PhD in psychology. She fancied herself the Caliban’s Prom Queen although she was never that popular in high school. A friend and I liked to joke that Donnie and Linda were having a torrid, platonic love affair they were way too drunk to consummate. Her husband Bob was a part time doorman, part time actor and full time adulterer. Luke and Laura were always at a nearby table with their adopted Guatemalan baby. Darla had once been a daily regular and came back around every now and then. Linda thought she came into pay homage. Actually, she moved 10 blocks north.

Finally, there was Buddy. He always drank Pernod with a water back and ran his own glass etching business. Buddy was the most interesting of the group probably because he was always in some sort of female trouble. Buddy’s wife caught him having an affair with her sister and they separated. A few weeks before the lawyers got involved, she came in to meet Buddy for a cocktail. She found only him under a table, performing cunnilingus on another woman. Buddy was always looking over his shoulder.

Buddy sightings have been scarce since Caliban’s closed. Linda and Bob lost their rent-stabilized apartment and now live with her father on Long Island. Donnie remains on the scene even though his friends have gone. He makes the rounds of the 3^rd Avenue bars, drinking his Johnny Black sniping at those who have moved into his world, changing it forever.

At 40, I am closer in age and experience to Donnie than I am to the twenty-something’s who now populate the 3^rd Avenue bars. I am in these joints all the time, just like Donnie. However, instead of sniping and dismissing the new neighborhood residents, I bore them with my nostalgic views of a romantised New York I wanted to come to 23 years ago. Too bad it vanished 10 years earlier.

I’m just like Donnie, a snarky drunk on the Gramercy streets. I take the Loser Bar with me wherever I go.