Let The Good Times Roll
Eve Marx
Michelle Anderson
Playground of the World
My earliest experience with alcohol was tending bar at a cocktail party when I was seven years old. My mother’s boyfriend, Charlie, threw the event in his palatial ocean front apartment in Atlantic City. It was 1961, before casinos, when the city was still pretty. They called it “The Playground of the World.” Under Charlie’s tutelage, I made a mean martini — a jigger of gin with a splash of dry vermouth, strained over cracked ice, shaken.
The party guests, three other couples, were serious drinkers. My mother, who barely drank at all, called them “fish”. They were mostly his friends. One was a dentist, another was a doctor. Their wives, college-educated women who never worked outside the home, kept their figures and weekly salon appointments. While their husbands were busy with their jobs and their affairs, the wives spent their mornings golfing and playing tennis. Afternoons were spent at the country club. Their arrival en masse in Atlantic City for a cocktail party was a bit of a novelty. I was part of the show, the seven-year-old mixologist.
The third couple was Bea and Artie Ballow, who owned and operated a shoe store. Bea had thick ankles and wore her graying hair in a messy loveknot. Artie and Charlie were fishing buddies who went way back. Bea’s unfortunate ankles and the fact she worked in a store set her apart from the other women, and Artie, well, Artie was Artie, a braggart who told off-color jokes. From my position behind the martini pitcher, it was clear to me the other guests didn’t like him and he knew it. To compensate, he drank twice as fast.
Although he loved the role of host, Charlie, who was twenty years older than my mother, tired quickly. He wanted to show off his flashy new apartment but he didn’t want lingering. To that end, he offered his guests very little to eat.
Early in the morning on the day of the party Charlie invited me to ride with him in the old ambulance he used as a station wagon. We drove to Brigantine to haggle with the taciturn woman who sold clams by the bushel in her front yard. As soon as we got home, he told me to place the bushel basket of live clams in the bathtub on top of bags of ice. If anybody needed a bathroom, he told me to steer them to the other one.
While all the guests were drinking, Artie was really throwing them back. I mixed him three martinis, olive, no twist, one right after the other, bang bang bang. I knew Artie from the shoe store where my mother was a patron. I hated his lame jokes, his Brylcreemed hair and the way he called me “Little Lady.”
“Man, I really gotta tap a kidney,” he said to me. With no hesitation whatsoever I pointed in the direction of the wrong bathroom. Artie lurched down the hall and disappeared. A few minutes he emerged, wild-eyed and shaken.
“There’s something in there,” he announced to the party. “Charlie, there’s a goddamn basket of snakes behind your shower curtain! I heard them hissing!”
“Those are the clams,” I said. “In a few minutes, that’s what you’re having for dinner.” I handed him a fresh martini. “Here, drink this. It’ll calm your nerves.”
Banged
I met Gaddy in 1977 through my friend Corey. Gaddy was rich, unbelievably attractive and raised in Connecticut. He was wasting time and having the time of his life majoring in directing at the Tisch School of the Arts. Gaddy had light blue eyes, brown hair and wore tweedy jackets with leather elbow patches. He affected a beard. I never encountered him when he wasn’t drinking. I was powerfully attracted to him but all he wanted was booze, not sex. Our dates, if you could call them that, took place at a hole-in-the-wall bar in Greenwich Village on McDougal Street called The Kettle of Fish, where Gaddy ran a tab.
One afternoon, he and I were sitting at the bar. Jimmy Cade, barkeep and sometime Broadway chorus singer, was wiping glasses. Four gin and tonics in, Gaddy decided he wanted to play pinball. I carried our drinks to the rear of the bar. Never setting his drink down, Gaddy positioned me in front and stood close behind at the machine. I felt the heat of his body as I leaned in.
It was a warm spring afternoon and the door to the street was open. Sunlight from McDougal Street filtered in. Besides a couple of daytime regulars, the place was nearly empty. Suddenly, a man rushed in, brandishing a pistol. He shouted something unintelligible and then fired off a shot. Everything happened fast. Gaddy pushed me to the floor. The shooter didn’t hit anybody and was in and out in a flash. After a few moments of dead silence, Jimmy Cade bellowed, “Drinks on the house!”
A couple of gin and tonics later Gaddy carried me on his back out of the bar. He was huffing a little but carried me all the way to the scroungy third-floor walkup on Charles and Bleecker where he lived with a pet reptile. He got the door open and we staggered in. He had a loft bed in an alcove, but only made it as far as his recliner chair. I lay spread-eagled on the floor and waited until my head stopped spinning. There was no point trying to fuck Gaddy as he was dead asleep. Years later, I found Gaddy on Facebook. I sent him a friend request, which he accepted. I asked him what he remembered about that day. He said he’s been in AA for decades and doesn’t remember anything from that time, including me.
How I met my husband
I met R.J., the man I married, when he was a freelance writer and I was the editor of a skin magazine. The magazine gave me an expense account so I could take writers out to lunch. Almost every writer I met was an alcoholic who drank their lunch. Over Bloody Marys and double vodkas they’d pitch their story ideas. The only one who ordered food with his booze was R.J.
Most of the writers wanted to meet at P.J. Clarke’s where they could get bombed while I ate a hamburger, but R.J. liked a Greek place called Acropolis at 47th on Eighth. I always got the appetizer-size sweetbreads. We’d kick off our editorial meeting with screwdrivers, which the restaurant served in a tall water glass. Basically, they served you a glass of vodka topped off with a splash of orange juice and a cube or two of ice. The drinks were strong. I was shitfaced in fifteen minutes. That one drink was it for me, but R.J. always ordered a glass of retsina to go with the lunch special combo of moussaka, cucumbers steeped in vinegar, steamed potatoes and shaved lamb. He was very hungry and got baklava for dessert, washed down with espresso and a glass of ouzo. After these two-hour lunches, three sheets to the wind, I’d step into a cab to head back to the office. One day I didn’t go back to work, going instead to R.J.’s place, a hellish studio in Hell’s Kitchen. I left the job six months later to start my life as a freelance writer.
L.A. Story
R.J. and I left New York and moved to a little house in Venice Beach. Everyone I met in L.A. was in AA or The Forum. It took me months to find a girlfriend to have the odd glass of wine with. R.J. was gainfully employed as a screenwriter by some South African producer of exploitation pictures. I was working on a spec script. Our kid was in a Montessori nursery school program five days a week, which left me with a lot of time on my hands and an itch to cut loose and get a little wasted. My problem with L.A. was I felt my creative energies were being sapped by the constant sunshine. I craved the blur of alcohol to give me a different perspective.
My neighbor, Susan, turned out to be an ideal lunchtime drinking buddy. Newly single, she had showed her husband the door after they completed a “Making Love Work” couples workshop. She said he failed to grasp the concept that making love work is work. We chewed this over for months once a week over multiple glasses of Gewurztraminer, which we drank at a trendy Italian restaurant in the Villa Marina Marketplace Mall. Susan is a committed vegan. Following her example, I only ordered salad. After these two- and sometimes three-glasses-of-wine lunches, somehow I manoeuvered my ancient BMW, which lacked power steering, out of its parking space in the underground garage and drove home. How I did it without hitting anyone or getting pulled over remains a mystery.
A few years later, back in New York, I was teaching a writing class at Taconic in Bedford Hills, a maximum security prison for women. I had four women in the class serving seven to twelve years for vehicular manslaughter. Every one of them wrote something for the class about their experience as a drunk driver. I knew it was just a matter of luck it wasn’t me behind bars.
Faceplant at Pastis
One summer in college, I stayed on campus and took a class called “Introduction to Film,” taught by Howard Buck, a young professor fresh out of Brown who later became a real estate entrepreneur and then literary agent. He screened films by Dali, Chabrol, Bunuel and Fassbinder.
At the end of the semester, he threw a party at his beautifully appointed floor-through apartment way west in Greenwich Village. A handful of his favored students, including me and Corey, were invited. It was the first time I was invited to a grown-up gay party. Everyone was drinking martinis. I told my story about how I was a skilled mixologist from a very tender age, and Howard assigned me the role of bartender for the rest of the evening.
Some years later, when I was looking for a literary agent to represent me for a collection of short stories I'd written, I rang Howard up. He was friendly as ever, as though no time had passed and invited me to bring my manuscript to his apartment, which was still the same address.
By this time, I was a married mom living in Westchester, so I took the train in. My husband said he’d pick me up and we’d get some dinner. Howard lived in the same apartment but now he owned the building. One of the first things Howard said when he saw me was, “You look exactly the same but 20 pounds heavier,” which I tried not to be upset about.
I hadn’t been to his place in years but recognized some of the art on the walls. I said his furniture looked the same but different.
“Slipcovers,” Howard said.
It turned out Howard was a fan of the gimlet. It was just after three and a Friday afternoon which made it ok for me to drink. Howard wasn’t terribly interested in talking about my manuscript, much to my disappointment. Instead, he wanted to talk about the past, specifically about our mutual friend Corey. Corey died of AIDS early in the battle. He was a completely brilliant shining star who tragically left this world too early. Before he got sick and died, he was a true friend who more than once saved me from myself. Howard took a long walk back in time reminiscing. He didn’t need me to be anything but an audience for his memories. I drank a Gibson and then had another. When R.J. arrived, he turned down Howard’s offer to stay and have a drink but accepted a recommendation where we should have dinner.
"Pastis, by all means," Howard said.
Thanks to the TV show “Sex in the City,” Pastis was at the height of its original fame. We had no reservation but were seated anyway at a long banquette. I sat with my back to the wall, R.J. sat across from me. The room was extremely hot and crowded with the patrons packed in like sardines.
“This place really feels like something,” I said. I was chafing at living in the suburbs where I often felt dead. R.J. was studying the menu, focusing on what to eat. A server came by to take our drinks order. R.J. suggested I get a Coke.
“I’ll have a martini with Bombay Sapphire,” I told our server. As soon as he walked away, I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll just nurse it.” I took a sip when it arrived. Heaven.
“I don’t know why I gave up gin,” I said to R.J. “It makes such a better martini than with vodka.”
The next thing I remember, my face was in a plate of moules frites. I literally was so bombed I couldn’t keep my head up. R.J. was embarrassed. He choked down his cassoulet, beckoned to our server to box up my moules frites and bring the check. On the sidewalk, because they hurt my feet, I took off the shoes I’d worn to impress Howard. I walked barefoot to our car, which was parked a few blocks away. We drove all the way back to Westchester without exchanging a word. R.J. listened to jazz on the radio. As soon as we pulled into our garage, my stomach heaved. I opened the car door and puked on the cement floor.
"Couldn’t wait til you got to the bathroom, could you," R.J. said unsympathetically.
That was the last time I saw Howard and I haven’t had gin since.
Eve Marx
Eve, who lives in a rural seaside community near Portland, Oregon, is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex.
