More or Less A Memoir

Lately I've been falling in love with barmaids. If you spend the kind of time in bars that I spend in bars, it's bound to happen, sooner or later. That, and also the fact that barmaids are the cream of the crop, relatively speaking, given that I'm no good at mixers. And bars happen to be my idea of socializing. The problem is that barmaids are the most desirable people in bars, because the girls your mother leans on you to meet are precisely the ones who make great cousins, and therefore aren't hanging off bar stools -- Minnesota farm girls, Radcliffe neurotics, Jewish American Princesses, girls from Westchester and Wellesley (in that order) and the like. But barmaids make great cousins. So lately I've been falling love with barmaids.

(It's worth knowing, in the context, that I tend to fall in love randomly, helplessly, with no provovation. With Gladys Knight, Cybill Shepard Kodak advertisements, Candy Bergen Life covers, librarians, bank tellers, and one topless dancer. That was the worst. Imagine the trauma of deciding the girl of your dreams was peeling, in front of the hardest core perverts, in a Combat Zone dive. And now, I'm in love with various elements of roughly six women. It's not an easy life.)

Which brings us to Wheels and The Farmer's Daughter. Barmaids. The Farmer's Daughter because she was and Wheels... well, Wheels because she had nice legs. But to call her Wheels lessens the chauvinism, and surrounds her instead with a sense of mute admiration. Lou Brock has "the good wheels." So'd Bob Hayes. And mute admiration is the whole point. In the context. I'm thinking of the swirling nature of the activity, and simultaneously, its centering down on the individuals at each table, so that each group contributes its individuality to the whole. So no one is quite as socially adaptable as the average barmaid. What the Farmer's Daughter told us was that we reminded her, the five of us, of a younger brother. And she of the worshipped sister, that for me, as an only child, became my first baby sitter. Who tucked me in at the age of five, and replaced my mother, on her rare nights out, to the point of kissing me goodnight. And who I've loved like no one since.

Thus: The Farmer's Daughter, dressed in high boots and her father's vest, in the proper state of disarray to be almost permanently endearing. The same smile which brought us drinks with a charm that consistently mixed up recipient and drink, eased her out of ugly confrontations with hard core drunks. She contrasted with Wheels' essential inaccessibility. The stuff dreams are made of. An imagined conquest. We talked to The Farmer's Daughter. She talked back.

It could've been the bar. Working class saloons lend themselves to conversation. That's where the emphasis lies, along with drinking. Because there's no formal entertainment, one is left to produce his/her own. Hence, talking. Strip joints remove the concentration from booze to women; drinking becomes an undercurrent, guilt-ridden diversions. (My misgivings always begin upon entrance. How do you strike up a snappy conversation with somebody who's only a third dressed?) The point, finally, is after boozy camaderie, or friendly conversation. And, if not barmaids, who?

So, what kind of women (to choose a single interest group) spend time in bars? Women who believe that I am a photo-journalist for The Melody Maker. Which brings us to Poughkeepsie, where I live in the off-season. The only time I was ever picked up in a bar was in Poughkeepsie, two summers ago.

Digression. There are two interesting bars in Poughkeepsie, Frivolous Sal's and Squire's East, located, interestingly enough, within a stone's throw of Vassar. But for the same reason Cliffies don't frequent Charlie's Place, you rarely find Vassar girls in Sal's. You find guys in Union College windbreakers, computer programmers, community college girls, and, being that it's New York, high school seniors. It's a bar whose juke box is evenly split between Chicago and Grand Funk. (Once, one Friday night, after I learned that the way to sidestep the dollar bottled beers is to be drunk before you leave the house, I waded through Squire's to the juke box, and in a real fit of ill-will, viciously punched Van Morrison's Wild Night. When it came on, there was silence.)

But, two summers ago I went home for a weekend. To visit a friend who was a counselor at a girl scout camp in the area. I went, with Kevin, to Squire's. And we got picked up. By two girls who believed we were correspondents for Melody Maker. I faked my best Cockney for the occasion. She believed us, nearly. But it was better once she found out we were from Harvard. All she really wanted was to score some cocaine. (At the time, I wouldn't have known cocaine from table salt. But I was bold.) So, I fed her a few beers, and then "took her for a walk." For this girl, I decided I would climb mountains. As it was, I executed a clumsy power turn in the parking lot of Peck and Peck's, exited amidst much dust and crying of tires, bottomed the car out on a curb, and almost ripped the oil pan off my mother's Ford Torino in the process. At the time I assumed it was love.

I haven't been to Sal's in nearly a year, and I don't talk to women in bars much anymore, especially since a hooker tried to pick Kevin up in the Two O'Clock last fall. But I sometimes dream of a power, like my namesake's in Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon, that is consummate attraction. And I wait to answer my door on some dreary Thursday afternoon, and find a youthful Lauren Bacall, propped by a door jamb, asking for a match.