combination living room and office, I ducked around the corner to Jimmy Armstrong’s joint.
I passed a lot of hours there. It was where I saw friends, where I met clients, where I took many of my meals. I had a tab there, and I drank a lot of bourbon there, some of it neat or on the rocks, some of it stirred into strong black coffee.
I was a regular at Armstrong’s, and I knew the other men and women who put in long hours there. Doctors and nurses from Roosevelt Hospital, academic types from Fordham, musicians whose lives centered on Juilliard and Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and a whole mixed bag of people who just happened to live in the neighborhood. They were all drinkers, and whether some of them were drunks was not for me to say. They’d talk to me when I wanted conversation and leave me alone when I didn’t, and the bartenders and waitresses would keep the drinks coming.
Once in a while I might go home with a nurse or waitress, but none of those last-call cures for loneliness ever turned into a romance. One time one of the waitresses, one I hadn’t ever gone home with, took a dive out a high window, and her sister showed up and couldn’t accept the official verdict of suicide. She’d hired me to look into it, because looking into things for people was what I did after I gave up the gold shield. And it turned out she was right, and her sister had had help getting out that window.
Armstrong’s. When I first got sober I couldn’t see why I couldn’t go there anymore. Whether or not you were drinking, it was a good place to sit, a good place to eat, a good place to meet prospective clients. I heard it said at meetings that one way to avoid a slip was to stay out of slippery places, but on the other hand I kept running into bartenders who’d held on to their jobs after they sobered up. It is, after all, the drink that gets you drunk, not the place where they sell the awful stuff.
I don’t remember anybody at St. Paul’s coming out and telling me to stay away from the joint. I figured it out on my own. The more days I put together away from a drink, the more value I attached to this new condition called sobriety. All those days would vanish the minute I picked up a drink, and each day there was one more of them at risk.
So I found myself less and less comfortable at my old table at Jimmy’s, even if all I was doing was having a hamburger and a Coke and reading the paper. And then one day I picked up my coffee and smelled bourbon. I took it back to the bar and reminded Lucian that I wasn’t drinking these days.
He swore he hadn’t added whiskey, even as he took the cup to the sink and poured it out. “Unless I did it without thinking,” he said. “And if that’s what happened, I wouldn’t remember, would I? So let’s start over.” I watched him select a clean cup and fill it from the coffee pot, took it to my table, and smelled bourbon once again.
I knew the coffee was all right, I’d watched him pour it, but I also knew I couldn’t drink it, and in the hours that followed I realized I needed to stay away from Armstrong’s. It was a week or two later when I told Jim Faber about it, and he nodded and said he’d figured I’d come to that conclusion sooner or later. “I was just hoping it’d happen before you picked up a drink,” he said.
I’d gone back one last time to make sure I didn’t have an outstanding tab, and to leave word that anyone looking for me could try my hotel. But it had been months since I’d crossed the threshold.
At least I could walk by the entrance without a problem. At meetings I heard a woman talk about her attachment to a particular ginmill near her office. She had to pass it twice a day. She’d tried walking on the other side of the street, but that wasn’t enough to keep her from feeling its magnetic pull. “So I get out of the subway and walk a block out of my way, and another block back, and I do the same thing at night. That’s four blocks a day, which is what, a fifth of a mile? All to keep from getting sucked into the door at K-Dee’s, which I don’t honestly think is very likely to happen, but I don’t care. And it burns a few extra calories, and that’s all to the good, isn’t it?”
I didn’t burn many calories. I took the elevator to the lobby, walked out onto Fifty- seventh Street, turned right, and walked a few doors to Ninth Avenue. I turned right again, and Armstrong’s was halfway up the block.
And did I feel a magnetic pull? I don’t know. Maybe. I suppose I was attracted and repelled at the same time, and in about equal measure.
I opened the door, walked in, and one breath told me I was in a place where people drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Two thoughts hit me at the same time—that it smelled awful, and that it smelled like home.
There were ten or a dozen people at the bar, and I recognized most of them. Around a third of the tables were occupied. No large parties, just groups of two or three. The conversation throughout was sufficiently muted so that you could hear the music. Jimmy got rid of the jukebox shortly after he opened the joint, and kept the radio on an FM station that played nothing but classical music.
The walls at Armstrong’s are a collection of incongruities, and the pick of the litter is the mounted elk’s head hanging on the rear wall. Directly beneath it, looking across the room at me through a pair of Buddy Holly–style horn-rimmed glasses, was a stocky guy around my age wearing a suit and a tie and a half smile on his thin lips. He was smoking a cigarette. From the looks of the ashtray, it wasn’t his first.
“ ‘Lucille,’ ” he said. “You know the song, don’t you? Hell, everybody knows it. She picked a fine time to leave him, with their four snot-nose brats and a crop in the field. So the singer decides not to nail her after all, because he feels sorry for the whiny-ass husband. Never happen in real life, not if she was as fine-looking as the song makes out. Sit down, for God’s sake. What do you want to drink?”
The waitress was new to me, a dishwater blonde, tall and slender. She had an air about her that suggested she was easily confused, but she got the drink order right, bringing me a glass of Coca-Cola and Steffens another Scotch. He said, “Vann Steffens. You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Have we met?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I don’t know. But I recognized you the minute you walked in. Of course I was expecting you. Couple of times, you and I were in the same place at the same time. Not this place, but one that’s not too far from here. Or was, until it closed. Morrissey’s, the after-hours. You remember the place?”
“Of course.”
“They performed a humanitarian service, the Brothers Morrissey. Made sure a man didn’t die of thirst just because it was past four in the morning. I was there now and then over the years, and I saw you there at least twice and maybe more’n that. You were with a guy named Devoe, had a piece of a joint on the next block.”
“Skip Devoe. His bar was Miss Kitty’s.”
“Another joint that’s closed. And it seems to me I heard he died. Our age, wasn’t he? How’d he die?”
“Acute pancreatitis,” I said, and that was indeed what it said on Skip’s death certificate. I always figured it was a mix of drink and sadness that took him out.
