April 17, 2006--"The Usual?"
All institutions have to die. I know that. But the West End Bar at Columbia University? The very place where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and other Beat Generation writers hung out, hysterical and naked? This I can’t accept. But according to the NY Times (see article linked below) it has been sold and it will soon be turned into a Cuban restaurant! A Cuban restaurant no less, with Mojitos? This is just too much.
You may be wondering why I am so upset—what’s the big deal? Well, when I arrived at Columbia as a wretchedly skinny and overgrown freshman, decades ago but just a few years after Jack went on the road and Allen started to howl, I skipped orientation and the chance to learn the words to Roar Lion, Roar, and raced right over to Broadway where I bought a tweed jacket with leather patches already installed on the sleeves, a pipe, and a beret.
I was all set to join the Beats and knew that, newly outfitted, I would need to find a regular stool for myself at the bar in the West End. Maybe the barkeep there would tell me where Allen and Jack perched; and while puffing on my pipe (you could still smoke in bars) and pitching my beret to just the right angle and blowing the foam off my pint, I would be inspired.
I did settle in there, becoming a version of a “regular,” often cutting Comparative Anatomy lab and my Dogfish dissection (as a backup plan to having my poems published by City Lights in San Francisco, I was a pre-med), drank my beers, sometimes seasoned with tears, and waited in vain for words to come to me.
Few did.
When I finally graduated and decided that I didn’t want to be just another Jewish Doctor, I held onto the jacket, the pipe, and the beret and went off to become just another college professor. My first few jobs, quite coveted even then, involved teaching Freshman Composition as an adjunct at Queens College. Endless sections with hundreds of papers to read and comment upon each week. But I persisted, staying in touch with Ginsberg and Kerouac, now as a faculty member and “scholar,” through their publications, disappointingly not as a fellow Beat.
I managed to work my way up the university food chain toward tenure. I did not, however, remain connected to Columbia or the West End—the memories of what I hadn’t achieved were too painful.
About twenty years after graduating from the University, a friend who lived on upper Broadway invited me to meet him there for a drink before a concert. With some trepidation I agreed to, wondering how it would feel to be back in the West End after so many years and so many half-fulfilled dreams.
Jeff wasn’t there when I arrived, actually the place was nearly empty. So deserted it was that my old place, my stool (Allen’s?) was not taken. So I slinked over to it and resumed the position I had abandoned decades before.
Before I was even well settled, without apparently looking up, Johnny the bartender from that earlier era, who was still there wrapped in the same stained apron, asked me, from the same side of his mouth as in the past, in that familiar voice, “The usual?"
And I wasn’t even wearing my tattered beret.
You may be wondering why I am so upset—what’s the big deal? Well, when I arrived at Columbia as a wretchedly skinny and overgrown freshman, decades ago but just a few years after Jack went on the road and Allen started to howl, I skipped orientation and the chance to learn the words to Roar Lion, Roar, and raced right over to Broadway where I bought a tweed jacket with leather patches already installed on the sleeves, a pipe, and a beret.
I was all set to join the Beats and knew that, newly outfitted, I would need to find a regular stool for myself at the bar in the West End. Maybe the barkeep there would tell me where Allen and Jack perched; and while puffing on my pipe (you could still smoke in bars) and pitching my beret to just the right angle and blowing the foam off my pint, I would be inspired.
I did settle in there, becoming a version of a “regular,” often cutting Comparative Anatomy lab and my Dogfish dissection (as a backup plan to having my poems published by City Lights in San Francisco, I was a pre-med), drank my beers, sometimes seasoned with tears, and waited in vain for words to come to me.
Few did.
When I finally graduated and decided that I didn’t want to be just another Jewish Doctor, I held onto the jacket, the pipe, and the beret and went off to become just another college professor. My first few jobs, quite coveted even then, involved teaching Freshman Composition as an adjunct at Queens College. Endless sections with hundreds of papers to read and comment upon each week. But I persisted, staying in touch with Ginsberg and Kerouac, now as a faculty member and “scholar,” through their publications, disappointingly not as a fellow Beat.
I managed to work my way up the university food chain toward tenure. I did not, however, remain connected to Columbia or the West End—the memories of what I hadn’t achieved were too painful.
About twenty years after graduating from the University, a friend who lived on upper Broadway invited me to meet him there for a drink before a concert. With some trepidation I agreed to, wondering how it would feel to be back in the West End after so many years and so many half-fulfilled dreams.
Jeff wasn’t there when I arrived, actually the place was nearly empty. So deserted it was that my old place, my stool (Allen’s?) was not taken. So I slinked over to it and resumed the position I had abandoned decades before.
Before I was even well settled, without apparently looking up, Johnny the bartender from that earlier era, who was still there wrapped in the same stained apron, asked me, from the same side of his mouth as in the past, in that familiar voice, “The usual?"
And I wasn’t even wearing my tattered beret.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
3:04 PM
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