Conversation In a Bar: Rosie Schaap

One afternoon each week, I like to go to a bar with someone and sit and have drinks and talk. Sometimes, with the other person’s permission, I will recount the experience here. Just from memory — the conversations are not recorded. What am I, a narc? A journalist? No way! Anyway, this is the first of those times.

Rosie Schaap’s hair is dyed a witchy reddish-black when we meet at the door to Hank’s Saloon, at Atlantic and 3rd Avenues, right near the Barclay’s Center. I’m psyched we’re here because I’ve never been before, though I’ve long admired the blue-tipped biker flames licking up the wall outside. Rosie lovingly refers to it as one of the last great Brooklyn dives. It used to be called Doray’s Tavern, she tells me, and it had a sign that said “Where friends meet” and she and her late husband Frank used to add “…their untimely demise.”

Rosie’s brand of morbidity is a particularly charming one. She often wears an egg-sized skull around her neck, it looks like ivory, I imagine it’s bone. And her fingers are adorned with tattoos of Tarot symbols. She knows how to read Tarot cards (as you can read about, in the memoir she published last year, Drinking With Men) and soon after we hoist ourselves onto stools at the bar, the bartender, Jeannie, starts chatting about how she needs to read hers. Jeannie reads Tarot cards, too. In fact, she can even read a person’s fortune on a deck of normal playing cards. Rosie doesn’t know how to do that, she says, but there’s a conversion system. When Rosie suggests that they might trade each other readings, though, Jeannie declines. She hasn’t read another person’s cards in years. Her kids made her promise to stop. It was getting too freaky, she said. She told a woman she read for to play a number that hit for a bunch of money — the number was 8, and the lady was born on the 8th of August or something and had lots of other prominent no. 8’s floating around her life. And a friend of hers, or a cousin maybe, can’t go into a certain room of her house after what Jeannie told her. She says she sees an apparition, the ghost of a relative. She’s a great-grandmother, Jeannie, with a voice like Brooklyn smoke, and has obviously been tending bar here for a long time. She likes to light candles everyday at five. It’s a dark place.

Rosie and I order whiskey and Jeannie gives us cups of water with them.

We talk about California, from whence Rosie has just returned. She went to Santa Cruz, where’d she’d ended up as a Deadhead at the end of the ’80s, and lived for a while in a cabin in the woods. She hadn’t been back in more than twenty years.

It wasn’t, in Rosie’s telling, a dreamy stroll down memory lane arm-in-arm with the dancing bears of her youth. It’s a rough place, Santa Cruz, located at a point of land jutting out into the Pacific Ocean and the North end of the Monterey Bay. It’s the end of the line, the end of the road, the place where the buses get to and stop. The drifters drift there and come to rest. So there’s a lot of homelessness and a hard-worn seediness that stands in relief of the paradisiacal beauty of the palm trees, the beaches, the surf and the sunsets. I have never been there, but from Rosie’s description, it sounds similar to the strip of burnout bars on the main drag of Key West, Florida, the Southernmost tip of the state, and of the States, where I have been.

We talk about death. Not instances of it affecting our lives. Not, like, people we knew who died. (There’s a great rock song by Jim Carroll, the author of The Basketball Diaries, about that.) More about death as a concept. We do trade scary airplane ride stories, times when it occurred to us that we ourselves that might be facing immanent death. Rosie once endured a turbulent descent into a snowy, mountainous West Virginia airport with two crying children and their mother, praying aloud, in the seat behind her. We talk about how we think death is a generally healthy thing to keep in mind and think about a lot. I tell Rosie about how I’ve often found it helpful to visualize death, my own death, as a coping technique for fear and anxiety. Envisioning the specific details, the sound of metal shearing, the image of my forehead slamming against the ceiling of the plane, the plane flipping upside down, hurtling itself into the sea: this calms me, in a counterintuitive way my brain has learned to trick itself. Rosie furrows her brow. She doesn’t like to do that, she says, but she finds it helpful, in a get-through-the-normal-day way, to surround herself with the iconography of death. Thus the skulls and skeletons and such. A reminder of the clichéd but very sound advice to live every day like it’s your last. One of these days will be that day. And come to the end of it, you’ll want to have spent its hours well.

This is maybe sounding gloomier than it should. Rosie is about as warm and friendly a person as you’ll ever meet, and as skilled a conversationalist. Full of quotes and anecdotes and morsels of arcana, she’s well-versed in jazz and punk-rock and the “Old, Weird America” that Greil Marcus has documented in folklore and songs, but she can connect these things to, like, Greek mythology or Romanticism or English football. She’s clever and quick and strong in her opinions. She throws her head back when she laughs. Talking with her is so fun (and drinking whiskey in the afternoon is so fun), that the conversation tumbles forward like a rock bouncing downhill. Sometimes at a pause we have to go back, retrace our steps, to figure out how we got to where we are.

Rosie says that Forrest Whitaker is one of her favorite actors. I think he’s super great, too. We marvel at his range — how he can play wise and stoic and goofy and evil, a giggling goody-goody military man, a mystic modern samurai and also Idi Amin. How he can take a seemingly flat character into a mediocre movie and blow him into something full and round and complicated and human? Remember in Panic Room, with Jodi Foster, how he scared you and made you laugh at the same time? He’s everyone’s nightmare, a home invader, threatening a frightened mother and child, and yet, you love him. “Forrest Whitaker is a genius,” she says. “And I don’t use that word lightly. But he is.”

But there was something else, something else one of us wanted to say. Like five minutes ago. What was it? This keeps happening.

We help each other rewind. We got on Forrest Whitaker because we were talking about Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, which Whitaker starred in with Stephen Rea and Jaye Davidson, and which Rosie thinks is underappreciated because of the whole “surprise, Jaye Davidson is actually a man!” thing, which got so much “don’t spoil the secret” marketing that now that’s the only thing people remember about that movie, which was a phenomenal movie in lots of ways besides. We’d gotten on The Crying Game because we were talking about Belfast, the city in Northern Ireland where parts of it takes place. My mom was there recently for work and she was telling me about how The Troubles are still, sixteen years since The Good Friday Agreement was signed, very much a living history. She saw the loyalist bonfires burning and took a tour of the memorial murals. And Rosie, who has spent time there, was saying that yes, absolutely, that just walking around the city, you could tell how the collective psychology still reflects the danger, the paranoia, of the sectarian past. People walk with their heads down and try not to call attention to themselves. “You don’t want anybody to ask you where you’re from,” she said.

We were talking about Belfast because we were talking about Ireland, how I’d never been there, how it’s high on my list of places on the planet to visit — right after Japan, I think. Rosie has been to Ireland lots of times. She loves the place, including Belfast, and considers it a kind of home, I think, the way she talks and writes about it. I’d asked what first got her interested in Ireland. What spurred her first trip there. Is she of Irish descent? Half-Irish?

“No, I’m a Jewish girl from New York,” she said.

It was poetry, was the answer. More than anything else, poetry. Most of all, William Butler Yeats, whose poems Rosie had fallen in love with during college. This is what led her across the ocean to the famous green Isle, to Dublin, first. Yeats is her favorite poet, among many favorites. Rosie reads at least a little poetry every day.

I don’t know a lot about poetry. But I told Rosie that I think a Jewish girl from New York shipping off to Ireland because of Yeats is about as good a description of the power of literature as I’ve ever heard. Words in a book, hundred-year-old words, arranged exquisitely enough to paint pictures in a reader’s mind so vivid and compelling that she decides she has to go see the place where they were written. Truly this is the opening up of other worlds. I tend to find it trite and kind of fruity when people talk about “the magic” of anything. Oh, lah lah lah, the “magic” of words, of music, of love, whatever. One the one hand, there’s no such thing as magic. On the other, viewing the world from a certain perspective, and magic is everywhere you look. You can’t walk down the street without bumping into magic. So why bother even noting distinct instances? “The magic of life!” “The magic of sentience!” Let’s talk about that! Hahaha. Of course let’s not.

But here, sitting in this dark bar, sipping drinks with Rosie, I forget what it was, now, that one of us had wanted to say.

Photo by themikebot.