Drinking with Men

Schaap, a writer who writes the “Drink” column for the New York Times, sought out an early kinship with adult company and alcohol, a lifelong pursuit she fondly chronicles as she recounts the homes and families she’s made in bars around the world. With an absentee father and a complicated relationship with her mother, she gets satisfaction from the interest other adults took in her, utilizing that dynamic when she briefly becomes a tarot card reader as a teen in the bar car of the Metro North commuter train, trading readings for beers. Feeling out of place at home and at school, she drops out at 16 to follow the Grateful Dead full-time, ending up on the West Coast. In college at 19, she goes to Dublin for a summer study abroad and it’s there, at a cozy, smoky bar frequented by writers and storytellers, that Schaap feels the sense of belonging and community she’s been thirsting for. Back in the U.S., she discovers bars near school in Vermont and later in New York that offer a “safe haven, my breathing space... where I figured out how to be myself.” Feeling like a regular matters to her, providing her with an anchor and a code of kindness and decency to live by learned from how patrons and bartenders treats one other. Schaap estimates she’s passed 13,000 hours in bars, and judging by the warmth and camaraderie she evokes, it clearly has been time well spent. (Jan.)