Tavern

"WT" stands for Washington Tavern. I first associate Washington Tavern with Marilyn L., the face of a tortured Catholic Italian American girl from the fall of 1968; I was trying to get her to love me, be in love with me, and then expose her freshman breasts to sophomore me, and she was trying to get me to Church on Sunday (I closed my eyes and compromised on the Lutheran church across from the WT; it was a damp place with no passionate corners). We each gave up on our hopes and she mostly ignored me until a year and a half later, when during a rehearsal for Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real," she had an actor's motivation to slap me and so then almost broke my jaw. Afterwards, she took up with another acting student, they were fornicating, and during that relationship, in the middle of the winter, she fled from him downtown, under the influence of his drugs and his alcohol, and wandered off like a blind woman, groping the frigid air, first onto Western Avenue, "She's near the WT!," someone said, and later to be found on the uptown campus five miles west, where she had walked and fallen, frozen, into the student snack bar. A group of downtown friends had searched for her, all drunk and screaming her name, in front of the WT, waking the townies to anger, "Marilyn! Marilyn!"

Today, the WT is owned by an Irishman named Mike, an Albany restaurant entrepreneur, with high white hair and sly lips and thick eyeglasses. For years it was a half-towny, half-college-boy drinking bar, the bartender a locally regarded beat poet: grime on the bar, grime on the bar floor, grime on the stools, grime on the ceilings. The bartender's long gone, with a nice obit in the local Times Union some 10 years ago, and a few years back Mike bought the next-door lot and added a fashionable street patio and a "dining room," a room adjacent to the bar, cleaner, with photos of Irish poets, sepia, like soft paintings. The old bar is kept grimy deliberately, for the college crowd, the dining room is for older folk. 

My friend Mike--not the entrepreneur but the poet and the dreamer--and I re-unite once a year, or once every other year, when he chances up north from his southern retirement retreat in search of answers and home in one of his past worlds. He comes to this world, the world where I live, where the WT is still serving decent drafts and heavy food. We sit in the old section among the grime, at a two-person table with a backgammon set drawn on it, and we sing old songs of tennis matches, poetry workshops, yearnings, relationships, and Albany. We can't put our fingers on it, but together again we find something unspeakable, touching, reassuring, in the cracks in the table and the grease on the ceiling, and we reintroduce ourselves to the best of our human achievement.