Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) by Rosie Schaap

embellished, no less, by the smiling visage of a plump pink pig. Those of us who had wasted no time establishing ourselves as regulars took to calling it the Pig Bar, and often, even more efficiently, the Pig. Despite this, it was a wonderfully civilized little place. And as dreadful as its real name was, it had a ring of truth and rectitude: There
was
no baloney here, no BS, no airs or fripperies. The food was good in a standard and honest way, the drinks were reasonably priced, the atmosphere unfussy.
    After Grogan’s in Dublin, the Pig became my second proper local. There, a small group of friends—including a handful of male professors—drank and talked until late most every night. And among the regulars who were not connected with the college, none was more regular than Stan—a sweet, funny sap of a man who worked at the local auto parts shop. And among the faculty, there was no one whose company I kept more often than David, a professor of English literature.
    His prodigious drinking habits were the source of not a little gossip and awe on campus. Everybody had heard about the time he had instructed the students in a Beckett seminar to show up at his house to watch a film, and how we banged on his door and called him on the telephone for the better part of the morning until he finally was able to lift himself from his drunkbed, open the door, let us in, and screen the movie. (There was also a rumor, which I never quite believed, that he had passed a student in a previous Beckett seminar who had submitted, as his or her final paper, twenty blank sheets of paper.) None of this demonstrably diminished the quality of his teaching, which was engaging and challenging. He was a tall, lanky, pallid character, handsome in a dissolute, faintly Byronic way.
    His intellect was formidable and, to me, anyway, intimidating in its breadth and its rigor. He had a sharp and confident, if not downright arrogant, discursive style that lent itself well to debates, in which he habitually prevailed. As with the woods, I was drawn to him because I was a little bit afraid of him—for all of his cultivation, I still detected a streak of wildness about him—and I was certain that I stood to gain much from his company, if I could muster the nerve to keep it.
    And if one drinks, at least sometimes, to try to forget one’s worries, well, he had plenty reason to drink (not that he needed one): A big shift was underway on campus. A beloved faculty member had been unceremoniously canned more than a year earlier, and the need for further faculty cuts had been announced—an assessment that, to many students and professors, seemed less than perfectly honest. During my sophomore year, I had been one of the instigators of a student insurgency orchestrated to obtain the economic evidence that such cuts were in fact necessary; many students suspected that something other than a fiscal shortfall was behind the cuts, that the administration regarded a good number of instructors as enemies, that this was a matter of academic freedom under threat. Our well-intended but naively planned student takeover of the college president’s and other administrative offices failed to yield the evidence, or lack thereof, we’d sought. We thought we’d been pretty savvy, but in our youthful cluelessness, we had never anticipated that the president and her partisans in the administration would refuse to give us what we wanted, and we had failed to consider the paramount importance of having a strong exit strategy. If our student protest did little to protect the jobs of those whose jobs we wished to protect, it did bring some of us closer to our professors and fortify our alliance. They could be sure that we were on their side.
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    B ennington had long been known as a place where teachers and students were pretty cozy. Everyone was on a first-name basis. It was not unheard of for teachers to show