A Soviet Jew Walks Into a Bar in Harlem

My boyfriend doesn’t really drink but he loves bars. He likes talking to strangers (he’s a sales executive) and he likes talking to strangers at bars; I hate talking to strangers but I like listening, and I like listening to him do it, how smoothly he runs conversations. The first time we went to New York together he took me to Red Rooster. This Red Rooster is a recent thing, named after the iconic speakeasy where he used to go before moving out of Harlem in the eighties. It’s huge and packed even midweek and it has real Romare Beardens and Faith Ringgolds on the walls, and its crowd is a utopian display of the city many imagine and few ever see: Black ladies in hats, white crewcut men in varsity coats, mixed-race families with strollers sharing apple pie, Asian same-sex couples, middle-aged Italian tourists.

This is what my boyfriend is after, this optimistic vibrancy of stories to absorb barside, and once we squeeze into the single available spot, not far from the door (I sit, he gallantly stands), he strikes up a conversation with a young woman who is sitting to my right. By the time she mentions Afghanistan and the US Army Corps of Engineers, my drink has arrived and my boyfriend has turned away from us to chat with the Italian tourists sharing a chicken-and-waffles to his left, and I bravely decide to engage: I can do this, I was in Afghanistan, too, we can swap stories, though I rarely do it, tell war stories, even if this bar would be the perfect venue for them because they are the kinds of stories, in my mind, that people should only tell in bars, people lonely in their formerness: burnt-out veterans, ex-cons, former war correspondents like me. Insider bar jokes. Have you heard the one about the time the driver stopped our truck in the middle of a roadless scrubland at three a.m., grabbed the AK from the teenage gunman riding shotgun, and stomped off into the dark? There was a shot, and another shot. Welp, I guess we have arrived, I thought then, but then the driver reappeared in the headlights, the gun in one hand and a dead fox in the other: He must have told the missus he’d pick up dinner along the way. Or the time another driver, months later, kept clenching and unclenching his fist in front of his belly the entire drive, and smiling, and I thought he was hungry, so I kept handing him Maria cookies? He’d take a cookie, smile, eat it, do the fist thing again. Ate the whole pack, poor thing. When we reached our destination, a Red Cross outpost, our hosts there were shocked: We had just driven across forty miles of minefields. The driver wasn’t hungry, it turned out, he was trying to warn me we were about to get blown to bits. Why did he agree to drive in the first place, and why did he smile? Was it the famous Afghan hospitality or something else I will never understand? Moments like this you learn that being lost in translation pays sometimes: You don’t know you are supposed to be afraid. Of course, there were occasions you didn’t have the time to be afraid, like when a Hamas bouncer suddenly threw a bag over my head when I was on the way to interview Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, the year before his assassination; or when a suicide bomber’s inside-out head landed on my balcony while I was making lunch; or back when I was a skinny little kid in Leningrad and this man in the street approached me and smiled and then jabbed his burning cigarette into my left arm and called me a rotten Yid spawn…no, these are not the kinds of stories I want to tell, not even at a bar. You see why I prefer the boyfriend to do all the talking?

But the young woman at Red Rooster isn’t interested in my stories, she’s interested in hers. Now she’s telling me that she is an architect and an urban planner, that she’s from Mississippi but she’d lived and worked in the UAE before moving to Harlem a few years ago, she loves Harlem, though it’s getting gentrified for sure, even this Red Rooster isn’t the original, the original was a few blocks north, two steps down in the ground-floor storefront on Striver’s Row, it closed down in the eighties, she’s heard that James Baldwin’s bar in Just Above My Head was based on it—and while my heart boomerangs through the summoned-up lovegrief of that novel, my favorite of his, she’s already on to how she also makes skincare products at home (her skin is flawless, like velvet), and that she’s thinking about opening a bathhouse that would specifically attract Black women, and I am barely hanging on when I hear her say something gold sex something something small business something vibrators. Then she pauses. Oh, okay, I say, and turn to my drink.

By the way, did you know that bar jokes go all the way back to the Old Babylonian Empire? The earliest known recorded bar joke was found on a four-thousand-year-old clay tablet at Nippur, a sacred city in ancient Sumer at the time of Hammurabi, dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Enlil, the ruler of the cosmos, wind, earth, and storms. Translated into English, the joke goes something like this: A dog walks into a bar and says, I can’t see anything, shall I open one? As one media outlet put it, Jokes: Sumer funny, Sumer not, though innuendo and puns can get lost over time. Nippur was abandoned in the ninth century, the cuneiform tablet with the joke was found in the late eighteen hundreds. When I was covering the invasion of Iraq we drove past where Nippur used to be on the way to Baghdad—and there in the middle of the desert I saw a pack of dogs, snouts to the ground. When my convoy pulled up, I realized the dogs were eating the bodies of Saddam’s soldiers. Life is often a bad joke.

Anyway, when the woman mentions vibrators, I turn to my drink not because I’m bored or want to change the subject. I turn to my drink because this is all too much information for me in a crowded place, and also because I am sitting with my back to the door, and sitting with my back to the door makes me anxious, especially in a crowded public place, so that by the time we got to the UAE part of her story I had expended my small reservoir of endurance for engagement with strangers in crowded public places with the door at my back. I want my boyfriend to take over, he is still in deep with the Italians, making them laugh, the three of them are having such a good time, I wouldn’t possibly interrupt it though I so wish it were him sitting next to her so he could keep her going and I could zone in and out, the way my anxiety dictates. But as I take a sip (house paloma, smoky, good) I realize that my timing was shit. This hip and beautiful young woman was telling me about golden vibrators and in response I said, Oh, okay, and turned away. Now she must think I am a prude. I am not a prude, despite my life-worn, perimenopausal skin, despite the bulky top I’m wearing to cover up this new hormonal belly instead of the tight-ass bodycon dresses that attracted the boyfriend in the first place. I am just socially awkward, but how would she know? So I force myself to turn back to her and say, So, do you design them yourself?

Design what?

She holds her drink in midair. Her manicure is perfect. Everything about her is perfect. I take another sip, for courage.

I, umm, thought I heard you say you, umm, did something with sex—that maybe you sold golden vibrators?

The look on her face, is it pity? Now I see she’s wearing a tight velvet jumpsuit, how perfectly it matches that glowing, posh, slightly tipsy, successful American skin.

I said, she says, I got a Goldman Sachs small business accelerator grant.