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

then into the Main Street apartment with the front porch the summer before my senior year.
    Bennington College regarded itself at the time as a “self-selecting” school, which may have been just a friendly and parent-comforting way of saying it wasn’t hard to get into. They had let me in, after all—a high school dropout with math SAT scores, my brother quipped, that probably wouldn’t have gotten me into the National Hockey League. But by then I badly wanted to be a student, and, I hoped, a good one. I wanted to read lots of books and, seduced by the glossy catalog the college had sent along with an application for admission and which I pored over dreamily for many weeks, I envisioned myself hauling great stacks of important literary works across the idyllic campus, trudging through piles of crunchy fallen leaves in hiking boots until I ran into a fellow student, maybe even a professor, and we launched into an impromptu argument about the last novels of Henry James, or about third-world feminist poetry, or something else about which I knew nothing. I wanted to write lots of papers (even if I would chronically turn them in late). I wanted to learn. I entered college in the fall of 1990, about two years after dropping out of high school, a time I’d spent mostly following the Grateful Dead around the country. Because I’d been out of school for a while, I thought of myself, at the ripe old age of nineteen, as a “mature” freshman.
    In a way, that was true. For me, college was not my first taste of freedom, but instead a chance to redeem myself, to un-fuck-up as best I could. I was over drugs, but drinking had already become a part of who I was. The one little bar in North B was a major draw to off-campus life. It was the only one within reasonable walking distance of school, and living in town would bring me even closer. I liked my classes, I idolized my professors, I joined about a half-dozen committees. But on campus, socially, I felt dislocated.
    When I first visited the bar in North Bennington, as a sophomore, it was still called the Villager, and most everybody called it the V. Seniors, graduate students, and a few professors drank there. And not everybody who spent time there was involved with the college, which gave the students who hung out there a different, more intimate perspective on life in this depressed corner of New England. There were guys like Alex and Adrian, who’d graduated from Bennington in the previous decade but had stuck around and were now more Vermont than Vermonters. And there was a fantastic bartender with a huge, warm laugh, who also happened to be a fine poet. This was where I wanted to be, more than at campus parties. It felt more like how I imagined the real world felt like, and I knew that college wasn’t the real world.
    By the time I was a senior, the Villager had twice changed ownership and names. For about one miserable year, it was a mediocre restaurant with delusions of grandeur. The new owners made it clear that students were not welcome, no matter how un-studently we behaved. It wanted skiers, it wanted tourists, it wanted anyone but us. The owner eyed us with suspicion whenever we sat down at the bar. She was foolish, because in such a small town, a bar’s bread and butter is bound to be the locals, and in this case, the locals included students. Predictably the venture failed, and soon enough, two lovable middle-aged sisters from the Berkshires took over the space and opened an unpretentious bar and restaurant where all (of legal drinking age) were welcome.
    It was a refreshing and necessary change of guard following an unpleasant and distressing interlude, and it struck many of us that the sisters’ only misstep was in the name they’d chosen to bestow upon their establishment. They renamed it No Baloney, a disconcerting fact that one could not ignore, proclaimed as it was on the sign they hung outside the premises; a sign