INSIDE OUT

An Ambivert Reversal

Of all the intense riptide changes I’ve made recently — moving from California back to Brooklyn and learning a new job in 3 sweaty, nonstop weeks — the most jarring of these has been the conversion from being a full time reclusive hermit to being essentially onstage all night as a wine bartender.   I had to turn the toggle switch in my psyche from introvert back to extrovert, and it was so rusty I didn’t know if I could.  

Covid really suited me, socially.  I was already doing all my grocery shopping online because I am lazy, and often couldn’t summon the psychological fortitude to deal with other people.  I used to go out into the world and feel my aura dented all over like a golf ball.  But then again, I was in Marin County — one of the snottiest and most conformist places in the US, where looking like an old death rocker got me bemused or uncomfortable expressions from the local Pilates trophy wives.  In New York I am gloriously invisible again, and this is paradoxically why it feels fine to suddenly be in front of new people all evening.  In Marin County I am a straight-up weirdo, and women clutch their yoga mats as if I might roll up their 92 pound bodies in them and deposit them near a freeway offramp;  in Brooklyn my bleached hair and black clothes merely mean I am a woman of earned character, who also might mummify a 92 pound trophy wife in her own yoga mat. It’s a plus here. 

There is considerably less natural beauty in Crown Heights than there is in Marin County, but then again, I haven’t even walked to the divine Prospect Park yet.  The main beauty of Brooklyn, I realized (while sending mash notes to Punkrock Joe) is the people.  They are young and interesting and alive and multicultural in a way that doesn’t really exist anymore in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the rents are too high for anyone but wormlike techie working stiffs. 

Right now some Hasidic Jews in my neighborhood are having a party that is entirely audible from my back yard — and for such a serious and overdressed people, they are really tearing the roof off the motherfucker.  At first I thought it might be a college fraternity because they were all cheering and singing together. 

“That sounds like more fun than I have ever had,” I thought to myself, hearing all the men and women laughing and whooping.  Then I heard the thumping dance music lyrics in Hebrew, and realized that the Hasidic community is exactly that - a real community, however hermetic.  They sounded like they were having a wedding, or a family reunion where everyone actually liked each other.  It sounded genuinely joyous. 

Usually the interaction with my customers is limited to what kind of wine they want, but I now have a handful of regulars and locals who come in and hang out, who I know by name.  I’m trying to cultivate a “Cheers” kind of vibe for the neighbors.  

The other night a trio came into the bar from the Bronx — a shave-headed hispanic guy in a white T-shirt, a lovely black woman, and a skinny black dude who looked like a member of the rap group Los Migos:  he was wearing a velvet jacket, a Gucci hat, little gold oval glasses.  The three of them were clearly quite stoned, and had brought a dense fog of cannibis smoke in with them.  I tried to welcome them with a little extra warmth and attention, and started talking to them about wines.  I could tell they were a little shy about being in the wine bar.  “I figured, fuck it, let’s go someplace completely new,” said the Hispanic dude, who ordered a simple pinot grigio.  I served him, but I was determined to give the Migos dude something a bit more exotic to figure out where his real pleasure centers were, wine-wise.  He was demonstrating the shyness of the cripplingly stoned, but I plied him with red and orange wines until one made him smile.  

“I am starting to understand the vibe of this place - -it’s a recipe of energies,” he told me and Lane, the Boy Genius chef I work with. 

“This is artistry, right?  The way the wine goes with the food?  First you get hit with the vibe of the place (which, I must say, is adorable - it looks like an excellent cigar bar or European bistro, surrounded by books), and then you get her energy,” he said, gesturing to me.  “She got that good energy right there,” he said.  I beamed at him. “I knew I liked you,” I told him.  He smiled.  

He thought about it for a minute, took a bite of the Red Leicester and hot Capicola sandwich he’d improvised from the menu, and looked me in the eyes.  “People don’t understand that what we have here,” he said, gesturing the space between us, “makes us so rich.  This connection.”  When he said it, I could feel both of our hearts lighting up.  Everything went blinding amber for a metaphysical moment.  We couldn’t look at each other’s eyes, one of us would have started to cry.  This was the elusive, ineffable thing I had been missing, all those years — shining moments with total strangers. 

I was wondering why my dharma of late had led me back into a life of labor, which I escaped for 38 years by writing professionally.  I often felt, during my reclusive and underemployed years, that I was serving out a kind of self-imposed prison sentence in solitary confinement, or in some version of an old folks home, watching repeated viewings of Ink Master and waiting to die, alone, and have nobody discover me until the smell disturbed the neighbors. 

Now I’m starting to think that the larger plan guiding my movements is about reconnecting me to the human race.   I am pouring wine for humanity, and it, in turn, will make me richer inside and out.   

Now I just have to figure out how to party like a Hasidic Jew.  They’re definitely on to something.  

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Dinner with Elagabalus,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2024