It Only takes One

Note: This blog is presented last post first. To read from the beginning, scroll to the post titled “Everything Will Turn Out OK.”

Back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton ran for president against Donald Trump, we let our daughter color in the dot next to Clinton’s name where it said “Select one candidate for president,” and took pictures of her outside the school where we’d voted, telling her she’d just helped to make history by voting for the first female candidate for president. Of course the next day when we woke up, the world was a very different place, but at that very moment, we could not have been more proud, more filled with hope about the future. I still believe in the power of one vote, especially considering how close things were in 2020, and I don’t intend this to be a political speech. I just want to point out that everything we do has meaning. Every effort has value.

This is a picture of the tasting room just before closing, when the only lights we leave on are the grow lights for the plants. From the street, it might almost appear that we’re up to something nefarious in here, but more often than not people thank us for making them feel safer when they walk by at night, as it’s the only light shining on this part of what can be a scary, deserted block. On December 28, we will turn those lights on for one last time. We’d hoped to be the store that changed the neighborhood and brought business to a corner people don’t tend to walk by, but that’s just not possible to do in a pandemic, especially the kind of pandemic in which one person who doesn’t even know they’re sick can sicken a dozen people and those dozen can in turn sicken…how many? In the third grade math we were doing with our daughter last year, we never got to the concept of exponents, which probably don’t come into play until your brain is mature enough to grasp the concept of infinity. Here at the tasting room, we kept our heads down and focused on more simple math. One sale at a time. One person at a time. A friend told us recently, “You’ve been swimming upstream this whole time.” We have, but not alone.

If I were to list the many acts of kindness, the people who have devoted their time and knowledge to helping us, the list would be too long. I started this blog at a rough time, over a year after our opening, and the handful of you who’ve been reading along have surely seen the end coming. But I don’t want to say goodbye without acknowledging the differences that a single person can make—that one person who helps to build the bar or leaves an outrageously large tip or redesigns our chalkboard or becomes our unpaid event planner or performs with her band for free to draw in a crowd. So, so many people have made a difference, one act at a time. But it has come to the point when some days, only one customer walks through the door, and that’s the kind of math that we can’t do. That’s the kind of math that means it’s time to say goodbye, and i’ll do so, as my Dad points out, without ever telling you a single thing about the wine that Josh put his heart into or the vines he took care of or the varietal blending we did in our kitchen or the sales calls our daughter trudged along on after school. This place is just four walls—albeit four painstakingly painted and cared for walls—but in the end, it’s just a building; and the drink, whether made from grapes or grain, is just the drink. A place like this is always bout the people.

It’s been an honor knowing you.

Positional Play

 “Cup o’ tea?” a man said with an Irish lilt in his voice as he headed for the counter where—three incarnations ago, when the shop was a coffee bar—he used to get his local dose of caffeine.

“Has it been that long?” he asked, and after we directed him to a bubble tea store down the street, I said to Josh, “Well, how about it? Could we offer tea? Coffee might get too complicated, but a nice cup of tea for those who don’t drink wine…?”

At the time, I was drinking chai with ingredients I’d brought from home, and it seemed like a smart move—if this was the 10th person who’d come in here this month looking for a coffee shop, perhaps that’s what the neighborhood wanted. Taking in the sight of me lapping up my chai like a cat from one of his shallow olive bowls, Josh sighed and said, “But then we’d need mugs that will take up space, and milk that will expire, and paper cups to go, and liability insurance for hot liquids, and a dozen other things.”

It’s true that I hadn’t thought it out. We had an electric kettle and plenty of spoons and I was dreaming like a child playing store of all the other things we could serve. With a jar of honey and a carton of milk, I thought we’d be set, but every move in business seems to require a license and a plan, so I moved on. To cheesecake that could be offered with red wine, and would require only the forks and plates that we already had, and then to the games we were playing in between customers at our daughter’s request, because sometimes a grownup’s world is boring—and children are right to believe not only that games are more fun, but that playing them can turn their parents into children again.

In Connect Four, as with Tic Tac Toe, you employ a strategy of blocking your opponent while also maximizing your line; whereas in Exploding Kittens, you need only the luck of holding onto your Defuse card in the event you draw a picture of a cat holding a bomb. We’d lost the printed rules for UNO and were playing it on our nephew’s instructions until a fight broke out over different interpretations of the “reverse” card, and we finally agreed to play chess, a game my daughter’s school began to teach her in second grade. At the tender age of seven, she was ripe to absorb the rules. After all, her life was governed by them —rules for home and school and play. But she was also really good at looking ahead, at following the diagonal lines to map out where her enemies might come from, or how she might get to them first.

In came several regulars to buy their Sunday beer. Six cans off a towering stack of Torch and Crown’s “Almost Famous” IPA, four off a stack of KCBC’s barrel-aged “Beast Slayer” and I saw Josh register the spaces where they used to be and mentally fill out an order form. It’s the job of every salesperson to project magical ease, the game to make this environment seem like a place where the rules of real life don’t apply. The machinations behind divining what people want and making it all happen—those are supposed to take place behind the scenes, in the corners of the mind where the next moves are planned out to the smallest detail. We had done this before signing the lease (How close is the nearest wine store? What is the average family budget—and will people be willing to spend their disposable income on alcohol?), but I’m learning it’s something you need to keep asking every time you make a move.

A bishop can move in any unobstructed direction diagonally. A knight moves in an L. A couple wove uncertainly through the tables, searching for a bottle of Italian wine until we told them that all of ours must legally be made in New York State. Recalculating, they asked for a Long Island red and gestured to the corner where the games are piled up waiting for players. “Could we play Monopoly?” Josh brought them two glasses of his Merlot blend while I continued to play his side and was defeated by my daughter in a single move I failed to predict.

Covid and a bad economy having upended the rules, Carpe Vino’s new strategy has played out in a number of successful musical performances over the past month. As for me? I plan to buy a book on what chess players call “positional play” so next time my nine-year-old doesn’t beat my pants off!

When the Masks Come Off

 It’s Halloween and we’re not at the Tasting Room this weekend, which makes this the perfect time to share a scary story (blood, guts and all)  about Carpe Vino’s very first event—a couple of months before we’d officially opened our doors for business. 

There’s a man I’ll call Otis who nods his head every time he passes the tasting room but never comes in. Although we’ve since made peace, we both remember that cold December day just before Covid hit when he called the cops on us for playing music so loud it bounced the speakers off their shelves, and for allowing our guests to spill onto the sidewalk in loud, smoky hordes. In his place, I would have done the same—but let me explain how we got to that point from what was supposed to be a quiet Hanukkah singles party that would end at midnight with, at most, a little drunken singing of “Oy Hanukkah, Oy Hanukkah.”

It’s a story we often tell to explain why we’re somewhat gun-shy about holding private events, and it’s one that can be told from multiple perspectives:  from Otis’s—the neighbor who just wants to enjoy sitting on his stoop in peace.  From the event planner’s, who believed it was her right to do whatever she wished in the mostly empty space she rented from us for four hours. From the owner’s, fearful of any damage to his landlord’s property and to his license to operate a bar in New York City.  And from mine—the wife sitting at home with her child, hearing the tale unfold in furtive phone calls and texts.

First, there was the shelf of glasses that came crashing down on which Josh cut his hand badly, eliciting only the comment from the planner that she was glad she’d brought her own kosher stemware. Second, that she’d advertised the event as a hookah party, forcing Josh to move the hookah practitioners and their equipment outdoors to ensure they didn’t violate NYS smoking laws. Third, that a posse of her friends threatened him with litigation and banished him off premises for the duration of the event for daring to exert his rights as owner (and probably also for cursing her out). And last, of the increasingly stoned behavior of the guests, who refused to lower the music or to leave at the party’s contracted end until Josh showed them his dripping, bloody hand and finally impressed them with the urgency of his need to close the bar and go to the emergency room for stitches. It was almost a relief when the cops showed up.

That the hookah guys were also EMTs who helped to temporarily staunch his wound is one of those odd New York coincidences that doesn’t make up for the overall horror of the night. I doubt a more stringent contract would have saved us because it’s difficult to contractualize morals. Besides the EMTs, no one cared about good behavior or the rule of law or the welfare of other human beings—and there’s nothing scarier than that, so I’m thankful for the hundreds of exchanges we’ve had with customers since then that have restored our faith in human decency.

But the fact is that our very first event had nothing to do with celebrating the traditional festival of lights, or even with helping people to find a date. It was a crash course on how to handle everything you hope will never happen in your establishment, and a primer on identifying and avoiding deceptive clients. It’s a lesson applicable to every public business, but perhaps none more so than a bar, where people sometimes come to let go of themselves. This Halloween, a day that makes the masks we’ve been wearing for two years seem almost normal, I’ve had a chance to reflect on the moments when our other masks come off and reveal the people we really are. 

Behind the Bar

 Last Saturday, a millennial drinking his beer at the bar was left momentarily alone with his friends while Josh stepped outside to investigate a popping noise. He returned to find the man behind the bar, charging his phone while taking selfies of himself sitting in what is, essentially, the boss’s chair. We weren’t sure which was more disturbing—his lack of boundaries or his inability to live without a powered-up smartphone—but I’m willing to forgive the transgression if it was the former because I still feel the thrill of standing on the other side of the bar after nearly two years. The ding of a cash register being popped open has a different sound when heard from this side (the sound of success); the purr of under-counter refrigerators a certain secrecy (the promise of an illicit stash).  Then there’s the view of the world that’s microscopically sharper when everything is your responsibility, from the napkin that falls to the floor or the leaf that blows in on the wind to the presence of the police outside the projects for the past 24 hours—their red, white and blue lights flashing the message that there will be no more shootings, at least not while they’re on the beat. That afternoon, customers who had also noticed the popping noises flocked worriedly around Josh, asking him to confirm what they already knew in their hearts, and in a flash the bar lost its temporary status as an extension of their living rooms as they fled to safety. The selfie-taker might have taken his shot with the street behind him, rather than the mirrored bar, because that’s where the story was. It’s where it always is, when you’re looking beyond yourself.

The next day, with the sidewalks washed of their grit and the graffiti painted over, the sirens faded into the distance and we opened as if it were any other ordinary day, performing once again the courtesies and traditions of those who stand behind the bar. I got a lesson on using the taps and learned that the act of washing out the inside of a beer stein isn’t just something you do to make sure there’s no dust in it, but something that helps to create a good pour, with a head that foams just enough to make it look fresh but not so much as to make it look like you’re cheating someone out of a full drink. You pour while spinning the glass and tipping it sideways, waiting for the crazy foam to subside and letting a substantial amount of it drip into the overfill drain. Through it all, your focus is out over the bar, on the next person who slides onto a stool, on the emptiness of a glass on a table outside, and especially on the tale you’re being told by a person who wants your attention to be on him and him alone.   

My daughter and I didn’t have to climb onto the bar to reach the lights where we were hanging Halloween decorations, but it was more fun when it felt like a transgression.  (Selfie-taker, you’re forgiven again.) A customer replaces the toilet paper on the dispenser when we should have done so. Another flips a record then it comes to the end, also our job, and then leaves to DJ a neighborhood party so loud we can hear it from our back kitchen window. The roles of proprietor and customer, host and guest, are played out on this stage, and we blur those public and private lines them from time to time as we step out in front of the bar, or retreat behind it.

Way Stations for Transitory Souls

 A good bar serves its neighborhood in both deliberate and accidental ways. We’re the meeting places for celebratory drinks and solitary rituals just as often as we are the places to wait out a storm—the way stations between wherever you’ve been and wherever you’re going. Like any other public space, we get all kinds passing through—some of them looking for something else, whether it’s coffee or money or a bathroom—but to every one of these transitory souls, a good bartender presents the same welcoming, unchanging face. 

It’s about noon when in walk two regulars of the deliberate kind—a couple who work at a corner table every Sunday on an extracurricular project, leaving their young children home with a babysitter so that they can spend an uninterrupted five or six hours on what’s become their passion: a documentary film about a little-known Black nationalist group called The East, immortalized in Wikipedia in four sparse paragraphs. The group operated in Bed Stuy around the same time as the Black Panthers, but offered a different path: daycare for kids, art classes for adults, even a coop food store and jazz club. On the more commercial end of our co-working couple’s interests is the Black-Owned Brooklyn Business gift guide they’re hoping to publish in time for Christmas. Paul Robeson performing Othello was on the record player when they came in, and we’d been regaling our daughter about his impressive background. They enjoy a charcuterie plate and drink their Rosé in company with our family, all day long. 

At nearly closing time, a customer of the more accidental type comes in. She’s been here once or twice since she lives in one of the apartments above the bar, but has never stayed long. This time she almost knocks on the open door the way a neighbor might when stopping by to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. She’s unmasked, and a sharp observer would notice she’s wearing slippers and correctly deduce she’s locked herself out. What better place to wait out your exile than in the company of a good bartender? By the time her spare keys arrive via Uber (who knew keys could be sole passengers?), her laundry will be done, so she settles in with a glass of wine and a personal pizza while we go about the business of shutting down for the night. Perhaps inspired by the presence of my daughter rollerskating through the room, she recounts one of her most embarrassing moments as a mother. (Let’s just say the story involves an exploding diaper, a plane trip, and the luck that only fathers seem to have in staying clean.) We share a laugh and see her to the door when her Uber drives up. Perhaps next time she’ll come on purpose. 

Never having worked in the hospitality industry before, what’s new to me on these Sundays at the Tasting Room is the feeling that all of these people are walking into our living room. They squeak across the floors we’ve swept, spread out their belongings on the tables we’ve polished, and play out a part of their lives—whether deliberately or accidentally—right before our eyes. Well, most of them do anyway. A few months ago Josh told me about a man who came in, appeared to look around with the intent of buying something, and then asked to use the bathroom. He took quite a long time in there, and finally emerged wearing in his long hair several of the peacock feathers we’d displayed in a tall green vase that sits on the supply cabinet. The bartender did a double-take, but didn’t say a word, and let the man walk out with his new headdress. As a writer—and perhaps as a bar owner, too—I have to say it’s these accidental moments that I live for. 

Evolution, Vampire-Bat Style

Ten days into October, it’s clear the winds are changing, but we’re slow to catch on. Still out in our flip-flops and drinking iced tea; still clutching straw purses and wearing white after Labor Day, as though if we just will it, wear it, we can bring back those late summer days. Trucks stopped in traffic on Marcus Garvey pause long enough for us to glimpse their drivers beating on the steering wheel to the tune of the rain as we ghost the doorframe of the tasting room, looking to see who’s ventured out. There are a few people in track suits who don’t move any faster even when it begins to pour, and a rabbit-shaped puddle sitting in one of the chairs. With no one else is in sight, we settle in for a long and uneventful day. 

Oblivious to the weather, my daughter and nephew take turns jumping off the roots of a tree and over a high fringe of sidewalk weeds while Josh’s sister keeps one eye them and another on the schedule of events for the month. As our unofficial, unpaid event planner, she’s helping us to pivot from wine bar to performance space in the same way the former tenants pivoted from coffee shop to brunch spot. Sometimes evolution is organic, but I suspect it’s more often what Darwin meant when he wrote about the survival of the fittest. The thing about evolving—and I’m pretty sure Darwin would agree with me—is that the degree to which you can change is deeply influenced by what you were at the beginning, and who you meet along the way. Change has sometimes been hard for us to handle, focused as we are on keeping the lights on, but we’ve been grateful to encounter new perspectives on how best to become an integral part of this neighborhood.

When we first opened Carpe Vino, we had no experience running a business, let alone a bar, although Josh seemed to have all the skills necessary to get one up and running. If a toilet broke, he could install a new one; a refrigerator shorted out, he could vacuum the coils and fix it. And when it came to the unknown, friends and acquaintances could be consulted for advice on how to repair an over-foaming tap or an underperforming line chiller. The pieces of this tasting room were harvested from sites across the tri-state area and Frankensteined into being. Recognize the 10-spigot beer tower? It’s from the old-man bar Hanks on 3rd Avenue, which died an old man’s death. The ice maker? Donated by our friends from Nunu’s Chocolates after they closed their Atlantic Avenue store. The  6’x6’walk-in fridge for the kegs has a more corporate history, nonetheless interesting:  Josh bought it from a Johnson & Johnson consulting firm out in Long Island that used it only briefly to store a bandaid-making contraption.  He had to learn how to drain it, take it apart, lower it down a basement hatch into its new home, and then put it back together again.

As a new business without deep pockets, we’re often in the position of finding new ways to make old things work. It’s a good life skill to have, and I make the point to my daughter and nephew that sometimes you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. Taking them to the Decatur Street Playground just around the corner for a break from the grown-up talk, I learn we have only a whiffle ball and not a bat—only a tennis ball and not a racket—so I roll up The New York Times, summoning my father’s stick-ball days, and encourage them to give it a try. On their own, when the bat proves too short, they decide to throw the ball around egg-toss style, the distance between them lengthening until skill wins out and one of them leaves to do something she does better:  hang from the jungle gym, vampire-bat style.

Back at Carpe Vino, seats at the bar have started to fill and a couple with a baby sit under the dripping umbrella. Two long-time customers stop by and sign up to perform with their bands, and an alum from my college comes in to discuss their event, helpfully pointing out that our mailing, rather than physical, address is listed on the building. (“Are they trying to make it harder for you to do business?”) The road that earlier this morning was so uninteresting soon becomes the scene of a bike accident involving a former circus performer who skids in a pool of oil and miraculously rolls over a car and onto the sidewalk as the traffic divides seamlessly around the Citibike he’s abandoned in the middle of the road. We gather again in the the doorway, trying to see if we need to call 911 until a customer sitting at the bar with a beer chides us, “What you looking at?  Nothing there to see. Back in my day, in this neighborhood, anybody standing ‘round gawking like that would’ve meant a dead body.” He talks to us a little more about the evolution of the neighborhood and tries to convince the biker, whom we’ve offered some bandages, to sue.

“Sue who?”the biker asks. “You saw me,” he says. “You saw me flip, right?” He seems almost more interested in his ability to turn himself around than in the fact that he could have been seriously injured.

“Three revolutions, man! Did you see me flip?”

And we did see.  Three perfect turns.  Three revolutions.

Three evolutions. 

Everything will Turn Out OK

On Marcus Garvey Boulevard between the bookends of the Bethany Baptist Church and the the Bed Stuy projects, you can swear off drinking and ask Jesus to save your soul or you can down a six pack of  Red Stripes and party ‘til the sidewalk seems as good a bed as any; you can buy a pair of zebra hot pants from Lulu’s for five bucks or invest in a socially conscious painting from the Richard Beavers Gallery for 12 grand. And because the highs and lows of any neighborhood in the middle of a transition coexist for a while, you can mourn the road-rage murder of a teenage boy over a parking spot just outside the Decatur Street Playground, or you can celebrate the unveiling of a Black Lives Matter mural on Fulton Street mere days later.

Depending on how you look at it, establishing the Carpe Vino Tasting Room smack in between these two worlds was either an act of tremendous courage or a grand delusion—or maybe it’s both. This Sunday, October 3, is one of those skyless days that has one foot in summer and one in fall, so I’m feeling ambivalent. Like the sirens on the ambulance that goes blaring by, announcing some poor soul’s fate—perhaps we’ll make it; perhaps we won’t. I suppose all businesses start out this way, but after an inauspicious opening  on February 29, 2020—exactly two weeks before (former) New York Governor Cuomo shut down all restaurants and bars to slow the first wave of COVID-19—we ‘re taking stock. 

There’s a white couple with a five-month-old baby sitting outside drinking draft beer and a vaccinated African-American couple inside listening to Sarah Vaughn’s Golden Hits on the record player.  A few weeks ago the situation was reversed, and we had the uncomfortable sensation that COVID was re-instituting segregation as we sat customers highly skeptical of a new vaccine in a post-Tuskegee world outdoors, and ushered in Team Pfizer to sit unmasked at the bar. Over the past 18 months, the pandemic has ravaged this block, so it would be good to see the tide changing.  When we first signed the lease, middle and upper class black and white families had been buying up brownstones faster than they could be gutted; and the promise of empty lots being turned into condos—those weedy, impressionist paintings that spring up between buildings as if to sketch out what could be —was the basis upon which the landlord expected to raise our rent not 3 but 5% by the time our five-year contract was up. Now, even though we’re $1,000 behind on rent every month, when the landlord’s henchman stops by, he only asks how we’re doing—glad that we’re sticking it out as long as we can.  Many of the apartments above the store have emptied out of people who’ve lost their jobs or decided to move to the suburbs for greener pastures.  Well, for any pasture at all.  It’s obvious the neighborhood’s sliding backwards, along with the rest of New York City.

“We in the jungle.  We all just profiling” yells a disturbed man weaving dangerously close to the rickety teak tables I set out on the double-wide sidewalk this morning.  My husband, Josh, comes out to make sure a customer typing away on her marblized Mac hasn’t been disturbed, and waits there until the man wanders into the parking lot next door.  Many of these men know Josh as someone who’s lent them $10 when they were down and out or hired them to paint a roll-down gate, and these are the people who will remain in Bed Stuy long after the pandemic becomes endemic—if they survive. There’s a grape vine growing over my head that Josh, a winemaker and former vineyard manager, transplanted into a cart the old tenants left behind.  It was (and still is) chained to the building, and has twice been deliberately overturned, once even by one of those men Josh had paid, angry that he’d been so late to pick up the cans he recycles for pocket change that we’d disposed of them ourselves.  Being sturdier, the roots survived the replanting, but the tendrils of the vine had to be carefully wound back up the wire that’s strung between the no-parking sign and the gate. As for the trust we once had in Barry, that’ll have to be rebuilt.

“We told you not to use that cart.  Your plants will only get stolen,” the owners of the High Line Residential real estate brokerage next door told Josh. But the vine’s blooming again, even going through veraison at about the same time as its Long Island counterparts, and Miss Lulu of Lulu’s, taking her Yorkie for a walk on our side of the street, gazes up at it as “Poopy Butt” (his real name, I swear) wanders ahead trailing his leash. In another few minutes, a gang of motorcycles will zoom crazily up the sidewalk, but by that time, she and her dog will be back in front of their wares, and my daughter and I will watch the danger from the safety of the bar. Despite all that’s happened, despite all that might happen and all that might not, I have to say this about Josh.  He’s got faith that everything will turn out OK.