Scheherazade Nights | Washington Post Magazine - July 9, 2006

Scheherazade Nights - Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham might be an award-winning novelist, but by god he was a struggling artist, too.  He had to bartend to pay the bills to support his writing.  He had to work with beautiful buffoons whose simple minds could easily be tolerated because they had large biceps and moved gracefully.  Some even showed genuine, if superficial, interest in his work.

Now don't misunderstand, this is a fun essay to read.  Mr. Cunningham weaves a simple memoir of his time among the elite in the bartending world.  He is funny and self-deprecating and he makes it easy to place yourself right there, at the bar, in this distant time.  I can see the skin tight shirts and mustaches on each and every one of them.  I can picture the lonely customers, the cruisers, the regulars who'll have no one interrupt their rituals and customs.

My problem with this is Mr. Cunningham's underlying attitude.  When he returns he has these thoughts: "But I was finally ready, in my own skin, to see them again, if any of them happened to be there still. I no longer felt like a beggar at the banquet."

It's a strange and normal thought process--I know nothing of psychology, and it shows--that Mr. Cunningham was part of a group that he physically admired.  And he was in that group in a milieu where physical admiration and desire were the primary driving forces of relationships.  One of these Adonis' shows the slightest interest in the fact that Mr. Cunningham writes.  Clearly, it left a deep memory.

After he has met some success, he feels comfortable enough to return, finally secure in his own worth.  Yet he assumes that these "simple, hardy young men" wouldn't be impressed with his modest success.  (I don't know the timing of these events, but geez, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, for god's sake.)

You can read the essay to see what he finds.  It allows Mr. Cunningham to wax profound about life's inequities.

I don't care to be mean, but I think he was slightly disappointed that he couldn't rub it in a little with them, or maybe see their approving looks.  We all want that when we reconnect with the people in our pasts.  Hell, the entire high school reunion industry is based on this.

I wonder though, if Mr. Cunningham was straight, and let's say he was a barback or a cook at a place like Hooter's or its ilk, would an essay like this generate some heavy criticism?  Wouldn't it likely be seen as an middle-aged man's thinly-veiled gasconade?

"Oh, how I came so close to giving those big-breasted, long-legged Barbie dolls their comeuppance.  Alas, they no longer worked there."

(I must be grumpy...Mr. Cunningham, I don't mean any of this.)