Picking Up the Tab

By George Justice

It was our last day in London and my teenagers and I were enjoying refuge from a rain shower after a visit to the British Museum. We were sitting in one of my old haunts, The Plough, just down the street from The Museum Tavern, which had served Karl Marx and many others on similarly rainy days. As my boys hunched over their phones, oblivious to the world around them, I texted a photo of them to my friend Craig, halfway around the world in Adelaide, Australia. He quickly texted back: “But they can’t drink.”

True. But as part of this nostalgia trip to Bloomsbury, I wanted them to experience a typical pub lunch. I could drink, so I savored a pint of Abbot Ale, Greene King’s strong traditional bitter, and indulged the opportunity to reflect on glorious, life-changing days gone by.

Decades earlier Craig and I and our friend Ian would leave our books in the British Library and wander down to The Plough for a pint, or two, and a light lunch. Back then The Plough was a free house, offering beers from many breweries. Greene King was, to my mind, an upgrade, and Abbot Ale has been for those same decades one of my favorite English beers.

Back in the fall of 1991, Craig and Ian were new friends for me, fellow doctoral students living in the William Goodenough House, a residence on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury for postgraduate students from the United States, the European Union, and the Commonwealth. Craig and Ian were both pursuing their PhD in Philosophy at King’s College London (KCL). I was working on my dissertation for my doctoral program in English at the University of Pennsylvania. I was the grad assistant for the Penn-in-London program at KCL, paid a stipend for helping out the undergrads from Penn a few hours per week, but spending most of my time doing research and writing in the British Library. Ian was Canadian, Craig Australian, and along with our friend John (an American neurologist doing his medical fellowship at Queen Square) and Roland (a South African studying urban planning) we spent many days and nights talking--talking about pretty much everything.

I have always prided myself on establishing, developing, and maintaining friendships. i still communicate with my first friend—made when I was two years old and our again-pregnant mothers were introduced to each other. I’ve made friends through school, through work, wherever or whenever I have had the chance. I love to talk, and I love to listen. My best work, and the most fun I’ve had, has come through spending time with others. If I look back on the first twenty-five years of life, though, these all-important relationships were constricted by my very cautious approach to sharing resources. In other words, I was a cheap, stingy bastard.

Honestly, I couldn’t help it. I was raised that way. My parents were naturally thrifty by upbringing and by nature. My father’s father was a coal miner supporting his family first as they lived in a company camp and bought their goods and food with scrip, and then on a piece of family land where they grew much of their own food. My father raised rabbits and a pig for slaughter, and he would proudly regale his sons about his complete lack of sentimentality about his animals. My mother was one of four sisters in an immigrant family in upstate New York, living in a house built by their father and eating food grown by their mother in a garden I loved myself growing up.. Both my father and mother earned graduate degrees—my father was a Rhodes Scholar and later an attorney and my mother an assistant dean at Penn—and they were able to send me and my brothers to private school in Philadelphia.

Unlike many of our classmates’ parents, ours earned everything they had. They were able to raise us in what looked from the outside like an upper-middle-class lifestyle. I didn’t have to pay for college, and I didn’t have to work in high school. I took piano lessons (with an expensive teacher). But I didn’t have fancy clothes, and I was ridiculed at school for my cheap sneakers. Classmates would shout “Bobos!” at me and flaunt their Adidas. The Stan Smith model was popular then, and I’ve been amused to see it regain status in the past couple of years. I learned to take a sullen pride in my very cheap Converse canvas low-tops (certainly not Chuck Taylors--those were too expensive).

My mother died when I was nine. Her youngest sister, Anne, watched over me from New York, and I made the mistake of telling her that my dad wouldn’t get me the sneakers I wanted. She bought me a pair of Pony running shoes (they had become suddenly popular) on a trip I took to New York. My father glared at me upon my return, although it is unclear to me if my aunt had berated him or just indirectly criticized him by buying me the shoes (which I wore with a painful combination of pride and shame). Finally, in eleventh grade, I pooled birthday money and bought a pair of Adidas for myself. They were red suede—not the height of fashion, but they were on sale and I could afford them.

“The pubs of London let me become who, I hope, I really am.”

I was indoctrinated, then, with the belief that spending money was bad. I carefully considered—really, tortured myself over—any purchase greater than a 25-cent candy bar. I refused to buy books or records, which were things I loved. There was the public library for that.

My parsimony worked fine through college. I went to a liberal arts college, Wesleyan University, which had movies, plays, music, a library, an all-you-can-eat dining hall, and very cheap weekend parties at which I could drink very much beer.

But after college, living in London, then New York, then Philadelphia, I had to watch my pennies. I earned basically nothing working in retail (The Bead Shop, Covent Garden, London), publishing (editorial assistant at Harper & Row, $13,500 per year and living in Manhattan), and graduate school in English (stipend of $8,000 per year, supplemented by around $300 per month of freelance work for Harper and a couple thousand a year from a Wesleyan fellowship).

I’m hoping my friends just rolled their eyes. I’m hoping they thought it was just one of a number of easily observable, possibly amusing, George quirks that I calculated individual financial obligation to the second decimal place—sometimes delaying our departure from a bar by insisting on a precise division of the bill by the exact cost of the drinks we ordered. If my Bud was just fifty cents cheaper than their Heinekens—so be it. I didn’t care if it took an extra ten minutes to figure out what each of us owed down to the penny.

My time in London changed all that. And that change changed me for good.

For once, I had more disposable income than my friends. For that, thanks go to the undergraduate English majors at the University of Pennsylvania, whose study abroad programs supported me for the first year and the Mellon Foundation, whose dissertation completion fellowship funded my second year. Because “Willie G.” was a relatively inexpensive place to live, complete with a subsidized dining hall, I could live, read, write, go to plays—and drink about as much as I wanted. (My older brother, working full-time as a bureaucrat and worrying that I might be starving, would send me the occasional check, which would be directly converted to pints. He still mocks me with memories of bemused disgust from when he came to visit and saw how well I was living.)

During those two years, my life was changed as much by the pub as by the British Library. This seemed like the life I was supposed to live, drinking and talking exuberantly with a host of brilliant people, many becoming friends. I glommed on to the doctoral program in English at University College, London. Some nights I’d spend with Ian, Craig, John, Roland, and other literature students who introduced me to a depth of knowledge and insight that changed the way I read and wrote.

I never wanted the pub life to end. Since the pubs didn’t close until 11 p.m, rarely did the conversations, even if my friends didn’t have money to keep drinking. So instead of haggling over a few pence and retiring to a single room overlooking Mecklenburgh Square, I would buy round after round for my companions and keep the evening going.

The pubs of London let me become who, I hope, I really am.

The effects of this change were deep and permanent. It might not make sense to readers of this essay that buying drinks (and the occasional dinner) for friends could change a life. But buying drinks for others opened me up to career, family, and the life of the mind. Since finishing graduate school—my completion much more due to days in the British Library than evenings at the Marlborough Arms—I have been a college professor, teaching and writing about English literature. All in all, that’s a pretty good job for a penny-pincher: you do most of your work on your own and you don’t get paid a lot.

But I found my real calling in academic leadership, as a dean at two large research universities. That job gave me more resources, not only in terms of salary but in the fabric of the position, which allowed me to entertain faculty members, students, and community members, if not with excessive drink, then with decent meals, great conversation, and a sense that the work of intellectual life on a daily level encompasses much more than the work of a scholar in the archives. You could draw a direct line, then, from the Plough to the dean’s office.

As I drank my single pint in July and enjoyed my bangers-and-mash (my kids having chosen mac-and-cheese from the tourist-friendly menu), I thought about where my life had taken me. Ian died in 2012, our last conversation having occurred joyously in a bar in New Orleans a month prior to the diabetic attack that left him dying alone in a new apartment. My career as a dean has also ended. I don’t even have many drinking/talking buddies these days I’m able to see John regularly as he also lives in Arizona. And I manage to see Craig every couple of years, either here or in Australia. But family, my retreat to the English department, and (let’s face it) health have made me cut back on drinking and fellowship.

“It might not make sense to Readers that buying drinks…for friends could change a life. But they opened me up to career, family, and the life of the mind.”

My kids would not recognize the person I was before 1991. I buy them the sneakers they want and I encourage them to buy things that might give them pleasure. Neither of them likes to spend money. Nevertheless, I want them to learn generosity, toward themselves as well as others.

I am left to wonder whether one is born, or becomes, a cheap bastard. But I do know that living well and doing good things for others and myself required opening my wallet and opening my heart.