The Cloak Room By Moira Muldoon Special to the American-Statesman Thursday, May 23, 2002 I don't usually get asked to recite poetry in bars. As a matter of fact, I'm never asked to recite poetry in bars. But the other night, sitting in The Cloak Room, my friend and I were asked to -- by a lobbyist. 
The Cloak Room, being as it's right next to the Capitol, is often full of lobbyists and legislators and sundry state employees. The discussions around the bar tend to be more about politics and pork barreling than poetry. But this particular lobbyist was keen to make friends with my friend; therefore, when he realized we were writers, he asked us to recite a few of our poems. I floundered badly, unable to remember even one completely by heart, but my friend came through with flying colors -- and an impressive and surreal sonnet that mixed foreboding, the fablesque and slant rhymes quite nicely.
Oddly, reciting became something of an initiation rite that night: When a third friend joined us, she had to recite something too. (She opted for Keats.) Eventually the lobbyist himself pulled most of Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" from the corners of his mind and declaimed it for us as well. As I've mentioned, this kind of thing isn't normal, as best I can tell. Most of my Cloak Room experiences have been late on weekend nights, rather than happy hour, but even when the place has fewer lobbyists and more regular joes, as it does on weekends, you still hear the bartender baiting regulars -- about a party leader, or how hard this senator works, or how little that one does. (And if I were more in tune with Texas politics I'd be able to tell you the names of the folks I heard about. But it all went in one ear and out the other. I know, I know, I deserve 50 lashes with a wet zoning proposition.) However, at the same time the lobbyist was poeticizing and I was busy forgetting senators' names, I was also enjoying a fine Elgin sausage, since every happy hour at The Cloak Room involves a free buffet. And, well, there were only about six of us there, including me, my two friends, the lobbyist and the bartender, so we had some work to do. Which I didn't mind, because Elgin sausages are good. The bar itself is something of a cavern, or maybe more of a crevice, given that it's not all that large. You have to walk down a dozen steps, the smell of stale smoke and dead booze rising to meet your descent. You open the door, walk into the darkness, wait a moment for your eyes to adjust (assuming you head in while it's still daylight), and then lose all sense of the fact that it is daylight, since the ceilings are low and there aren't any windows to look out of. The tables are small and cozy, the TV's tuned to news and golf, and the jukebox plays Johnny Cash or Otis Redding. It's actually a good place to have a conversation; you're always welcome to fling barbs with the crew on the barstools or retire to a table for a more private chat. In a way, The Cloak Room is a very male bar. Men in suspenders and pressed chinos with rumpled hair, customers ribbing each other, the bartenders ribbing the customers, beer and hard liquor running up tabs (no sex on the beach ordered here), Elgin sausages wrapped in mustard-covered white bread. No one was smoking cigars, but someone should have been. I happened to start reading "All the King's Men" -- Robert Penn Warren's epic novel of Southern politics -- after coming home from The Cloak Room one night, and I was struck by how comfortable all the characters in that book would have been in the bar. They might not have forced young writers to recite poetry, but they would have found a way, sure as shooting, to get everyone talking to each other. And come to think of it, they might have had a limerick or two to contribute. Contact Moira Muldoon at bargirl@covad.net | ||||
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