“The Committee”: A Friendship Forged in the Pandemic

Ann and I had a propitious first meeting. I was out with the Chef when I got a call from the NYPD. Was I aware that my son and a friend were dropping water balloons out of our 8th story window? I apologized to the police and spoke harshly to the boys, then high school freshmen. I got Angus’s friend’s mother’s phone number. I felt his parents should know. “I’m sorry you don’t know me but…”

And thus began a decade long friendship with Ann and her husband Jim, which was tethered, at first, to our sons’ friendship and then continued after the boys went to college. When we got together for dinners, we laughed so much and had good intense talk about politics, people, books and movies. But still, everyone was “busy,” and we got together maybe twice a year. Enter the pandemic and the run-up to the 2020 election. Walking bleak Broadway with its shuttered stores, we ran into Jim, aired our mutual angst and decided we all needed a drink.

And so it begins…

On September 18, 2020, we four met at the Dive 106 bar on Amsterdam Avenue. We sat outside anxiously sipping while slipping our masks up and down. After a relatively carefree summer Governor Cuomo had restricted inside dining to 25% and outdoor bar-goers had to order food. A foil tin of fries arrived, and I used paper napkins as sterile mitts to mete them out.  Ruth Bader Ginsberg had died that day. Trump was raging that the election would be stolen. New Yorkers were about to join the country’s third COVID wave as fall and winter approached. In fear, despair and rage it felt cathartic to be with others who felt the same. The Chef’s and my dinner table rants had been taking place in an echo chamber, but with Ann and Jim we could at least experience a roomier chamber with different decor. A wintery wind whipped around us, and one of us proposed a pact: to meet at the Dive 106 every Friday evening, to sit outside in all weather, and in this way, weather our sad season.

By about our third Dive bar Friday, affable and garrulous owner Howie Kaye, who does double duty as a waiter, dubbed us “the Committee,” and, indeed, we make a good foursome. Jim is what you’d call a tall drink of water. With a hank of dirty blond hair flopping over his forehead, he exudes either boyish charm or edgy world weariness, depending upon how his writing is going. Jim is the author of four well-reviewed nonfiction titles on key people or moments in America’s history; I rely on him for literary gossip and writerly commiseration. Ann is slender and tall, too, with angular features and sleek brunette hair in a chic cut. She’d look at home in a 60s shift as an extra on Mad Men or wearing Bermuda shorts on a tennis court. A voracious reader and producer of an award-winning TV show, she is seamlessly efficient and suffers no fools, but she also tender hearted. Of course, the scientist chef can hold his own on multiple topics, from political screeds to obscure facts about New York natural history. As for me, the generalist writer, I am the group’s emotional glue, organizer and über-texter, the one who will steer the conversation to the personal, pop culture and food when political conversation becomes too heated (we don’t agree on everything, after all).

Instead of Roberts Rules of Order, our committee hews to the tiny print in the Dive 106 contactless menu. The first agenda item is the procuring of the beer, which, for the three of them seems to be an inordinately long and fussy process. They debate beer qualities, color, alcohol content and brewery provenance. Jim and Ann order high alcohol IPAs and almost inevitably one will covet what the other orders, and they will swap cups. Howie says of the Chef, “Let’s just say he has very particular tastes.” Sometimes he has a more thorough knowledge of what’s on the tap menu than the waiters, ordering low alcohol ales that are named for dead animals or with fanciful titles like Industrial Arts Tools of the Trade. I’m a margarita on the rocks gal and have remained so even as the ice in my plastic cup mirrored the ice surrounding our metal chair legs.

Our committee meetings or “Long John Beers” as Ann called them, got us through the aftermath of Trump’s “hot mess inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck” debate, and through the nail- biting months of alternating election ebullience and uncertainty. At first our talk centered almost entirely around the fate of the country with short breaks for movies, books, hike ideas and catch-up convos on our children’s lives. But I can identify the moment something seemed to crack open between us.  

“Amazing!” and the beginning of committee code…

One night, for some reason Jim said the words “anal sex” really loudly—perhaps we were talking about a movie scene—and followed it by crowing “that was AMAZING!” about something entirely different. Suddenly, we noticed that the claque of lively gay men at the table next to us had stopped talking and were avidly following our conversation. We then engaged them in an earnest discussion of whether one could get COVID by performing various sexual acts. (This is what I continue to love about New York City, that it’s easy to enter into frank conversations about sex with total strangers). In order to bring the sexual speculations to a close, the Chef, ever the wit, announced. “This is all quite interesting! I’ll make sure to present these findings at the next meeting of our Upper West Side swingers club.”

So “AMAZING” became a code word we shared, the first of many. Our Friday meetings didn’t just punctuate the formless weeks, then months, of almost nil social engagement. They also gave us a different route to getting to know another couple. The Chef and I never had regular “couple dates” and ones that are always and only that. Little details accrue forming a layer of ease and familiarity. Now, we know that Ann and Jim reserve Hampton Inn rooms via “Hotwire” for short jaunts in the Hudson Valley and we rib Jim for procuring “a good wine” for the occasions (true) or sprinkling rose petals on the beige hospital corners of the Hampton Inn King sized bed (a committee legend).  That Ann keeps stashes of double dark Hershey’s kisses and has a penchant for scatological humor. They have witnessed my bluntness, as when I loudly announce we should move tables because the people next to us are too loud or their dog too yappy. More than once they have seen me burst into tears.

 Beyond deepening a friendship, condensing conversation into regular short chilly sessions has honed our verbal reflexes. We are like two teams in well-matched tennis doubles . Since the “AMAZING” evening, the sexual innuendos zip across the table and are answered with a satisfying thwack or disappear into the omnipresent roar of trucks and screech of sirens on Amsterdam. Just like playing tennis with more able players ups your game, I must keep on my toes, crouched, ready to serve and receive the next wisecrack, insult or political aperçu.

Grim Days at Dive

With a short break for the Christmas holidays, we made good on our pact, bundling up in multiple layers of clothing, Smartwool socks and hiking boots (Ann and Jim weren’t kidding about the “Long John Beers”; they always wore long johns). We had come to know the waiters by their eyes and voices, since they were masked and swathed in wooly wraps. Still, we sat shivering as the winter bore down, sometimes cutting meetings short at 45 minutes. Ann and I were always the first to bail, standing up abruptly and rushing home to thaw in hot baths.  

Looking back now, it seems extraordinary that not only we, but also a surprising number of our fellow New Yorkers braved frigid temperatures to down cold cocktails and beers. Hurrying down Amsterdam to meet Ann and Jim, glad for the extra warmth of my mask, I always felt there was something festive about the hastily erected sheds festooned with party lights, little clots of diners leaning in under the silver pagodas of heat lamps (which never seemed to emit enough heat from their bright orange grills). While many people were content to stay indoors and, indeed, even welcomed the forced lack of sociability, the committee was part of a subset that sought out our fellow humans at the expense of physical comfort. On January 8, two days after the capitol insurrection, we were back to full-on rage. And as we raged from our rickety metal chairs in the jury-built shed with no heat lamps, waiter Will told us the Dive would likely close for all of January and February. COVID cases were spiking again, indoor dining was shuttered, and we recalled a sobering discussion with Howie that brought home how the pandemic had decimated the bar and restaurant business.

A former Broadway actor, with creds in “Miss Saigon” and other well-known Broadway shows, Howie had always bartended between theatre gigs. When the opportunity to purchase the 106 Dive came up in 2018, he and his bar employer, Nick Seinfeld, became partners and leapt at the opportunity to buy. And while it seems unlikely that bar ownership would prove a route to financial stability, sure enough the 106 Dive became a neighborhood success, with its gemütlich staff, drag queen trivia nights, a full slate of well-selected beer on tap and excellent bar fare. Howie told us on a typical Friday the bar would pull in $3-5000. In the fall and winter of 2020, the Friday take was a paltry $300-400. While our pledge to meet served to prop our own spirits, I began to also think of our committee as a GoFundMe for Howie Kaye and the 106 Dive (one of four in the Dive bar family). After all, our $72 tab was almost a third of the estimated proceeds in those grim days.

Oh…and the Food

Since this is, ostensibly, a food blog post, I must write that we occasionally strayed from our standing French fry order ($3.00sm/$6.00lg) to get the delicious, improbable potato pierogies: slippery doughy  crescents doused with a sour cream dill sauce. We even strayed so far as to order the “boiled peanuts,” which all of us, except the Chef, thought were, frankly, vile, like eating lukewarm kidney beans from a can (in an online discussion of this southern tradition some commenters were not so kind: “I tried them once. Next time I’ll just eat a dog turd.”). Now my all-time favorite bar snack is the Dive’s NOLA-inspired fried dill pickles ($6.00). While dill pickles are my least favorite in the pickle kingdom,  there is something—I have to say it—umami about the salty spiced batter, the piquant pickles swabbed in ranch dressing dip.*

…but Springtime Arrives, Summer, too

Miraculously, though, the 106 Dive stayed open through the winter.  When we met on Friday January 29 the temperature was a high of 25 and a low of 14, but we were in festive spirits. Howie had built a more insulated hutch adjoining the bar and finally installed heat lamps. We were high on the Biden inauguration, on beaming Amanda Gorman in her lemon-yellow coat and red turban, on the promise of a rational humane person shepherding us through the pandemic, vaccine doses rolling off the production lines into our arms. In the meetings following the inauguration we marveled that the hour would go by without a single political discussion, not that, as the Chef continues to remind us, we should be so sanguine. The Republicans are still in thrall to the Trump and determined to unravel our democracy state by state. In springtime we were all vaxxed, our masks dangling from our ears or disappearing entirely. We became more interested in dissecting the last season of “Shtisel,” planning our post-pandemic travels, commiserating over dealing with elderly parents and stubborn adult children.

When we last met in early June, it was hot and sultry. Ann and I were in summer frocks and my margarita on the rocks was finally in sync with the temperature. The TV season was well over for Ann, and she and Jim were down from Cape Cod where they spend the summer, meeting us after a long hiatus. We were surprised when a guy in a T-shirt, shorts and with a shaved head walked by us casually, without blinking, and said, “Oh, the committee.” It was Will, our waiter, who we’d always seen wearing flannel shirts, a watch cap and mask. And Howie: I saw his full face for the first time, the noble nose, mobile lips; who knew he was so handsome? Our verbal volleys had not suffered from time apart. On a side trip to DC to visit his ailing mother, Jim witnessed the cicada invasion, so of course he began discussing nymphs and nymphos and the Chef was keen to explore the culinary possibilities of cicada husks.  Yet, I began to feel pre-nostalgic for our Long John Beers, how necessary our meetings felt during those dark chill months of the pandemic. As so much shut down, a friendship opened. Now I worry we will get caught up in life’s “busy-ness,” so I call the committee to order…to order another round and two sides of fried dill pickles!

106 Dive Bar
938 Amsterdam Ave. (NW corner of 106 and Amsterdam)
917-965-2840

*At this writing pierogies and boiled peanuts (yay!) are no longer on the menu. The bar constantly features new tantalizing snacks and dishes. My friend Lorraine says the ahi tuna sandwich with wasabi mayo slaw is addictive ($18.00).