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used to make doggy tails wag
Monday, August 20 2001
They didn't even look real, the semi-gilded dollar coins that the stamp machine had dispensed for change at the 18th Street and 7th Avenue post office in Manhattan. But the guy in J's Pizza didn't seem the least bit distressed as I handed him four of these in payment for a big slice of one the richer pizzas J makes.
I had big plans to hit a bar tonight with my former housemate John, but heavy rains started falling and I ended up doing dinner with Gretchen (freshly back from Silver Spring, MD) instead. Partly in an effort to divest of those fake-looking dollar coins, we ate in the outdoor dog-friendly sidewalk section of some sort of middle eastern place down on 7th Avenue in Park Slope. The outdoor section isn't very large, so we sat crammed shoulder to shoulder betweeen a couple of dykes with a cute yellow dog and a pair of girls who looked more like fratboy bait. We'd brought Sally with us and she was doing a good job of not eating from an adjacent display of peaches and looking cute for passersby.
Gretchen spent most of the meal regaling me with tales of how she'd spent her weekend. She'd hung out with guys she knew back in high school, all of whom were reportedly giving her the royal "Damn girl, you look fine!" treatment. Adding further to the high-school-redeemed feel of the weekend, they inevitably sparked up a bong in somebody's basement and knew all about where to get really good ecstasy.
We tried to take Sally into Gretchen's favorite bar up on Flatbush, a place called Moonies. I was skeptical that people running the place would actually let us bring in a dog, but Gretchen assured me that Park Slope is very dog friendly and she'd seen dogs in Moonies before. Unfortunately, though, she was mistaken. Though the patrons were excited by the sudden presence of a non-human dog, the bartender told us Sally wasn't welcome, so we had to leave. Similarly, when we ducked into a semi-alternative video store to look for a copy of Peter Jackson's classic splatter flick Bad Taste, we were told the dog had to wait outside. I guess with the Starbucks, Blockbuster, and Key Foods, Park Slope is gradually losing that certain something that used to make doggy tails wag with glee.
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