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East Village bars
Tuesday, August 28 2001
We've been making plans to do this forever, but tonight my old housemate John and I met each other at a bar after I got off work. I don't really know the bars in Manhattan except for the few I've been to, so I suggested we start out at The Holiday Cocktail Lounge in the East Village (St. Marks & First Avenue) and play it from there. As I was walking south down 1st Avenue from the L to St. Marks, I heard John calling my name behind me. Evidently we'd been on the same subway ride, in different parts of the train.
John may not get paid anything to work in his brother in law's startup company, but he continues to do well as a professional gambler. A recent trip to Atlantic City made him about $500 richer. Nonetheless, I have a much more stable source of income and would have been happy to pay for stuff but he wouldn't submit so such charity. "One thing I like about this place," I told John, "is they let 14 year old girls drink here." Across the bar was a bleach blond with an overapplication of eyeshadow that, in this light at least, gave the impression that she had two black eyes. Nonetheless, as John was quick to point out, she was the cutest girl in the bar.
We talked for a time with a friendly guy named Aaron from uptown. He had a crudely-set broken finger and was wondering if he should sue the person responsible. I was already too drunk to remember how it had happened, though I'm sure he told me. Refreshingly unlike in Los Angeles, no one was asking anyone else what they do for a living.
After we left the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, we ducked into a bar a little further south down First Avenue, acting under the principle that all bars at the bottom of stairs are good. We found ourselves in a plush loungey kind of place. In addition to the usual cocktails, they were serving cans of beer from a tub of ice atop the bar. The strange thing about the place was that its clientele was almost entirely female.
When we'd had enough of that place, John and I hit the streets of the East Village in search of something like falafel. We ended up instead in a tiny hole-in-the wall Indian restaurant where we ordered several large pieces of naan and a plate of samosas.
We wandered up and down the nearby avenues of the East Village and came upon Coyote Ugly, a bar with unusual activity on this Tuesday night. Women were atop the bar dancing to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" and people were clapping and shouting and raising hell. "Let's go in!" I urged. We were there about a minute before John wanted to leave. This didn't make any sense to me at all, but he tried to make the case that the chicks dancing on the bar were fat, which they were not. "But turn around" he said, and I whirled around to face the booths. Okay, so there lots of ugly girls in the booths. But when you've lived in LA for a year, it's refreshing to see ugly people out and about. Besides, this was Coyote Ugly and there were women dancing on the bar!
John was adamant, so we left. But there was nothing in the East Village anywhere near as hopping as Coyote Ugly, so eventually we circled around and went back in. Again John tried to tell me that the bartender who had been dancing on the bar was fat, but I disagreed strongly. "I think she's beautiful!" I said. If women like her are unattractively fat, there is no hope left for humankind.
I've noticed that men's standards of beauty are in a constant state of flux and largely depend on the standards of their peers. In the absence of peer pressure, guys would fuck any girl who came along. The reason they try to limit themselves to hot chicks is mostly just to impress their male friends. As if to confirm this theory, my going on and on about how sexy the bartender was gradually liberalized John's analysis of the situation and he despite himself he actually began to have fun. Before long he was at the bar talking to a scrawny dark haired girl from Park Slope. Again I was delighted to note that the bar banter was entirely devoid of questions about what people do for a living.
I went to the jukebox to look over the selection. Almost all of it was country music. Not just any country music either, it was the tobacco-stained old stuff: Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and David Allan Coe. In terms of decoration, there wasn't much to see in the smoky dankness except for several collections of hundreds of old bras in a multi-pastel-hued masses hanging on wires slung beneath the ceiling pipes. One of the customers told me, "it smells like bras in here," but I think that smell was probably the accumulated funk of hundreds of imperfectly-mopped-up vomits. Considering how nasty the place was, it had a surprisingly rich frat boy component, though these baseball cap equipped gentlemen were probably there to see the girls dancing on the bar. "It's pretty good considering there's no cover," John allowed.
But the ladies of Coyote Ugly know how to deal with the unchecked libido and arrogance of the testosterone poisoned. When the bartender and the cutest non-bartending girl in the bar started tittering about how much they loved a song that had just come on the jukebox, I quietly urged, "Get on the bar!" The bartender heard me and quickly flipped me off and her friend, the cutest non-bartending girl, urged me to be nice. I think the bartender bore something of a grudge after that, because when John asked for a glass of water she fetched him one with a bottle cap at the bottom and a cigarette butt floating on the top.
Nonetheless, John did well tonight with the strong women of Coyote Ugly. For a time there I was sort of off to the side and John was seated between the scrawny girl from Park Slope and the cutest non-bartending girl in the bar. John had graduated from the former and was now firmly in the class of the latter. They were talking and getting friendly and it seemed sparks were beginning to fly. It was already very late, the bar had thinned out considerably, and I was starting to grow bored. So I bid John adieu and headed home.
I really should have called Gretchen because by the time I rolled in it was already 3am.
The next day John told me that indeed he had gone home with the cutest non-bartending girl in the bar. In LA it's all names and numbers and no nookie. In New York, it's exactly the opposite.
The cute bartender in Coyote Ugly.
I'm on the left and John is on the right.
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