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East Village drunk
Tuesday, October 16 2001
Of late, I've been patronizing the Burritoville on 23rd St., between 7th and 8th Avenue. It's good to finally find a burrito joint that doesn't offer an unappetizingly yellowed photo gallery of the dishes and doesn't make burritos that suffer from congenital spina bifida.
But that's only when I'm actually in Manhattan. For the past week or more, it hasn't much mattered where I was, and I've been traveling back and forth between burghs on the slightest whim. I've been unable to work effectively because there has been no functioning internet tunnel allowing me to work on the computers I'm paid to work on. At such times, it's good to be collecting a salary. But my still, my Protestant work ethic (which is surpassingly strong given my lack of religious upbringing) won't let me off so easily.
In the evening, I met that San Francisco "internet personality" Jay again in the East Village, this time at the infamous Holiday Cocktail Lounge (a suggestion of his friend Lisa). When I arrived, those two were also in the company of one of Jay's friends who had just flown in from San Francisco. He was a somewhat swarthy guy and could have passed for a shaved Hezbollah terrorist with a few rapist crusader roots. I asked him how security had been and he said it had been relentless and intense. His bags had been searched multiple times, even rubbed down with a rag that was submitted for chemical analysis. Jay, in contrast, had breezed through security a couple weeks before. Nobody thinks the next terrorist incident is going to be pulled off by someone with Japanese features.
We made something of a grand tour of the East Village bar scene, moving to Coyote Ugly (which, on this night, reeked of puke). A snaggletoothed woman in tight blue jeans came to our table and introduced herself by saying "I'm here all by myself tonight."
On Jay's insistence, we ended up at Varsac's Horseshoe Bar on the corner of Tompkins Square. It was the first place we'd been that had Guinness on tap.
During the course of all of this drinking, nothing especially interesting happened, although good times were had by all. I do remember smoking one cigarette after another. If terrorists and anthrax weren't going to get me, I was determined (in a subconscious way) to suffer all the same.
I was sitting at the bar talking to some random woman when Jay and his friends left. The bar closed a few minutes later, I was shooed away by the management, and stumbled back to the L subway station at 14th Street and 1st Avenue. On the way, I found a couple of old computers abandoned on the sidewalk. It's hard to go far in New York without finding the detritus of a recently obsolete evolutionary stage of the information age. Using my bare hands, I managed to yank out the computers' PCI video cards and take them with me.
Riding the subway back to Brooklyn, I sat sideways on the bench and nodded off a few times. But whenever I was awake, I looked up and down the brightly-lit car fearing I might puke. But I also made myself a plan that gave me comfort. If I really did need to throw up, I'd go between cars and do it.
It's been a very long time since I drank so much that I felt I might puke. But I'd really set myself up for damage tonight. I'd taken the one remaining Adderall from a cache my old housemate John had given me, and it allowed me to stay awake and keep drinking where I'd normally just pass out. It's the drinking equivalent to having yourself tied to a pole so you can be more easily beaten.
By the time I got home, it was 5:00am.
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