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one beer Friday
Friday, October 19 2001
At around 4pm this evening I was so hungry that I had to go over to Flatbush to get something to eat. For some reason I was craving Chinese food, something I have rarely eaten since the early part of my life in Los Angeles, when overindulging in cheap Chinese food was easy for a lazy guy like me. I devoured the entire pint of "Kung Po Chicken" while seated on a bench outside the 2/3 Station at Grand Army Plaza, over on the Prospect Heights side of Flatbush. It was a nice blustery, sunny day.
After an essential "glamor nap," Gretchen and I found ourselves running late for a cocktail party in the Upper West Side. Sitting in the increasingly crowded subway headed uptown through Manhattan, Gretchen and I wished we'd brought a game of Boggle to pass the time.
The cocktail party was being thrown as a sendoff for Gretchen's childhood friend Dina, an Associated Press correspondent. Dina returns to the States now and then to say hello to her American friends, but she spends most of her time overseas. Recently her post was Isræl; now she has been redeployed to South Africa (a place no one cares about in today's geopolitical climate).
It was, so Gretchen tells me, your typical Upper Westside Jewish intellectual cocktail party. There was plenty of alcohol available, but I stuck entirely to non-alcoholic options such as Cranberry Juice. It would be nice to retrain myself in the art of sober social charm.
Gretchen and I were talking mostly to Dina's friend Jim, a tall blond guy who looks exactly like "Spencer," a good friend of Gretchen's back in her high school days. (The friendship between Spencer and Gretchen was, she tells me, charged with the tension of deep sexual self-repression.) Other than this similarity, the one thing I knew about Jim was that he's currently working on writing and illustrating a children's book about a little boy with a nasty habit of picking his nose and pasting boogers everywhere.
Gretchen and I had plans of perhaps leaving the cocktail party early and catching the PATH train to New Jersey to see Guided by Voices at Maxwells in Hoboken, and when we suggested that Jim come along, he said sure. So I went into the kitchen to get a plate of shelled shrimp for Dina, Jim and myself and then we put on out coats and left.
We'd never caught the PATH train from 34th Street before, so we found ourselves wandering around through the rat-tunnel-like hallways of the new Penn Station looking for a PATH station that simply wasn't there; it was, we eventually learned, over an avenue away. But outside the PATH station Gretchen finally called Maxwell's on her cell phone and discovered the show was sold out. So we decided to go down to the Lower East Side instead and sample the various nightspots there.
The first place we went to was called Torch, though you wouldn't have known by looking at the place from the street. The only indication that anything was there were several large burnished metal doors. All of them were impossible to open except one that was equipped with a tiny tooth-pick-shaped handle. We opened the door and found a very posh nightspot, complete with white tablecloths and a jazz band. We'd come here mostly so I could attend to my full bladder, but my intestines were also causing me discomfort and in the bathroom I found I could erase both my discomforts.
Next we wandered into another fine, romantic place called Lansky's. It had no presence on the street whatsoever. You had to drop down into a basement alley and then climb up a stairway into the back of the building, and then you found yourself in a dimly-lit romantic wondercave of cozy booths. Strangely, though, people at the bar were standing around without the benefit of stools.
But what we were really seeking was an authentic dive. The Lower East Side used to be full of them, but of late the neighborhood has gentrified and places like Torch and Kansky's are the norm, not the exception. We finally settled on a place that was a little less fancy, if not a complete dive. Adding to the lack of pretence, the place was tricked out in unabashedly ordinary Halloween decor, including artificial cobwebs. The three of us sat at the bar talking mostly about Jim's life (since Gretchen and I had already told our story on the walk over). Jim is currently unemployed and nearing the end of an unhappy marriage. Though his jadedly upbeat views of marriage weren't exactly heartening, I was especially discouraged from his failure to find a job since being laid off from a dotcom. He hadn't said what sort of work he did, so I assumed he'd just been another fluffy copyeditor or project manager. But no, he has a degree in computer science and had been doing database work. And he's been unemployed for months. I wonder what's going to happen when my job runs out at the end of December? Will I find myself working at a Duane Reade? Preparing burritos with lightning-like wrist movements? At least my expenses in New York are low, only about twice what they were when I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia and earned $8/hour.
During the course of the entire night, and it was a Friday night, my alcohol consumption consisted of exactly one beer. I'm not really used to this sort of constraint, but at my age it's time I learned to control myself.
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