Nights at the bar when Val is working tend to be interesting. Leaving us alone together is often a recipe for strange. Guess what happened last night. Right.

It started with someone asking for a beer. The beers weren’t cold yet. Normally by the time they open the beer is cold. Sometimes things happen. This was one of those times. So, when asked how long it would be until the beers were cold enough to serve Val looked up and said “I have a formula for that!” Well I simply had to know. I had to, you understand. So I asked. And she hmmm’d and uhhh’d at me a second and then slowly built the following formula:

“B times the square root of cold equals five minutes”

Which … all right. I mean if you say so. I can’t really argue with it since it makes no sense at all. Come on, it makes so little sense it might be anti-sense. How do you argue with that? Who knows!

Later on we were discussing Val’s first job, as a receptionist at Snapple. Now, as she told it, she was 17 when she got this job and had never answered phones for anyone before. So if you called you got this:

“Snapple.” And then you would, presumably ask for a person or Department and get: “Yeah, ok.” And then transferred. Well after a week or so they told her she had to find out who was calling as well. So instead of “Snapple. Yeah, ok” you would get, and I quote, “Snapple. Who dis? Yeah, ok.” Eventually they taught her how to answer a phone.

Val ordered a salad for dinner and got this wilted cruddy looking thing. It had chicken, huge hunks of meat that looked out of place and dropped in. It had cheese, which was slices of something, might’ve been American, ripped into little bits by hand. It had one big hunk of avocado that looked very much like silly putty. We named it the Jail Salad. Because in jail, that is the kinda salad you can expect.

We also lost a regular it seems. Older guy, decent drug problem. Odd, odd, man. Seems he died a few weeks back and no one mentioned it to me because either I wasn’t around or they thought someone else had. So I found out with one of those roundabout conversations that leaves me feeling like I’m in an episode of Three’s Company.

Magically not long after I found out, however, another regular comes in with a plastic bag. A generic, white, got it at the deli plastic bag, tied up with what seems to be tupperware inside. And he hands the bag to Val and asks her to put it behind the bar “until I know what to do with it.”

I looked at the bag as Val shoved it on one of the very cluttered shelves and then looked at Val. “Is that?” She nodded. “His ashes? Yeah.” And we looked up at them, in their dingy white plastic bag a bit and thought. “We should smoke him. He was into good stuff.” “We so should! I bet he’d make good fertilizer!”

Every now and then for the rest of the night we’d glance up there to see if maybe they had gone missing. Nope. Still ashes in a plastic bag and tupperware. Yup. Still on that shelf. Huh. Never had a regular at a bar I was at be in ashen form. That was new.

Past that the night was all: Val’s ass as tip increasing tool, Val’s jacked up finger, discussing setting things on fire, ponies and the like.

So yeah, I should be telling you to buy a book, and you can pre-order Stays Crunchy in Milk and I wish you would. But my brain is sluggish so I can’t think enough to type or compose thoughts in order. Which is, I find, a bad place to go “pay me for my writing,” really.

Anyway. Right now I am trying to plot out a novel. Maybe. See I have a novel I have been working on and another novel I might switch to. But the fate of which one I will write first will be decided by plotting. If I can finish plotting #1 then I will write it. If not I write #2. This “finish plotting” bit translates to “by Friday morning,” by the way. So you understand the time frame here. We will see what happens. The nice things is I won’t be sad or disappointed, regardless of which one I end up working on first. So hooray!

But right now my brain just isn’t firing on all … any … cylinders.

——–

Last night at the bar, a small selection:

“Where’s the lock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well it isn’t where it should be.”
“Maybe it got lost. Or moved.”

——–

“No, you’re supposed to be fun.”
“I’m not any fun. Suck it, bitches!”

——–

“They never stop, do they?”
(from outside: Oh MY God!)
“No. And I lived through the 90s once already.”
(from outside: And then I was all…)

——–

And then M had to take the middle of her piece of bread and break it up into tiny bits and reshape it into cubes, each one getting slightly bigger. That is how she eats the inside of bread. Until I suggested pyramids. I waited until she was down to one cube. She had to stop and try it and, of course, did. Declaring “Bread pyramid!” to the world.

Bread pyramid. Suck it, bitches.

So last night … well, what you need to know is that Ed and I haven’t seen each other in years. Not that Marianne being there was less cool or something, but Ed and I haven’t hung out in years. So with Ed and Marianne were here and Hammerpants and I were thinking of what do suggest we could do, you know the bar came up.

So we hit up some chinese food and to the bar we went. Some seven hours later we left. After that: diner. That’s how we roll.

Now I wanted to do a whole coherent recap but I’m writing this a bit faster than normal due to needing to go hang out with them again before they leave, so you get the highlight reel:

• Marianne could not decide on a drink. So I asked M to get inventive and suggest something. Drink bartering proceeded and it ended at a Negroni. 1 part gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 part campari. They are tasty.
• Marianne hits a point of drunk where she starts talkin’ lahk a good ol’ boy. Het G’s vanish and every-thang is just in slow motion.
• No really, she moves in slow motion!
• Both Ed and I drank a goodly amount. By the end of the night we realized neither of us was drunk. He had gotten buzzed. I wasn’t even fazed. This makes no sense, actually.
• Hammerpants did not share our undrunken state. In the diner he started talking about how he could see himself just snap sober, like from a distance, and wow that was cool. Which is when we had to tell him that meant he was still rather drunk.
• M hung out as much as she could, since she was working.
• The number of fuckers in NY who don’t see the need to tip is both astounding and kinda criminal, in my book. If you want to go out and beer costs 6 bucks – you only go out if you have 7 bucks, not 6. See how that works?
• Shit we drank a lot.
• I am still unsure why it didn’t touch me. I mean it really didn’t. Not like I woke up with a hangover, either. Nor am I that much of a lush that my tolerance is suddenly magical.
• M learned an important lesson that I impart to all of you: If you drink a shitfuckton of Patrón do not go home and eat a huge plate of german food and go right to bed. The More You Know…
• Of course M went from feeling crappy-ish to hand-shakingly hyper because all of her coffee hit at once. Like a bullet. Could’ve sat her on a washer and faked spin cycle.
• Marianne was finger dancing (you know when you hold up two fingers and bend and point them In different directions to the music?) and Ed and I joined in. Then Hammerpants did. He was not only off-rhythm he was also reversed from the rest of us in a “go left then right” sense.
• That has nothing to do with his drunkenness. He just has anti-rhythm.
• Off The Hook was, indeed, off the hook last night. Sometimes they play the fuck out of funk.
• In the diner Hammerpants and Marianne were arguing about what is really the south as well as other things, I wasn’t able to follow much of it but it made sense to them at the time, and sometimes to other people!
• Seven hours of this. Eight if you count the diner. I have forgotten more funny crap than I remember at this point.
• You try hanging out with five funny motherfuckers while drinking for that long and see how well you retain it all. Shut up.
• Ed and I resumed our old game of: I identify the muscle problem and hand it off to him to fix. It isn’t that I can’t, but he’s faster at it. M and Val benefitted from this. Of course now they both now that I can fix their shoulders as well. I have a feeling I will be earning my drinks in the future.
• One note from Friday, oddly enough, in a different bar. Bar was way too small, so to get past the bar you had to shimmy along a wall. Guy at bar was pushed back blocking a bunch of the space. Ed walks by, knocks him and spins him. As the guy starts to look pissed toward Ed I walk by and knock him to spin him back to where he started.
• So last night Ed and I tell this to Val and Ed says “After three years, man, I knew you still had my back.” This will never be in question. Ever.
• The bathrooms in the bar are simply dangerous some days. Or, at the least, mostly broken. It’s an adventure!
• I should put on pants so we can all get bunch.

Yah, I have the best motherfuckers in the world around to hang out with, working at a bar or taking to a bar. Sadly, some folk didn’t show up. Some of that was missed calls (someone said they called Ed and txted me and neither of our phones showed it! What the FUCK, universe? You denied me another of my fave people!) Another friend tried to make it and, I suppose, could not. That’s life.

Oh, right, I was putting on pants and going out. Right then!

Last night was the special birthday edition of Monday Night. Now, my birthday is today, the 19th, but there is no way I can do anything tonight. Work intrudes mightily on the mere concept of plans tonight. So we did some hanging last night instead.

Kendra and Noelle met me for dinner at the Pink Teacup and we had a grand old time, full of laughter and headshaking. Then we moved on to the bar. M was working last night, on a special two week fill-in extravaganza, so it was like old times. M handed me a bag of really good coffee beans as a birthday present – which makes even better sense if you remember that back when she was our regular bartender I would bring in bags of coffee for all of us. So yeah.

The four of us hung out a while and then Hammerpants dropped in. There was a bit of a Norm! moment when he did, which was great. And then he tripped over himself trying to remember Kendra and Noelle’s names, since he had only met them once. They left soon after, not due to Hammerpants, and the drinking continued.

Around 10, Hammercapris showed up (Hammerpants GF. She picked the name herself.) which is always cool, and so did Vin. So then we had a small party of folk and drinks and a laughing, cackling, M and Moran.

Somehow, it came out that Moran will sometimes just replace my beer but leave the same napkin. And so what? Well see – cold wet bottle of beer + paper napkin = mush within a bottle. So when she manages to do that, and the napkin dispenser at that end of the bar is gone now (broken) so I can’t grab one myself … well I end up with a mushy pile of … mush. And it’s fine and when it gets bad I get another one and it isn’t like it’s every week. But, you see, Hammerpants started telling this to M. Who turned to Moran with a “Will you PLEASE just give the man a new napkin? Some days?” and that started this chain of hysterical laughing and accusations. Which … I dunno. It just is.

Around then I asked Vin to text Doc, who hadn’t shown up. I didn’t except him to, frankly, the man is busier than me by far, but I haven’t seen him in a year and I’ve known him since High School. So Vin texts him and we get back “Oh shit, that’s tonight?!” after which he started heading to the bar.

So Doc shows up and then we’re spreading drink carnage across the bar. Just glasses and bottles filling up a bigger and bigger space. It became a challenge, I think. But then … oh then… Hammercapris found a wooden box outside. On the street. And decided the bar should have it. So she brought it in. And then we realized the bar’s bobble head dolls would fit inside.

Yes, the bar has two bobble heads up on a shelf. Anyway.

So M stuck them in and I nodded at it. “Well, now they have box seats,” which cracked M up and made the rest of my friends wonder if they could legally drown me. We had to leave not too long after that, since it was getting late. However it also meant it was then past midnight, so I achieved the goal to start my 33rd year in that bar, surrounded by good friends, including the staff, while drinking. If it sets the tone for my year this one will be a blast and a half.

And, under the cut, some more bonus pictures!
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On my way down to the bar I stopped to text M and see if she was gonna stop by. She couldn’t, she told me, she had stuff to do. Well, fine, I was heading down anyway. And so I did. Stopped for dinner, as per usual, and got another text from M. She would be showing up, it seemed. Well, all right, cool.

So I hit the bar and M and Moran are sitting and talking.

“I wasn’t going to come until he twisted my arm, via text message,” M said, indicating me.

“Wow, really? That one message? It musta had a hellofa twist.”

“Yeah, just twisted it right off. That one. And I had to stay at work late, and plans didn’t happen and… I blame the text message.”

So we sat around a while and hung out. M had to leave so Moran and I sat around chatting like we do. There are far worse fates. While we’re talking this guy comes in and sits down. Wearing a suit he orders a beer and then takes out a book. He starts to read his book, ignoring the music, and slowly sip at his beer. Halfway through his beer he stands up and leaves. Just … woosh.

I can’t image what happened there. I mean who goes into a jazz club and sits reading a book, in very dim light no less, while drinking a beer? Ignoring the music, and just sipping at a beer that was then left at least half full? So many thinks wrong there.

I told Moran I wanted to chase him down to demand answers but she convinced me that since I didn’t know what the guy looked like, really (he had a blue suit, two arms, two legs, a head, white hair, white guy, between 5′10 and 6′), and he left a good ten minutes before I decided I simply had to know why … well I didn’t chase him down.

I considered going outside and shouting “Strange suit wearing reading half beer drinking man! Come back!” but I didn’t do that either.

There was also a long row of people in town, all together. They were from … Italy I think. And they were simply fascinated by Cosmopolitans. They ordered a few, and I don’t think they knew what they were. They just ordered them. So then they sat, admired, sipped and called Moran over for a conference.

And then they debated what they guessed was in them, with her. “… and cranberry juice,” Moran says at last to a chorus of “Oh!”s and “I knew it”s. You would have thought the cranberry was the easiest part to guess. Oh well.

Later on some other regulars came in and we talked a bunch. Ralph bought me a beer. Nice of him, and I owe him one, but I was having an early night of it. Or planning to. So Ralph buys me a beer, which I can’t refuse to drink once Moran puts it down. So I’m drinking that when this other guy, Mark, sits down and joins in on the conversation. Ralph has to move, after 40 years in the village, so we’re talking neighborhoods and such.

Mark is a recent transplant and has lived in London and Japan and such and is just interested in NY. Yeah. Two natives already bitching about the city … it’s a way to get an earful.

So I tried to leave and Mark tried to buy me a drink. I finally got Moran to not get me that drink, because I simply had to go. I still had some stuff to do, and sadly, it means I had to turn down a free drink.

Sucks, but that’s life.

I got to the bar a bit early, because I noticed that the outside lights were already on. People were already heading in. How strange. But I’d been gone for two weeks, so maybe everything changed. Stranger things have happened.

I walked in and Moran spotted me. Which is when the trouble began.

“Where have you been? It’s been so long.” she said.

“Two weeks,” I protested.

“Still, you just go and leave me alone and…”

“Can you find forgiveness?”

“Maybe.”

“Then let the healing begin!”

We had a lot of long talks last night. It’s funny, when she was the waitress she was always running around the place so much we got to talk in short bursts. Now that she’s behind the bar we end up having actual conversations a lot more.

So we talked. And talked. About her English class, her school in general, her summer travel plans, my summer plans, some strange-ass ex of hers, you know – life. Agnes was working, too, and there ya go. No real funny stories from the first part of last night.

Later on though we had some guidos come by. They were … well they were, weren’t they? “Yo, just gimmie what’s on tap,” one of them asks. Moran pointed out they had no taps. “Oh,” he says looking confused. She points to the beer selection above the register and he looked at it like … like Non trying to make heat vision work:

They get a beer and talk to these Guidettes they were with. Everyone there is happy, if confused. Until one of the girls decides to step outside.

“Excuse me,” I hear from behind me, “this says use other door but the other door doesn’t work either.” There are, of course, two doors. One is locked the other is the only way in or out of the bar. She is, therefore, now trying to tell me that we are all locked in. Hmm.

“Just … just push?” I offer, turning to watch. So she pushes. And turns to look at me with hopelessness in her eyes. “Just give it a big sharp push, go for it. Just push the hell out of it, sometimes it sticks.” She looks doubtful, but eyes the door with steely menace. And pushes the door hard. A bit too hard. And almost fell face first out of the place. Woops.

But overall, it was a nice quiet night full of conversation and beer and music. Which tends to be a recipe for win.

Strange little night.

I leave the diner and start walking toward the bar. As I take my first steps the light summery breeze starts to swirl. It picks up speed and changes direction every few seconds. It cools off, shedding degrees by the second. The sky goes dark as black clouds roll in.

Well, I admit I thought to myself, that doesn’t bode well.

And then I got to the bar. And saw the official notice that they were closed “by order of the Commissioner of health and mental hygiene.” I stopped, in the little entranceway, while the wind picked up more and grew colder and the sky got even darker. I sent Hammerpants a text message, letting him know. I told him I would just be going home.

He didn’t reply. I waited some more, thinking I would wait out the first burst of the storm there and wait for him and then go home and get some work done, sad but what can ya do?

And then Moran showed up. Oh no, she told me, they were open tonight. It seemed that the woman who had been annoying them about noise for 11 years (seriously, she can’t hear them in her apartment at the end of the block, she wanders and bitches at all the bars) combined with new noise laws and an unfortunate run in with the cops (don’t ask) meant that the bar got shut down a few days ago.

And Monday it reopened.

So anyway, Moran and I are standing there discussing this when M’s Adam shows up. He had time to kill and was coming by. So we waited for M. Why was M late? She has a new job, see. Yeah. But we’ll get there. So M shows up and now we’re opening the bar. I swear I don’t work there. I promise.

M is teaching Moran to bartend and is waitressing at the same time. ‘Cause yeah, M has a new job doing non-bar stuff. And so she is training Moran to take over her bartending shifts. So next week it’ll be the same situation as this week and then M won’t be there on Mondays again. As staff. She’s planning on coming by fairly often to drink with us, instead.

M walking by and yelling out to Moran: “White Wine and gin!” to which I added quickly, “Not mixed together…” I mean it made sense to me. M agreed. Moran didn’t, really.

A while after Hammerpants showed up we (him, me and M) were sitting and chatting when Moran brought over a bag of gummy bears. M starts biting ears and limbs off them, happily telling us how she used to torture them when she was little.

“When you were little?”

“Well, I mean I’m still…”

“I didn’t mean size, I mean age. As in you did but STOPPED?”

“All right, I love torturing them!”

She spent a good twenty minutes slowly pushing a cocktail straw through a gummy bear (ass to head) to core it, and waved it around like a scepter. The one time she left it she then demanded it with “Gimmie!” and “Mine!” like a three year old. This woman has a thing for torturing gummy bears. She is also, she says, worse about animal crackers – but who isn’t?

After she cored it, Hammerpants said something and she told him to watch it. We realized she was pondering coring people, too. Lucky for Hammerpants she didn’t have a straw big enough. ‘Cause… ow.

So there ya have it. M is no longer our bartender. She may be our waitress sometimes, but really now she’s on our side of the bar. And she’s drinking. Things get stranger and far more hi-sterical.

And a good morning to you, guys. Anyway. Last night was the capstone on a weekend that seemed to include drinking more often than it didn’t. Now, I had injured my foot that morning (overnight, actually) and was having trouble walking for most of the day. So I get downtown and head for coffee and … closed, due to Memorial Day. Aw well, still, over to the bar and I sit down and about to tell M about my foot when she says “Oh! And guess what, I got in a car accident on Saturday night!” Well, all right that wins.

Seems she was in a cab going home and the cabbie rear-ended someone else at speed. She’s all right, just really sore shoulders and arms from where she hit the partition. Still it was such perfect timing. So we discussed that for a while, until we both noticed Val was a bit hyper.

Val comes over to me and starts talking in this sing-song Valley-girl cadence. “So this weekEND, I went shopPING, and I got some dresSES and I look so FLY.” she rushes out. M comes over, raising an eyebrow and wondering why I am laughing. “Tell her, you tell her,” demands Val. So, I say, in an utter monotone and with a nice good 3 second pause after every period: “This weekend. She went shopping. Bought dresses. Looks fly.”

But Val was quite the little spaz last night. She sat, for a while, and muttered various phrases over and over again while drinking tea. And then she’d get up and go work and come back and start making all of us, and I mean all of us, a bit nervous.

Now where I normally sit is right at the corner of the bar. To the left of me there are two seats. To the right, nothing. In front of me the rest of the bar stretches. To the left, those two seats, the far one is normally where whomever is working sits to eat if possible and hang out some.

So I’m sitting in my seat and two guys come in and take the two seats to my left. Val comes over, annoyed at me. “Why didn’t you slide over and save my seat?” she demands. “Well, because there are three seats you want me to sit in all at once, and there is only one of me. Do you see how that doesn’t work?” “You couldn’t slid over and done something.” “Done what? Set people on fire? Flail? Whimper? Whatever, sit in Hammerpants’ seat until he gets here.” “You still shoulda done something.”

Of course when Hammerpants got there he managed to almost cause the place to burn down. M put a towel on the coffee maker to heat it up and asked him to remind her it was there. He forgot, of course, and she noticed only when the towel started to burn. Smooth.

Val also came up with a new word, a sniglet really. Mafondle. Manhandle + Fondle = mafondle. As she used it: “And then they were all mafondling my pizza!” Mafondle. Use it, love it, know it.

Mafondle!

Fan-fucking-tastic night last night. Got to the bar, sat around and listened to the usual bar gossip and stories. Some good ones, too. The type of stories that get M all strung out and excited. At one point she was at the far end of the bar, whirled around and exclaimed “Oh! I forgot to tell you!” and her eyes got big. She ran back as soon as she could and started going.

There was also a moment of “Oh, lordy I’ve been here too long,” when Miran signaled to me so I could get M’s attention to complete a drink order. There was a moment of silence as we realized what had just happened. And then laughter, because, really, there’s always laughter.

Hammerpants showed up, and was kinda down. But I cheered him up by reminding him that we have Tom Waits tickets for the end of June and then by calling M over to share the best bits of bar gossip all over again. She was more than happy to oblige.

And then the newlyweds showed up. This couple ends up sitting next to us, being happy and chatty and generally good people. They were from Seattle and M told them that Hammerpants had lived there for a few years and we all got to talking. And then we started buying each other drinks.

He’s a carpenter, she works in oncology, I think, and they’re just nice folks out on their honeymoon (10 months after the wedding) to hang out in NY. Somehow they ended up in the bar. They forced us all to get into the pizza debate and the bagel debate. Which was kinda mean, but they didn’t know that. You know, asking people in NY to name their favorite pizza and favorite bagel place is simply asking for a fight. But ah well. We behaved ourselves.

Turns out he is also a Tom Waits fan and we joked around about that and talked about the shows and so on, at length, the way you do. So that was nice. I dunno, I realize the night doesn’t sound exactly amazing, and part of that is due to stories I can not tell in public but really it was just damn nice to stay extra late and spend the time hanging out with a bunch of folks all just there to have a good time, buy each other drinks and just enjoy the night.

It was the kinda night, when someone asks “Why do you love to hang out at bars?” you talk about. Just a good crowd, even the bad ones because they make for fun, and better people and good music and … you know: beer.

Got to the bar early. So I just wandered in. Lights were mostly off, M and Miran were sitting around talking. The band was staggering in. The clock was turned off. Yeah I was a bit early. Not that it mattered.

M was exhausted, it turned out. She had just moved (two weeks ago she was off looking at a new apartment: since then she has gotten it and moved in already) and spent all day painting. when I say all day I mean she got up at the crack of fuck-you and had painted until she realized she had to be at work.

Which just makes everything funnier. Because a very tired M is an M that isn’t inclined to do much of anything. Except sit and raise an eyebrow. Miran got into the habit of “M, I need a… oh I’ll get it myself,” by about 9. Yeah. That was the kinda night it was. The clock was its own issue. Plugged in, looking fine, the clock just didn’t turn on. So we’re sitting around talking and I catch a flash out of the corner of my eye.

The clock had turned on and then off very fast. So M wiggled the plug and look! the clock works. Until it cut back out an hour later. Fuck the clock. Fuck it up its stupid ass. Of course that meant that every ten or fifteen minutes M would turn to me in a rush and ask what time it was.

Their food got there and M and Miran started to eat. Just before they did, M went to get me a beer. She wanders back, chattering away, sets my beer in front of Miran and sits down. Miran and I look at each other. Then we lose it. I mean, sure, it was an interesting night but I didn’t think it called for Miran to start drinking that early. Sheesh.

It was, I repeat, that kind of night.

M told us about this ass over the weekend. Apparently he started some shit in the back of the joint and then to the front, still going on. M followed him and he started telling her to “shut the fuck up” and how her job was to take his orders. So, and M was proud of this, she took his 99% full beer bottle and poured it over his head. Now, pouring out a beer like that over someone takes time. This guy just stood there in utter shock.

But back to the very sleepy night. Because it was one. At one point the band leader came by and chatted for a few, like he’s taken to, and took my name and address because, it turns out, sometimes they throw private parties for regulars. Which I am now going to be invited to. And as cool as that is? Really I think I am just on their mailing list now. Let’s be honest here.

Yeah it was sluggish and quiet and slow. Which fit. And so we left, as we always must, and took a cab home. Which is when we had a cabbie with the best name in quite some time.