no one fights without a reason, part one

by mg at 10:57 AM on July 13, 2001

Remember how, earlier this week, I said I’d tell you all about my favorite new local bar? Well, it’s about damn time I actually did, don’t you think?

I’ve lived back in New York City for a little more than a year, after six years in a small midwestern college town. Before I went to university, I had lived in New York City, and in the same neighborhood I live now, for all of my 18 years. I know what’s going on in the city, but except for the last year, I’ve not spent a lot of time in the city as someone of legal drinking age.

There are a lot of bars in New York City; that is pretty freaking obvious. But living in a college town, you get a whole different quality of bar. The bars I frequented back in school were small, dingy places, where the music was never turned up too loud, and you’d see the same people from one night to the next. I liked that. Alcohol should foster a sense of community, but in New York City, there are just so damn many people and so damn many bars that you are not likely to see the same person if you go back to the same bar every night for a month.

As mentioned yesterday, being unemployed and in a crappy work environment when I was employed, meant I didn’t have a lot of happy human contact. Additionally, when I moved back to New York just a little more than a year ago, I was expecting it to be just like Friends. Me and my mates even had this coffee shop all picked out to be our Central Perk. But, for some reason it just didn’t work out. New York is a great city for going out, but really awful for doing regular hanging out, especially if all your friends work and live in different parts of the city.

I mean if I lived across the hall from my best friends, I’d just be gloriously happy all the time. Bored? All I’d have to do is open my front door and cross the hall and there would be Monica and Rachel. But, unfortunately, the people in my apartment building are a bunch of old pants-loads, and my friends are scattered around in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. It’s always such a hassle to get together that I don’t see them nearly as much as I’d like.

Add to that the fact that we do all of our drinking in Manhattan, and me living in Queens, makes for some pretty drunken, lonesome, late-night trips home. I can’t tell how often I’ve left a bar before I was ready, just because hanging out any longer meant it’d take me 3 hours to get home, since trains run so infrequently during late nights. And let’s not even talk about the times I’ve fallen asleep, (okay, passed-out) on the train and woken up find myself having completely slept through my stop, ending up, finally, at the train terminal, with only the other sleeping drunks to convince me I wasn’t in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

All this leads up to the fact that I (a) need to find a local bar, so I can drink and stumble home, relying only on my feet and not the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and (b) that bar needs to be filled with friendly people, who’ll talk to strangers, since most of my friends won’t make the trek out to Queens to hang with me.

It also needs to be cheap. On average, a pint of beer in the city costs as much as a pitcher of the same back in college. Sure, I’m making a lot more money now (or at least I was making more money when I actually was making money) and can afford it; it’s just the principle of the thing.

So, after a year, I think I’ve found my bar.