Slap Happy

The other night I karaoke duet'd “We've Got Tonight” with a friend who has on numerous occasions freely told me that, despite still enjoying idiocy like karaoke duet'ing “We've Got Tonight” with a drunk guy who can't sing, at some point she definitely wants to get married.

Towards closing time, I got saddled with a married girl (hereafter Married Girl) who at various points was both "great" friends and "only-kind-of" friends with a fellow Tex-pat who another friend had brought out that night on a semi-date. Yes, that is a lot of qualifiers for one sentence.

My friend hadn't done much “no, stay out” cajoling when Married Girl's (?)friend(?) had decided to head home early; he later told Married Girl he regretted not making his move. Now that he was gone too, Married Girl, who more accurately should be called Wasted Married Girl, asked me with astonishingly unmerited vanity:

“How come your friend says he wants to fuck my friend, but then acts like he wants to fuck me too?”

I'm absolutely positive he didn't act like that. I'm absolutely positive she loved asserting that he did.

“Why is it always about who wants to fuck you?” I asked.

She was laughing when she slapped me in the face, as if I was in on the game, and not just some guy who desperately wanted to ditch her for home. Or for Taco Bell. I can't remember what I said next, but whatever it was, it apparently merited another laugh-slap.

“Look, you could maybe pull shit like this if you weren't married and I wanted sleep with you” (I still wouldn't have wanted to sleep with her; why am I always handing people unearned compliments?), “but you are married, and you really can't pull shit like this.”

I caught the next slap. I'm glad my reflexes haven't abandoned me completely. I'm glad that the Sheena Easton to my Kenny Rogers never got married just to get married, then ended up at some bar assaulting random dudes while her husband was out somewhere avoiding her. Because I'm not married and need stupid things to happen to me in order to keep things interesting, I'm also glad me and Slapping Wasted Married Girl had tonight, and even gladder that we don't need tomorrow.

*More-more accurately, she should be called Wasted Married Girl Who's Not Very Good Looking Though That Wouldn't Matter If She Weren't Also Such A Horrible Person

DARE to Keep Kids off Rugs

It was very gratifying to be honored with this...rug for being named my company's Employee of the Decade despite our only having been in existence five years. It's even more gratifying to be part of a company that finds it hilarious rather than fire-able when another employee desecrates that rug with some sort of pornographic version of a Rocky training session.

To Their Credit, They Seemed to be Very Much in Love, Which is Rare These Days

"Excuse me, hey, sorry. We're not from here. We were trying to get to Times Square, or Ground Zero, or anything like that. Will this train take us there?"

Fuck-all Amazing

Just rolled out of the Tanteo tequila offices, where they'd asked me to judge a bartender duel: John from Elizabeth vs Bernardo from Agua Dulce. I'd agreed despite not knowing fuck-all about cocktail-making, mostly because their publicist is very...winsome, and because the other thing I don't know fuck-all about is avoiding situations where ignorance could prove a handicap. I took a judges' stool between Tanteo's mixologist (waving goodbye above) and the ferociously bearded owner of Daddy-O, Phil, a talented drinksman who'd started out managing that bar, then eventually bought it at discount from his boss, whose financial mistakes included telling Phil to "just keep track of what I owe you" and assuming Phil didn't know fuck-all about using a calculator. Being sandwiched by credibility got me more stressed out at first, but by the third competition drink (secret mandatory ingredient: Aloe Vera -- who knew that was edible?) I'd picked up enough from their comments to figure out that, like ice skating, degree of difficulty matters. I also learned about "balance", but still have no clue what "mouth feel" is.

So, competition's over, and I'm walking down Mercer, when I see this fucking amazing car. "That car is fucking amazing" I said to the Euro-mullet owner (see above -- it's the guy with the mullet that appears to be European).

"It is fucking amazing. It's a concept car. A Ferrari. I bought it off Jay Leno."

I swear he'd just told someone across the street the Jay Leno part.

"No shit? Jay Leno?"

"Yeah, man. $500,000." He then got in the car, killing the brief hope that he might be a modestly imaginative liar.

They say that in the end, it's really all about taste, but without knowledge -- of degree of difficulty, and balance, and etc -- you don't always know what you're tasting. I'm pretty sure that when this guy licks his very complex machine, the only flavors he's picking up are $500,000, and Jay Leno's balls.

Update: My car-loving coworker says there's no way Ferrari built this, and that it might possibly be a Fiero with a Cadillac build-out kit. Regardless, "the door handles are definitely GM."

March Madness

Sat next to two lovely men during Saturday's NCAA games at Whiskey Tavern. The first looked like PM Dawn, except for the Bluetooth and the Orlando Magic Tracy McGrady jersey. He flew into a strange, lisping rage when he returned from taking care of some sort of business outside to find the napkin he'd placed over his pinot gris had blown off. Later, he actually jammed several napkins into his half-full wine glass, then left and never returned.

The second guy was a 65-year-old, khakis-and-button-down Atlantan who immediately turned and asked:

“Do you know where I can find a good titty bar?”
“What kind of titty bar are you looking for?”
“Not one of those fancy places. I want a place where you tip a little, and you get to touch a little boob, and they like it.”
“So, a classic titty bar?”
“Yes, a classic titty bar.”

After texts with several outside sources brought up possibilities from Queens (“Is Queens dangerous? I don't want to get mugged -- I'll be alone”) to Flashdancers, we finally settled on New York Dolls, which is where our friend is headed in the picture above.

Yesterday at the same spot (more hoops to watch, and as evidenced by the McGrady-Khakis Confluence, it's a special kind of bar), we met a black sex therapist, who aggressively confessed to one of my friends that for a time she enjoyed having gay white men cover her in their gay white man-seed. She then showed him pictures on her iPhone. I only wish a Feist song had been playing.

The Adorable Train

My Arkansas buddy Kiser came into town last night from Jersey, where he's been living for two weeks doing training for a new pharm-sales job. He worked for another drug company for a decade; they recently downsized not just him, but his entire territory, which is now being covered by a younger, poorer-paid guy out of Tulsa. His new employer's put the trainees up in company campus dorms, complete with roommates. Kiser's is a mustachioed blue-toother with sleep apnea who's brother-in-law to an original Redskins Hog; their neighbor is an Oklahoma Republican who home-schools five kids.

Kiser is too old for this shit. During a doctor/salesman role-playing exercise, a trainee threw a fit at receiving subpar (but still passing) marks. Kiser laughed off the exercise -- it bore no resemblance to real-world scenarios, since the real world isn't a scenario. Still, who cares, get the thing done, don't bitch. In front of everyone, Kiser just about tore the girl a new one for wasting his time. Another classmate held him back, told him that by blowing up he too would be getting "off the train" -- "the train" being the smooth completion of some necessary bullshit. The woman then performed a grinning, shuffling train dance. This is the kind of thing that gets you by when you're too old for this shit, stuck in a class with people who aren't.

Thanks to the watermelon-sized heart of his wife, Kiser's Fayetteville home serves as ground zero for Bourbon 2000, an annual bash that in 2000 Proper involved drinking absolutely nothing except Makers Mark. The Makers-only rule quietly died -- some say as early as B2K-'01 -- but as of '09, guys were still drinking more bourbon than was good for them. Kiser himself only drinks Red Bull vodkas. Phebe's, where we were watching first-round Tourney games, does not serve Red Bull, only Monster. Kiser grumbled about Monster either having or not having “the sugar”, but got on the train anyway.

During Kiser's absence, his parents took his two-year-old son, Owen, to a JC Penney photo-shoot. After some hands-in-pocket-laughing shots, the photographer asked Owen if he could be a little more “pensive”. Neither the photographer nor the grandparents expected Owen to know the word, but without further explanation, he struck the above pose, causing three jaws to drop. Is this normal? Didn't precociousness used to onset at five-years-old?

Not too long ago, Kiser's own grandfather passed away after a long bout with dementia. As far as anyone knew, the man had never drank or cussed in his life, and was the sort of person who'd tell friends of his grandson, “I love you, because Aaron loves you”. During his downslide, the dam broke. In front of everybody, he told his wife, “Imogene, you have been a great sex partner, but you don't have the good sense to piss in a boot”. He told his son that to prevent his running around with women, he'd once considered “cutting off your pecker”. This is the kind of thing that gets you by when you're too old for this shit, that shit, and the other shit -- pretty much all shit. But given how extraordinarily sweet the guy'd acted for most of the past century, it's nice to think that at the end, in his own way, he was also being a little precocious.

The Salamander King

In the foreground, Jack. You'd never know it (you never do), but Jack is the author of seven or so unpublished books involving everything from a woman harboring the delusional belief that she is the tragic heroine of an unwritten Pat Conroy novel (and that she has a long-lost brother named "Chicken John") to a noir take on Weekend at Bernie's -- the actual script, enhanced with the likes of "Mr. Lomax pressed on the plunger and felt fire course through the burning fountainhead. Injecting. Just like he had injected so many with the seed of his mother." Jack was also one of the only lawyers in South Carolina to speak fluent Spanish when the big wave of Latin American migration hit the Southeast, professional qualifications that inevitably led to him seeing some very weird shit. Jack is without a doubt the most interesting man ever to attend a Bowery Ballroom rock show wearing khakis.

Behind Jack, you can just barely make out Moby. You'd never know it (you never do), but Moby can play the shit out of the guitar. Later last night, he jumped onstage during the farewell performance of Tragedy: An All Metal Tribute to the Bee Gees. The shit was played out of, on the guitar.

Jack wrote a song for his own band back in college with the lyrics "when I kissed her in the garden of the flaming rhododendron, we realized we were no longer humans, but salamanders of love". If Jack and Moby hooked up in a band, they would inject the whole world with their seed.

Great Execution

Just got back from an opening at the Japan Society, featuring the woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, who died in 1861: 92 years before Alan Moore was born, 125 years before he could have teamed up with Moore to illustrate Watchmen, and 148 years before he could've told a reporter that he actually enjoyed the film very much, and that Zack Snyder was a very talented director, and that...ha ha, he'd rather not venture an opinion about that, but yes, Billy Crudup did do a fine job as Dr. Manhattan.

The print above is entitled Morozumi Masakiyo Kills Himself with a Landmine. What's extraordinary about it, besides its stunning modernity, is that not only is Morozumi Masakiyo killing himself with a landmine, he's simultaneously ramming his head down on his own sword. As the work itself describes it, "Never before had such a death been seen in battle" -- like he was competing in Olympic-level Ritualistic Suicide, and pulled off the equivalent of a quad and some other extremely difficult move (I only know "quad") at the same time. I guess even though he was expected to kill himself in defeat, he wanted to go out a winner.

Professionally Anonymous, Like The Wolf

Had a Sunday birthday brunch at Donnybrook (formerly Lotus Lounge) for the proud Pole behind Alchemia Vodka, who lives in Ft. Green, and is not a former investment banker. Weirdly even for today's LES, there were a lot of babies.

Not feeling compelled to catch up with folks (they all knew each other far better than I knew them), I stayed rooted to my spot on the bench, and talked to whoever swung up next to me. One of those swingers was the new husband of the birthday girl's close friend. I would've avoided asking him what he did for a living, but he was from Toronto, and since the last Torontonian I met had a camera installed in his fake eye, I had no choice. Instead of what he did, he responded with what he enjoyed (writing, traveling, meeting people), and it wasn't 'til 20 minutes later that I teased out his actual profession: male model. He wasn't ashamed -- the job had taken him all over Europe and Asia, and only an asshole or tragically abused teenager wouldn't be thankful for that -- but he knew the perception, and didn't much like dealing with it, to the point that even his boys back home didn't know how he earned his keep. He certainly didn't fit the stereotype, and according to him, most mod-men don't: instead of growing up dreaming that everyone would one day find them very, very attractive, they typically fall into the gig; and they tend to be older, because who wants to buy a suit from an anorexic teen?

The next guest on my talk show was the b-day girl's 60-year-old stepfather, who'd lived in the LES back in the 70s, but'd moved out after losing one too many friends to the neighborhood. From the way he told stories -- gritty allusions, little detail -- he could've been either a cop or...something else, and when I asked, he just said he "did business" as forthrightly as that phrase can be delivered. A '69 Camaro cruised up Stanton, and he started talking about his speedboats, of which he had either two or four. As to why anybody would own more than one: "I have a philosophy. 'You might wanna need it.' Think about that." I still am, even as I type the following mark of punctuation(.)

Afterward, I headed up to Zum Schneider for giant Sunday beers, which adults should simply call "Sundays". I was learning to play gin rummy when this gargantuan goofball in a wolf t-shirt stopped to drink-linger near our table, compelling me to ask "Holy fuck, can I take a picture of your wolf?" After fully zipping his half-mast fly, he gladly obliged, with the condition that I didn't shoot his face, because his agent had told him to avoid publicity of any kind. He said he'd been in a restaurant, high as shit from smoking a blunt with his mother ("with your mother?" "yeah! i was like, ma, what the fuck? and she was like, come over here and help me roll a tight one, and just be glad i don't beat you"), when two cable TV execs overheard him ranting in-character. The character being a hybrid Puerto Rican/South Asian/Middle Easterner who basically just throws out all kinds of crazy shit -- so, barely distinguishable from his real life, except he's 100% Puerto Rican. The execs handed him their cards, and now he's apparently working on a deal, which might involve his own show, or maybe just playing a hilarious cabbie on lots of shows.

Of the three men I talked to, he was the most open on the subject of employment, probably because he hadn't secured it yet. Once you do, whether it's something you fell into, or were born into, things can get complicated -- not necessarily terrible, just less a cause for exuberance. And then you have babies.

Saints Valentine

If you were watching Martha Stewart leading up to Valentine's Day, you probably asked yourself, “Whose idea was it to call the featured Valentine's cocktail the 'Venus Blush', and how did he/she come up with such a brilliant name?” The Who was me, at the request of a Martha producer, at a Super Bowl party held at a midtown bar you'd never hit unless your friends were using it for Super Bowl party (Snafu). The How, because the drink has a blood orange garnish, plus prosecco and Aperol, but “The Bloody Boot” probably wasn't going to fly as a Martha-tine's theme.

If you weren't watching Martha Stewart leading up to Valentine's Day, ask yourself, what kind of life are you leading? Is it a satisfying one? No, but is it really?  

(Photo courtesy of Nick D./The Martha Stewart Show)

The Lambs Will Provide

Last night a musician friend brought me to Joe's Pub for their monthly Happy Endings series, where three authors read, bookended by a musician, this time the Will Oldham-esque singer/songwriter Mathew Houck -- stage name “Phosphorescent” -- easily the gangliest, eeriest guy I've ever seen casually hoist a Corona.

After some poetry that nimbly veered between darkness and carrot cake, and a first dominatrix experience recap that sought neither to impress or absolve (but did involve the quick-thinking redirection of an old man's pee stream), the third author read from a memoir loosely centered around his father's peacocking, Ginsberg-ian penis. He then closed with a holy-rolling reading of the Prosperity Gospel, which he swore would absolve the entire room of credit-card debt, student loans and, for New Yorkers who at least once had money, delinquent mortgage payments.

As I always do on phosphorescent penis evenings, I later grabbed a hot pastrami at the St. Marks Grocery deli counter. They have some of the most creative tip-inducers around, shit that really makes you want to hand over those Washingtons. A few months ago, it was “MAKE IT RAIN”, which just looks hilarious taped on a cracked plastic cup. Last night, it was “IT PUTS THE TIP IN THE BASKET”. So this guy got a little more prosperous, but instead of speaking in tongues, he used Silence.

Boz-O, Canada

Was watching the gold medal hockey game at St. Dymphna's when this gentleman, possibly the world's first Lubavitcher circus act, pulled up in an SUV to deliver baskets of joy to the Hummus Place across the street. I'd resigned myself to snapping him from the back, as I had a guy in a full-length fur coat on the way down to the bar, when my friend Dean cracked open the Dymphna's front door and yelled “Hey, Clown!” This being St. Marks, this guy wasn't the only clown on the block, but he was the only one who turned around.