I go to the Center for Fiction at the Mercantile Library, for the NOON magazine launch party plus reading: there’s always box wine at literary events, even if it happens to come in bottles. I get there a bit early, but it seems that most everyone who will be there for the event has already arrived. They, everyone, mill about, talking about their agents and recently finished manuscripts – memoirs, well, not really memoirs, but autobiographical vignettes this time, not fiction, so who knows what Jane-the-agent is going to do with it – and ideas for new projects. “Where are you staying?” they ask each other. I peruse the bookshelves and finger the monuments to previous methods of fact-checking, pre-Google and now dusty. The past’s workhorses the present’s curios. After a few minutes I find a seat near the rear of the rows of chairs. I make sure that it is an end seat. Someone says, not to me, to her friend, “there’s something about an end seat,” and sits into one herself. A cold, sickly feeling, like camaraderie, crept into my belly. I drowned it in wine and waited for the readings to start.
“You are friends,” the lady said. The readings commenced, beginning with someone I forget. The stories were all matter of fact, descriptions of surface phenomena, but without the linkages provided by sensible recollection or desire. While they were told, more chairs were brought out, as if by little elves, except by the employees of the center. I shifted over into the newly capped end-seat, then fidgeted and thought about dogs, and why it is that they smell when it rains. A distinctively animal smell. Almost rat-like. It was not raining that day. As soon as I could, I refilled my cup and drank it. Twice. In the interim I noticed the stink from my own body. The readings ended. I left.
Swag at the Center for Fiction: plastic cups of red and white wine paired with the finest salted pretzels from a bag.
Categories: Readings/Book Events.
Tags: pretzels, wine
By rwbs
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April 27, 2010 at 1:27 pm
About two months into this little experience I got the sense that it was getting very difficult for me to get drunk. And even more difficult to stay that way for any length of time. Either I’d learned to pace myself, subconsciously and without needing encouragement, so that I stayed just beyond slightly buzzed, or my liver had reached Olympic-level performance, or I simply had lost all ability to discern when I’d passed beyond being a jovial drunk and moved into the valley of incoherent gibbering. To celebrate whichever of these three happened to be the case (and also to get some other more pressing work done) I took something of a hiatus from the freebie circuit. But now I am back, and while I can’t say that it feels much easier for me to get drunk, I have in fact recently been fairly trashed. So, my liver needs to get back on the treadmill. Or something.
I have to say, though, that having hit up open bars, snack handouts, and shitty academic conferences for two months has left me heavy bored – and feeling somewhat malnourished: a plate of fucking salad every now and then would be more than nice. Maybe I need to find more exotic locales. But each evening continues to present its stretch of people (usually far more comfortable with who they are than I am – I mean, than I am with who they are; I’m self-loathing, but I’m comfortable with that) who are all so similar. “Blah blah,” they say, “blah blah.” And they repeat. And I say, “mmmhmmm. hmmm. mhmmm,” repeating myself in due time as well.
Categories: News.
Tags: life lessons, monthly recap
By rwbs
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April 26, 2010 at 11:44 am
The woman in yoga pants struggles to get a wad of bills into her slim billfold. She fusses for a few moments before she manages the task and drops her receipt into the trash next to the counter. While she is fiddling with her cash, two toy-sized dogs, tethered by leashes, greedily chomp and splinter dog treats all around her feet. The woman had apparently dropped them a few while she was getting money from her account. The group of them – the woman and her pets – are exceptionally well groomed. The refined, finely engineered curvature of the woman’s ass suggests that for her yoga is more than a passing hobby.
As the dogs chew the treats, little moistened fragments fall from their working jaws onto the carpet of the vestibule and it becomes spattered with slobber and half-masticated dog food. But this does not perturb the woman. She is busy storing her money, which takes enough of her attention. She looks over to a clerk, who is looking over at her dogs. “Your ATMs don’t give 50s any more, hmm?” she says to him. The clerk pauses for a split second before answering her, and in my head he blinks several times looking at her. “That one does,” he responds, pointing to a machine in the corner. “Oh!” the woman says, “Good!” Clearly relieved, she calmly waits for her pets to sniff the mess they’ve made on the floor before pulling them toward the door and leaving.
I had been going to Spain for dinner of Budweiser and patatas bravas, but suddenly I wanted to eat a dog.
Categories: Bar Gimmes.
Tags: beer, patatas bravas
By rwbs
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April 13, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Thursdays offer up more freebies than a single night can hold, from art-gallery rotgut to bar gimmes designed to jumpstart your weekend bender. If god were a drinker, you could call Thursdays his answer to Mondays’ dearth of free booze. He’s not, though, so it seems like Thursday is just another New York excuse to imbibe. Last Thursday I had a lot on my plate: I even wrote out a little list of all the freebies so that I could plan the most efficient way to get them all.
I started at Pop Burger and the OCHO LOCO deal. The burgers were not absolute rubbish, but they weren’t worth more than the dollar I spent for them. They were closer to sliders than burgers, and permeated with the salty, liverwursty flavor that ran through the grade-school cafeteria meat-products I couldn’t force myself to eat as a child. But they were small, and loaded with enough fat to keep me moving the rest of the evening, which was all I expected from them.
Next on the list was free Cointreau magaritas (I’m not sure about them, but I suppose they’re better than an appletini, and a free magarita carries less expectations than a 50-cent slider). I was told to put my camera away when I took it out to make some snaps in the store that was giving away the booze. Since I don’t like to be told no, I decided to leave the magaritas and obnoxious fashion behind and head over to the Dixon Lounge early.
The lounge was supposed to be having its grand opening, which apparently doesn’t mean much: it’s been open for a while. But there was a Weimar cabaret trio playing, and the cocktail menu looked interesting, so I added it to the list. I was a bit worried, though, when I finally arrived sweaty and stinking. A sign on the declared GENERAL ADMISSION: $15. I was willing to spring for a drink, since this was the grand “opening,” but I really didn’t want to sit through a play and I certainly wasn’t going to pay for a ticket to do so. I expressed my concern to the woman working the door. “So, uhm, is buying a ticket required?” “Huh?” she said. I made my concern more explicit. “I mean, can I just come in and check out the bar, or do I have to buy a ticket for the show too?” She chuckled in response, then said, “oh, that’s fine. I’m a big fan of the hump and dump.” I gladly signed their guest list, then ordered a rye Manhattan.
Swag at Dixon Lounge: I was somewhat mistaken about the offerings – all the notes I’d jotted down on which events were offering what got jumbled – but there were bar snacks in little plates, a cross between nuts and Chex mix.
Categories: Bar Gimmes.
Tags: crackers, liquor, magaritas, nuts
By rwbs
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April 12, 2010 at 1:15 pm
After drinking free whiskey in the East Village, I end up far uptown sitting at a table with two women who are discussing getting themselves off. Their favorite makes and shapes of sex toys, what website they visit for video to set the mood, one– or two-handed action, that sort of thing. This piqued my interest, I won’t lie, which was how I got involved in the discussion in the first place.
One of the woman is telling her friend how hard it is to find decent, woman-friendly porn. “Even the lesbian porn – or the porn with lesbians in it – isn’t good for women. It’s made for men,” she says. “Well, you know men are the biggest market,” I interject, “so it’s sort of good business sense.” “But come on, women would buy more porn if the stories didn’t suck so much,” her friend responds. She continues, “and the shots are awful. Who decides what to frame? And why is it that the woman spends more than half the time looking straight into the camera?” At some point, the conversation turns to other things.
I didn’t manage to leave my credit card out of my wallet Tuesday, which was a costly mistake. Primed for the evening after a couple free whiskies, I swung into Ding Dong to see who was around before calling it a night. But no money spends like plastic money, and plastic money spends fast.
Swag at Sidewalk Café: Jameson and drinks made with it. It was free until it wasn’t, then I left. The events at the gimme were less interesting, this night at least, than what went on uptown.
Categories: Bar Gimmes.
Tags: life lessons, liquor, whiskey
By rwbs
—
April 9, 2010 at 2:18 pm
“You are friends,” the lady said. The readings commenced, beginning with someone I forget. The stories were all matter of fact, descriptions of surface phenomena, but without the linkages provided by sensible recollection or desire. While they were told, more chairs were brought out, as if by little elves, except by the employees of the center. I shifted over into the newly capped end-seat, then fidgeted and thought about dogs, and why it is that they smell when it rains. A distinctively animal smell. Almost rat-like. It was not raining that day. As soon as I could, I refilled my cup and drank it. Twice. In the interim I noticed the stink from my own body. The readings ended. I left.
