Thank you, Mike.
Thank you for working on Wall Street, and for having a corporate AMEX card.
Thank you for being a bored husband with a wife waiting at home while you’re out on the town.
Thank you for being susceptible to the charm of young women.
And most of all, thank you for footing the $1,000+ bar tab we ran up this evening.
Yes, you read that correctly. We somehow managed to run up a tab that totalled over one thousand dollars, in the span of maybe two hours. How did it happen? You’re going to have to wait to find out.
I awoke at 6:00am this morning to the sound of dripping rain smacking against a loose piece of siding outside my bedroom window. I don’t remember exactly what I was dreaming (though it was probably something extremely depressing, like one of my recurring dreams where everybody I love turns their backs on me and I die), but at some point a character in my dream began hammering a nail into a very large piece of wood that was shaped like my head, and before I knew it I was awake and listening to the rain pelting against that fucking piece of aluminum siding. God, what a fucking annoying sound. I rolled out of bed, slid over to the window, opened it, and kicked the screen three stories down to the ground below. Then I stuck my head outside and started banging on the window’s aluminum frame until the hammering sound subsided. Then I closed the window, grabbed two tissues to jam into my ear holes, and crawled back into bed. I slept soundlessly for another three hours before I officially woke up.
I actually showered today. It had been a few days since I remembered showering, and with friends expecting to hang out and interact with me all day, I figured I would reward them by not smelling like a dirty, homeless piece of shit. I ate a mini bagel and downed a diet soda before my sister drove me to the PATH station.
I spent my entire day buying CDs and LPs to resell on the Internet. If my calculations are correct, the $100 I spent today should net me roughly five-times that amount once everything is sold. Of course, there’s no guarantee that will ever happen, because I don’t really think anybody buys music anymore. Oh well, maybe somebody will prove me wrong.
Since I spent all day on my phone typing UPC codes and ISBN numbers into Amazon’s website, my phone battery was down to one blinking bar at 4pm, so I decided to call it quits and turn my phone off for a while. Before that happened, I talked to Z and told him to meet me and hang out for a while until Ian got off work. Z and I met at Kim’s and walked to Chipotle where we shared an order of chips and two sodas. He seemed in good spirits, and we discussed work and our social lives. He asked if I wanted to go to K-Mart to help him buy a fan and a bath towel(?), and once that was done he headed back to his Brooklyn apartment to shower and change out of his work clothes. I headed over to Other Music and then walked to Ian’s apartment in SoHo. I stood around waiting for him for twenty minutes. It smelled like rat poison and garbage.
We ate dinner at Arturo’s (coal oven pizza, oh my God was it heavenly), and then met up with Jon before hopping on the subway and going to the Ginger Man. The first person I saw was Anthony (of Hype Machine fame), sitting outside talking on his Blackberry. We greeted each other and walked into the obscenely crowded bar. My sister and her friend were already inside, seated at the bar with a crowd of older men in suits surrounding them, clamoring for their attention. I asked what the fuck was going on, and she said something about how they were buying drinks. Did I want a shot of Patron? I said sure, and the next thing I knew I was holding four shots in my hand. Apparently the suits were paying for it. I asked for a beer (Rogue Shakespeare Stout on tap!) and got that too without paying. I took two shots and gave away the other two. Z showed up, Nat showed up, Zoya showed up, Mike (not pictured: me, drinking a shot from Mike’s crotch) and his girlfriend showed up, and Bret (pictured here with Ian, who seems to be having a great time) showed up. The next time I saw Elissa, there were a dozen shots sitting in front of her on the bar. I grabbed two, then two more, then two more and returned to the table where my friends were seated. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the free tequila. The next time I went up to the bar, there was one guy standing next to my sister and her friend, and another dozen shots sitting in front of them. Maybe it was the same dozen…who knows. The two girls introduced me to their Asian banker friend, and all I could think to say to him upon hearing his name (Tony) was, “Do you have an iPhone?” The two girls yelled at me and told me to go sit down, but I made them give me two more shots and another beer (Captain Lawrence Brown). That’s when I realized the girls had taken the AMEX card of one of the bankers and pocketed it. One of the banker guys caught on and took the card away from them, but when they asked him for another round of shots he put the card down on the bar and reopened the tab. Before leaving, I had another two shots and an Ommegang Chocolate Indulgence courtesy of a guy who introduced himself as Mike. Mike offered to take my sister and her friend to a hotel room for the night, which is when they decided we needed to leave as soon as possible. Once he offered to shift our tab over to his, we realized we were free to leave. According to my sister’s friend, his bill was $742 and change, and our bill was between $150 and $200. Mike took care of both, and supposedly left a generous tip. He then posed for a picture and we darted off into the night.
It took forever for the PATH train to arrive. It was quite sobering to wait around for it. The drive home was quick, because the girls wanted to hit another bar on the way back to Livingston.
What a night.
Swervedriver – A Change Is Gonna Come – (buy this album)
Teenage Filmstars – Soulful
Pere Ubu – Humor Me – (buy this album)
Leadbelly – Good Morning Blues – (buy this album)
The Books – Bonanza – (buy this album)
