“Gentri-fries”
(Late Night Basement walks around Williamsburg, and fools hipsters into believing Guy Fieri is opening a restaurant in their neighborhood. A rareified sort of hilarity ensues.)
Last night, I went out in Williamsburg. The couples in our group split up at the bar. The girls sat on a line of stools on a side wall, and the boys sat, deep in conversation, across a narrow chasm. It was enough of a distance that no one else realized we were all together.
The bar had a fantastic array of meatheads from Jersey, all of whom looked like they had read about Williamsburg on Thrillist. They loafed about, strategizing on how to pick up hipsters. Us girls were approached a number of times. “I can’t look at him, his head is so small, but his body is so large,” Sadie Lady gasped through laughter every time one would make an attempt to talk to us. I felt bad for them. They were just advanced apes looking to make some sort of human connection. I wouldn’t have felt so bad for them five years ago, when I myself was drunk and stupid and fumbling around.
After thirty minutes, we had amassed a collection of drinks bought for us on account of some meathead or another’s birthday. Ciders and beers and all manner of soft booze. It quivered on the sideboard. It threatened to spill over. “Caleb, come save us,” I told him on my way to the bathroom.
“No way,” he said. “This is way too much fun to watch.”
When I got back, we were approached by a pair sporting buzz cuts and muscle shirts, who clearly had laid out their plan of attack via email earlier in the week. “It’s Joey’s birthday, you gotta have another drink,” one barked.
“We haven’t even drank the ones you already bought us,” I said.
“Come on, take a shot,” he barked again.
“I’ll take a shot,” my friend Jess said.
“What do you want?”
“What are you drinking?” she asked.
“Whiskey,” the meathead said.
She stared straight into his eyes. “I’ll have a tequila,” she said.
His look when she said that was practically gleeful. It was like a scene from a movie. We played into their script. We did “Williamsburg Nights” with them, but we didn’t follow through to the denouement — the crazy badgirl hipster Brooklyn sex and the postcoital moment when the meathead would realize he had gotten what he had come for, and was ready to return home with his buddies.
A few minutes later, we moved over to a booth. The meatheads continued to try their tricks on new arrivals. We didn’t stay long enough to see if they got anyone drunk enough to move the narrative forward. It made me feel maternal, watching them.
24 Hours in Williamsburg
This past weekend was a close friend from Brown’s bachelorette party. Every third night is a bachelorette party for me in terms of the amount that I drink, so I wasn’t expecting anything too crazy.
What I was expecting was a nice weekend away with some of my girlfriends, at a hotel with a pool…in Williamsburg.
Because yes, there is a hotel with a pool in Williamsburg, and it’s called the King & Grove.
There are Italian-Americans everywhere. (And their overabundances on Christmas make me happy.)
This morning I decided to wake up late. I’ve been working every single day since I returned from Vietnam in early November, even on Saturdays, even on Thanksgiving, and this past weekend, my exhaustion caught up with me. When Caleb kissed me at dawn, I couldn’t lift myself from bed to rise with him.
So I slept until 10:20. When I woke, I shuffled to the couch, and treated myself to an episode of Sex and the City. “You’re a fucking moron, Carrie!” I shouted gleefully as she tried to crawl all over Mr. Big, who was trying to watch the final minute of a boxing match. My familiar hatred for her valorized getting dressed.
On my way to the subway, I stopped in a cafe. Ahead of me in line, a woman wearing a long flowing skirt, looking sallow, was ordering. I glared at her. Spiteful word associations filled my mind. “Yoga,” I thought. “Tofu. Earth Mother. Patchouli.”
The total price for her coffee and bagels came to $21.78. “Occupy Wall Street,” I thought. Behind the counter, the two baristas assembled her order, their backs turned to me as I waited.
I watched one prepare her food. I listened to the other steam her soy milk. Behind me, the door jangled, and the line grew to almost ten people.
On a normal day, this type of scenario would have raised my anxiety level to “I will shove a bitch out of my way.” But today, I was eerily calm. I breathed methodically. I let the darkness of the room soothe me. I felt well rested and normal.
Over the jangling and the hissing, I picked up the sound of one of the baristas whistling along with the house music that played right below the din of human traffic. His tone was rich and sweet. “Excuse me sir,” I wanted to say to him. “Have you ever considered becoming an animated bird in a Disney movie?”
By the time he turned to finally take my order, I was almost in love with his voice, the song. “What can I get for you?” he asked me.
“A large coffee,” I said, a bit light-headed.
He rung me up, and despite the fact that the tip jar said “tips are a common courtesy,” I gave him $1. Hot cup in hand, I floated over to the table where the milk was set up. I felt completely content in the moment, in that mediocre cafe, amongst the flotsam of mainstream Williamsburg, and that contentment felt almost religious.
But it was also a moment I didn’t want to last forever. I covered my cup, slipped through the crowd, and smiled to myself, my bun askew, all the way to the L train. There, I lost my graciousness.
You know Williamsburg is so over when the Gap uses the name for an advertisement in Vietnam.
(Like, seriously? At least they got the douchebag Mohawk right, I guess.)
Don’t Fuck With Franke
I’m in a tizzy right now, because I was just walking Caleb’s dog Franke, and she bit his next door neighbor on her fucking leg. Look at this little fucking monster.
The worst of it is that I haven’t showered, and I was wearing a turquoise gingham skirt that makes me look like a mentally retarded adult, a navy tank top I usually wear running, a pair of hot pink flip flops, eyeliner I cried off during a nervous breakdown yesterday at noon, and the gigantic fucking cold sore that appeared, like a good omen, on my mouth this morning.
Live Blogging: Hurricane Irene
(The East River from Brooklyn, Yesterday Evening)
There’s nothing much to do in New York City today besides wait for Hurricane Irene. The subways are down, the streets are desolate, and most of the stores are closed. I actually have no idea if the stores are closed, because I’m still in bed. BUT THE SITUATION SEEMS EXTREMELY SERIOUS, AND I AM WORRIED THAT I MIGHT STARVE TO DEATH IF I CAN’T ORDER FOOD FOR DELIVERY.
The talking heads wearing pancake make-up seem to think that this will be one of the worst storms ever to hit New York City, which is kind of awesome. Except, of course, if I die, or lose power, the latter being worse, because then the cable will go down, and I won’t be able to watch the absolutely riveting coverage on the Weather Channel.
I’m three blocks from the East River in Williamsburg, buffeted from the water by the hulking condos on the shoreline, which look like Sheraton Hotels transplanted from Fort Lauderdale for douchebags retiring from decency. They were evacuated yesterday. If you gather together all of the people not in their right mind in New York, and subtract my family, all you have left are homeless people and the 20 people living in those condos, so the evacuation only took six minutes.
I’m So Happy, It’s Getting a Little Tiresome For Other People
It’s usually about this time every year that I get so melancholy that I break down, and visit my family’s psychiatrist. “I am very depressed,” I say to him, lip trembling, upon arrival at his office.
“Sorry ‘bout your luck,” he tells me. “Here’s a bill for $400.”
And then he sends me home.
This summer, however, I am happier than I have been since 2003, when I decided that I would rather kill myself than suffer through another resume building internship in an office building in Manhattan. So I spent my days out by my parent’s pool, reading Robert Jordan, and my nights waitressing at a local restaurant. By the end of the summer, I had made $15,000 in cash. I was free, and I was happy, and I was richer than I’d ever be again. “This is one way I can live that is unexpected,” I realized.
But the next summer, I graduated, and took a prestigious job. In the years that followed, I martyred myself in a string of offices. I filled my calendar with networking events, and dinners with useful people whom I secretly hated. I endured it for all of the fall and winter months. It was what I was supposed to do, and it made me feel successful.
