infant one, ninth avenue zero

I work for a small business in midtown that does party planning; they just bought a gaggle of new Macs and needed someone to support them. The current employees are more creative types, not well-suited to dealing with the ever-present challenges of using a computer effectively, so I'm a vital part of the organization. They also offer a good per hora rate and extreme flexibility of hours, so I'm hooked. I've been working there since the beginning of April, and hope to stay on even once I begin law school. Having a few extra dollars in my pocket is always good.

This Saturday, however, is the last event they're doing for a while, and it's a monster: there's a huge number of different groups signed up for the same time period. It's utter pandemonium in the office, as people rush hither and thither putting together gift bags, getting decorations ready, etc. Meanwhile, Club Babalu, where the event is to be held, is closing at around a quarter to six, so there's a severe time limit on how long things can wait. I'm happily working at my station, downloading clip art for the website, when my employer's car arrives. Normally they just wheel everything over in a cart, but there's simply too much crap this time around to take that normally eminently sensible route. Driving in New York, you see, is more trouble than it's worth for most of the day. But this time around, there's not much choice. This engenders a problem: nobody in the office has a driver's license.

I was astonished when I first came to New York that many natives never bother to learn how to drive, let alone get a license. No one has a car, so what's the point. I always saw turning sixteen and getting that license as a pivotal and essential moment in adolescence, when you move from essenially an extention of your parents to your own free agent. After all, in Los Angeles, without a car, you aren't really going to be able to get much of anywhere. But the gist of this all is that we need someone to drive the damn thing, and I'm called upon for my excellent Californian abilities behind the wheel. We need to get from the office on 49th Street to the club on 44th with a gaggle of crap, most of which is stuffed into the car. A few particularly unwieldly objects are carried down manually, since it's such a short distance.

Unfortunately, Ninth Avenue at rush hour on a Friday is roughly equivalent to a Persian bazaar circa AD 1200: completely impenetrable to vehicular traffic. This is occasioned by its outlet another half mile down into the Lincoln Tunnel, a fact which is only to my great irritation. My boss is in the passenger seat and busy transacting cellular business while I gesture obscenely and ho9nk impotently at the compeltely stationary SUVs areound me. The perambulatory crowd makes three trips and actually runs into the car on the street, still two blocks away from its destination. And infant, literally, could have crawled to the damn place before we got there.

The lesson: don't drive in New York during Friday rush hour. Everyone wants to get the fuck out like it's the last helicopter out of Saigon. And if you have to, don't take Ninth.

casey gets into the closet

Let me begin by saying that Casey is, to the best of my knowledge, nothing but strictly heterosexual. The title is just, you know, a funny play on words. A little classic Sunshinean paronomasia. He insisted I make that clear. Casey is a loyal Zete, a guy who until recently went to Columbia, lived in the ever-popular, much-repainted Ruggles Residence Hall. But then he decided, like so many Zetes before him, to take the spring off, recuperate, rejuvenate, regenerate. A lot of people feel that one semester of formal schooling is enough for a year. But Columbia takes a dim view of persons not actually being educated staying in their residence halls, so he's been living of late at the Baird-Chucky- Robert-Cesar residence at 142d Street and Broadway, bringing the total occupants to five, which means every room, from the 8×8 storage room to the living room, has a tenant. It also means the rent per capita is insanely cheap. All of this economy of rent and diseconomy of space has created certain, though surprisingly few, problems. One is closet space. Casey's living in the ironically named living room, which lacks any kind of storage space. He has, however, remedied the situation in a serendipitous manner.

Evidently, some time ago, a raucous party transpired at La Casa del Baird y Todos Los Otros. Not that racuous parties are unusual, but this one was notable in the present sense for one reason: Casey got into the closet. Inscrutably, he was trying to climb the wall in the narrow main hall by bracing his back against one side and walking vertically up the opposite wall. This was proceeding apace until his legs suddenly (and, one must assume, unexpectedly) plunge through the drywall into a space beyond. Intoxicated, Casey stumbles off in a daze, but forunately Seth is in attendance, and he has a devoted interest in chaos and destruction. Over the remainder of the night, he rips down the rest of the drywall to reveal a full-fledged closet—shelves and all—which was evidently walled-over and forgotten.

Sadly, there is no putrescent corpse or satchel of cash waiting inside, which would be a considerably more entertaining story. Alas, it is only a plain, ordinary, fully-functional closet. But of course, this is what Casey most dearly needs, and it's nice and ironic that it's he that first shoved his legs into it. One still wonders why anyone would wall over a perfectly decent closet, especially in New York, which is greatly starved for storage space. Still, Casey finally gets his closet. And that's good enough.

how the fuck did they get all the greeks in there?

I went to see Batman Begins last night, a movie which not only manages to pleasantly surprise after hearing innumerable good reviews, but also aims to and succeeds in breathing new life back into the hitherto retrogressive Batman series, which series has been suffering greatly after the outrageously bad Batman & Robin in 2000, whose incarnation of the Dark Knight, George Clooney, himself readily admits to “possibly sinking the entire ‘Batman’ franchise.” Christian Bale appears to have single-handedly avoided that particular iceberg, and I and my two friends Casey and Maurice approve. The latter has always enjoyed Batman for its colorful villains, and the archnemesis in this one is the Scarecrow, who is played by the vaguely effete Cillian Murphy, making him (the character) seem like something of a pussy. But then, Mr Murphy originally auditioned for the role of Bruce Wayne, so at least the casting director got that right. Alfred Pennyworth is now played by Michael Caine; the first four Batmans had only two characters continuingly in common: Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, played by Michael Gough and Pat Hingle, respectively. They've both been replaced now, so it's a blank slate for the Caped Crusader. On a side note, only one of the four escalators at the Loews 42d Street Theater works. You'd think when they were raking it $12.75 per ticket, they could afford working escalators.

After the film, Casey and I walk back to Maurice's place, as neither of us has seen it yet, and it's just a couple blocks away. We're having fortified mimosæ (one part vodka to one part orange juice to two parts champagne), which taste almost exactly like the standard version but packs a nice little kick, when Maurice gets a call, evidently from a girl. He asks if we'd be interested in playing some beirut at the new apartment of a girl he knows. Does the Pope shit in the woods? (Answer: Yes.) So we head down to Chelsea, where she lives, pick up an eighteen-pack of Budweiser (because it was the only 18 in the bloody Gristedes), and head up to the fifth-floor walkup. The impetus for the beirutery is evidently the successful transfer of the girl's beirut table to this new apartment. The table is covered in graffiti, most indicating some tallied number under an amusing name, eg “Guinness Puss” and “Captain Sinkit”. The provenance of these inscriptions is uncertain, though it seems likely they're the scorekeeping of beiruters of ages past, since the table itself was stolen from Colby College.

If this is all beginning to sound very fraternitial (drinking games, property stolen from small New England liberal arts colleges), you wouldn't be wrong. We discover, to our great surprise, that eveyrone in the room is greek: a couple SDTs, a Pike, and us three Zetes. It's comparable to suddenly realizing that everyone in the room is a smoker. Probably even less common, since about one-fifth of Americans (over eighteen) smoke, but only about one-thirtieth of Americans (ditto) are in a fraternity or sorority. I think of the Trojan Horse, and wonder idly, how did they fit enough Greeks (capital G) to take over the city into a wooden horse? This has got to be a myth. But it's good to be among your fellow greeks. You know how their minds work. I'll take this moment to observe that, to their eternal and enormous discredit, the source of our most excellent table (Colby) outlawed fraternal organizations back in the 1980s, that decade when political correctness was first rearing its flagitiously ugly head. Eheu, students of Colby, for you know not what you miss.

Casey and I go back uptown to the Zetehaus at around 1:30 AM, and find Tre, Aneel, and three other guys playing Kings. Ironically, the deck has only fifty-one cards, and the one missing card is the suicidal king; until we realize this, the games are rather long, since they can't end without all four kings being drawn. Dawn and crunkenness arrive as one. Finis.

the continuing saga of teddy grundle

You may remember Theodore Terwilliger Grundle if you read his tale of dreams achieved in “romancing the milf” on we live in borrowed sunshine. For those of you who missed that episode, my dear friend Teddy gets down and dirty with that most Dustin-Hoffman-esque of adolescent dreams, the milf. Teddy isn't his real name. He's sort of a superhero, so he needs to keep his real identity secret.

Tonight, Teddy is regaling us with a tale from the past—a tale, actually, about the laptop his older paramour gave him. One of the nice things about being a gigolo is getting valuable gifts. Unfortunately, Teddy has since realized that nice dinners and great sex are not worth being emasculated with a shotgun, and so has cut it off with his very own Mrs Robinson. Notwithstanding Teddy's general studliness, his libido exceeds even volumes of willing and comparably aged young women, so he must perforce resort of more lonely means: spanking the monkey, flogging the bishop, a date with Manuela. Apparently, on one such occasion, some of the ejaculate roamed a bit farther than expected, and sullied the pristine plastic surface of the laptop. Better yet, such is the extent of Teddy's virility that this knocks out half the keyboard: totaly dead. He spunked his keyboard to death. Kinda like a stroke victim, that loses control of half his body. This is more of a jizz victim.

The whole sorry, sordid saga is not unreminiscent of an incident involving Michael “Tyrone” LaVigne. Managing against all logic and expectation to stagger back home after a night of particularly exemplary potation, he didn't quite make it to the bedroom, instead collapsing in a heap in the common bathroom on the third floor. In this compromising position, he evidently lost bladder control and pissed his pants. And this was no minor accident, this was a Niagara Falls micturation. This was a piss so huge that he actually shorted out his phone, in his pants pocket, with the sheer inundation of urine. Yes, that's right: he pissed his phone to death. Upon realizing the sheer enormity of the moment, he taped the fallen soldier to his door for the rest of his tenure at the Zetehaus under the epitaph “RIP Phony McRingRing.” A cautionary tale? Of course not. A clarion call to greater mischief.

drunks should not have pointy objects

I'm at 1020 on Saturday night with a not-so-motley gaggle of Zetes, dates, and friends, deriving from various places: there was evidently an expedition north from apartments far downtown to the old stomping grounds at the 72d Street Dallas Barbeque, including Jide, Aaron, Tim & Grace, and Tyrone and his ex; Chucky & Rosy appeared from a barbeque of some sort in New Jersey (interesting cosmic convergence, that), and I wandered over from the house. The group had originally been stationed at Nacho's Kitchen (the latest incarnation of the restaurant formerly known as Nacho Mama's) in solidarity with Baird, who is tending bar there to a nearly empty establishment; our group constituted roughly two-thirds of his trade while I'm there.

But we're all hardcore 1020ers, and eventually a sense of longing for our true home overcomes bonhomie. Naturally the darts come out, since most of us are fairly good at it, and a mostly empty 1020 bodes well for dart-playing: no oblivious drunkards staggering around in front of shots, nearly getting their eye put out, as your mother would have warned you. It is amazing that I only now discover that Tyrone and I have exactly the same dart case, though his is evidently the original; I have unwittingly rendered him the sincerest form of flattery. As intoxication progresses apace, we manage to mix them up several times, though we have rather distinct darts (mine are tapered to the front, twenty-four ounces, with a black and silver stripe motif), so the precious cargo itself is not mistaken.

Eventually, as I'm staggering home, Tyrone's ex-girlfriend calls me back when I'm already half a block away. Dubious, I'm not turning back, until she screams more pleadingly that it's urgent. I trudge back in the brutally humid night, only to discover that her “urgent” message is that she needs a cigarette. Stupefied into muteness by the sheer temerity of the ho, I am beginning to turn and walk away when her grabby hand snakes out, snags my pack from my pocket, extracts several stoges, and tosses them back to me without so much as a thanks. I should point out that at this stage, I don't even know who she is, and as I struggle for some kind of appropriate response, she replies, “I'm Laura. You should really know that.” It all comes back to me: she's the One-Legged Hippo that people were always talking about! I suppose I must have met her at some point, since she seems to know me, but I never put this girl and the legend of the Hippo together. (The link is not to the legend of this Hippo, but rather to the Hutto Hippo. They seem to share a great deal in common, since the Hutto variety is described as both “belligerent” and “ferocious”, which is just about right.) She has a prosthetic leg, which many people over the years have perhaps only partly jokingly suggested they'd like to rip off, and with which beat her senseless. This is not a derogatory remark about the disabled. It's a derogatory remark about her.

My hand is closing convulsively over my darts in my pocket, and I'm seized with a sudden mad impulse to stab her with one, or perhaps all three. Fortunately, being a sane man even when so deeply in my cups and provoked by so uppity a source—and wanting to avoid being aprehended for felony assault, which would preclude a career in law—the moment passes and I walk off. But think of what harm a man with less self-control in an equal state of pique and inebriety might have done. The lesson: drunks should not have pointy objects.