St. Splatty's Day

So after 7 or so months I thought now would be a good time for a new post. These next bunch of posts I'll be making will look back upon my time living in New York Fuckin' City. When I was shooting heroin with Rockets Red Glare and living in a fleabag apartment.

My first St. Patrick's Day in the city was relatively uneventful. I had been out before with some friends but the night was still relatively young when I headed home, especially by "Big City" standards. While walking home from the 86th Street subway station I turned down 88th Street towards 2nd Avenue when I passed a young skinny blonde girl blubbering and crying quietly to herself. She had her arms clutched around her shoulders and was wrapping her red zippered sweatshirt across her chest. Given her sniffling and whimpering (and thinking she was kind of attractive) I briefly considered stopping to ask her if everything was ok. But of course I didn't and kept right on walking. Towards the end of the block at 2nd Avenue was one of the more infamous college-kid dive bars in the neighborhood. I had never set foot inside (my college dive bar days having been over for a little while now) and tonight I realized I probably never would.

A large crowd of drunken revelers had spilled outside the bar onto the sidewalk. There was much yelling, commotion etc. I tried to decide if I should wade through the crowd or make a wide turn around them and continue on home. But before I could decide a small "knot" of people emerged from the crowd on the corner and began to make its way up 88th street directly in my path. I slowed and then watched as one stumbling greasy looking guy in his early twenties was pushed out of this small "knot" directly towards the open trap door in the sidewalk that the bar used to receive shipments of the awful horsepiss they passed off as beer to their customers. I had often passed by these open trapdoors in New York City and they fascinated me. They were a peek into the operations of local businesses showing Guatemalan barbacks smoking Marlboros on recently delivered kegs or Bangladeshi bodega clerks peeling potatoes. I sometimes thought that these open trapdoors might be a falling hazard to an ususpecting pedestrian - or in this case a stinking drunk greaseball. The greaseball didn't wobble or teeter on the edge of this trap door but instead fell directly in, ass-over-teakettle and disappeared into the bar's "dungeon". At the time I was shocked to see that this type of event that had only existed in my thoughts had occurred right in front of me. But then I remembered the rest of the angry drunks who had claimed the sidewalk as their own and crossed the street so as not to be drawn into their pointless argument.