Bartender Secrets (Part 1)

             You like to get drunk, right? You don’t have much cash? Or, if you’re a trust fund kid (god bless you), and you want to ensure that your parents hard earned money isn’t squandered on over priced drinks? Well, here we go.

            Listen.

            The bartender is always in charge. I don’t care WHO you are, we rule our beer-soaked lands. We will short change you if you’re a dick. We will cock-block you if you degrade us (by telling the girl you’re hitting on when you’re in the bathroom that we’ve ‘seen you around’, followed by the rolling of eyes. Trust me, girls believe their bartenders more than they believe your punk ass). We will always under pour your drinks if we so choose.

            Conversely, if you are a wonderfully sweet person, a great tipper, and somewhat of an interesting conversationalist (we get REAL bored back there sometimes), we can change the vibe of your night with a snap of a finger. We can get you laid. We can get you drunk. We can introduce you to our friends so you don’t have to sit lonely at the end of the bar staring into a candle.  

            Here’s some secrets of how not to anger/piss-off/infuriate your bartender so you can get all the perks a good wholesome drunk like yourself deserves.

           

            1.

            Twenty on the Bar.

            Now this is an old school thing. You roll in, after a hard day’s work, find a decent centered bar stool so you can scope the scene, saddle up, elbows down, and, after throwing a quick smile to the bartender, you break out a crisp, clean Andrew Jackson and slide it right on the bar and order a cocktail. You don’t even touch the money, the bartender will (if they know what the fuck they are doing).

            No one actually knows where this move was invented. But it states something very clear.

            I have money I want to spend here.

            No, I don’t give a shit about opening ‘tabs’.

            Yes, there is some of this twenty in it for you, Bar Keep, if everything goes smooth.

            This is a famed move of Italian Gangsters and anyone else who knows the bottom half of WWII.

            The bartender will continually take from this pool of money (always larger bills face up and on top), and respect the arrangement with a quiet sort of grace and respect.

            It’s got this feeling of class, like the patron doesn’t even have to handle the dirty business of the financials. It says street confidence and ‘no, I’m not going to run up a bill with you and drunkenly stiff you’. (Note: Ladies, it’s extra classy if y’all do it. In my career, I’ve seen only a handful of women pull this move, and I always lauded them with appropriate attention).

            2.

            “How Are You?”

            91% of the time, anyone in the food/beverage service industry is actually invisible to the customer. Seriously. We are all interchangeable faces that merely must shut up and provide a service a monkey could do if you trained him how to use a Church Key. When you are out to dinner, how many of you remember exactly what the waiter looked like? Or what the bartenders name was? Most of the time, the customer is coming off a long day and shuffles, tired into the bar.

Before them stands a mostly intelligent human being with hopes and dreams and feelings and, sometimes without even eye contact, the customer grunts:

            “Beer…”

            Now, nothing is more infuriating then one of these assholes.

            Hey, look, we don’t need to be best friends. We don’t need to talk about our feelings. But if you genuinely greet us with an honest “How are you?” it lifts us out of the nullifying abyss of obscurity and for a split second we actually feel like someone more than just a Robo Bartender (yes, they actually invented this, go here: ).

            Now, of course, we’re not going to tell you, actually, how we feel. You don’t want to know either. There’s just no time to discuss who knocked us up or how much coke we did last night, or how we can’t pay rent but still find the time to fuck 21 year old girls. But it’s your gesture that stands out in our bartending mind that you are the okay sort who will get their third drink bought back for them.

            3.

            Don’t Bring Up The Third Drink Rule!  

            This is an absolute imperative. Let me shout it from the mountains to be heard across every sea in the world.

            DO NOT BRING UP THE THIRD DRINK RULE.

            EVER!

            EEVVVVEEERRR!

            This will ensure that not only will you be ignored by the bartender, but you will be reviled and talked shit upon openly to other customers until you walk out in shame.

            Let me clear the air here. The Third Drink Rule is a loosely followed intuitive rule deeming that after the third drink bought (and tipped on) the bartender will buy the next one. This is not a hard and fast rule, and only decided by the bartender themselves.

            But somehow, as of late, I have heard customers (who obviously have never tended bar in their lives) bring this up with a bartender. Not only will you not get a free drink, but you will be hated for even daring to ask. It’s not funny. You’re not clever. You’re not ‘getting away’ with something, or proving anything to the bartender.

            You’re just proving that you’re a douche bag. Which wasn’t much in question to begin with.

            Stay tuned for Bartender Secrets (Part 2) 

Dont' treat us like this guy:

The Art Of Public Sex

            I was talking to my Flagrantly Gay Friend Roland about the nature of the world at Verb Café, joyously pontificating each point with erratic hand gestures, as if conducting some sick pedantic orchestra, and bringing my conclusion home with somber and austere vocal tones, using the baritone of my voice to solidify my opinions about life and love, to not paying rent on time, and finally, my new novel.

            Roland, smoking a hand rolled Amsterdam Shag cigarette, blows a large puff of smoke in my general direction, and asks:

            “Are you drunk already, Matthew?”

            I pause, the wind taken out of my sails, and look like a kid who just got his bike stolen.

            “Fuck you, Roland. What’s been with you, man? You are totally not listening to me. Literally, we’ve been here for over an hour and I have been making some remarkable points about life and love and sex and god knows what else, and you’ve been sitting there with your legs crossed with a goddamn smirk across your face and your eyes glazed over like some heroin mannequin. Now what the fuck?”

            Roland, downright docile, leaning over to snub out his cigarette on the patio floor, looks quite innocently up at me and whispers:

            “Vincenzio.”

            He closes his eyes and drifts away for a moment, as if whispering this man’s voice was some kind prayer.

            “Vin-who?”

            Roland opens his eyes, and the devil is back in his sparking blue eyes.

            “Vincenzio.”

            “Yeah, what about him? Is he the next victim in your war for cock?”

            “He. Is. Perfect.” He hums these words like a Buddhist Koan.

            “Roland, please, the straightness in me is getting awkward.”

            “Don’t let the Catholic in you fuck up my daydreaming.”

            “Allright. But what’s the story?”

            Roland straightens up (no pun intended), and starts rolling another cigarette. He speaks with the fever of a man who’s just discovered Gold.

            “We have a little game we play.”

            “And what’s that?”

            “Well, Mr. Matthew, we both get completely dolled up to the nines and meet, separately mind you, at the cleanest, most classiest hotel bathrooms in Manhattan to which we rapidly, and ferocious, fuck the shit out of each other, keeping our hands over each other’s mouths, in these well locked bathrooms. It is, by far, the most perverse thing I’ve done in the last 3 months. But the joy alone, Matthew, the mystique, the excitement of being caught, absolutely priceless.”

            “That sounds fun,” I say, thinking of all of the straight women who would certainly NOT participate in these activities, even if I asked nice.  

            Roland’s leans back, lights his cigarette, and goes back to daydreaming.

            “I love getting my dick sucked in library-voice!” He says, (this is a direct quote).

           

            Now this phenomenon is not rare. They even have nifty little terms such as Dogging (a British nickname for sex acts done in public places), Cottaging (another wonderful euphemism for sex in public areas, like little ‘cottages’, or public toilets), and Amomaxia (sexual acts done in automobiles).

            Then, there is this strange little phenomenon called Anasyrma. This is quite popular in the art of the Greeks and on modern college campuses. It is the gesture of lifting up a skirt or kilt and showing the public one’s buttocks. Though it is important to note that this is not done like a classic exhibitionist (as for sexual pleasure), but more for the effect on the onlookers.

            Another odd but slightly interesting activity is the act of Candualism, which defines when a person exposes his/her partner in a sexually explicit manner to the public, which seems to me a very illicit form of braggartry of a lovers ‘assets’.

            Now, just for comedy sake and why I love the Internet so, here is the result of an experiment performed with 185 exhibitionists when asked the question:

            What would you do if someone exposed their genitals to you in public?

            The answers are perfect.

           

            35.1% answered they would want to have sexual intercourse right then and there.

            15.1 % answered they would show their genitals right back.

            14.1 % answered they would experience ‘admiration’.

            3.8% answered that they would actually feel ‘anger and disgust’.

           

            Bravo!

            Now whatever your perversion is, let it bubble to the surface this fine Cruel Summer 0f 2011. It is mid-July, and we are right in the thick of it. Summer is already half-way complete, so before you feel that first brittle cold of Autumn crawl up your spine, go out and find a person perverse like yourself, and share in those private (and not so private) moments together.

            Till next time!

             

               

The Philosophy Of Dog Butt

             Well, kids, here we are, right in the thick of it.

            A New York Summer.

            Right after the Fourth of July (and the litany of complaints, yet again, why they insist on having the fireworks on the Hudson instead of the more Borough friendly East River), we know summer is officially on like two coked out 20 year olds at the summer McCarren Park film screenings.

            Yes. We’ve been to the beach. We hit Ft. Tilden. We hit Coney Island (my favorite). We hit Jones Beach. The usual hag-like paleness is slowly leaving everyone’s skin.

            And the Cruel Summer of 2011 is in full force. The heat goes right to people heads. Sexual contact is immediate. Intimacy is shunned. There is just simply no time for anything but fun.

            And fun is the name of the game. The New York Brand style. Fun at any and all costs. The high price of hedonism. The naysayers are left in the dust. Summertime is no time to be depressed over Young Raven Haired Beauties reading Journey To The End Of Night  by Celine at the Subway Bar with an open notebook and a blue pen.

            (well….)

            This is shaping up to what Bananarama talked about in their famed song. The Summer is fierce, the summer is strong. Embrace it or hideaway in some air-conditioned room by your lonesome.  

            Philosophy, particularly during the hot summer days, has little room in people minds.  

            Our question this week, however, deals with a very important philosophical question. It is a phenomenon My Lovely Sister Laura and I developed while sitting on a stoop off Bedford watching the world go by on a Thursday afternoon.

            We call it what it is:

            The Philosophy Of Dog Butt.

            The Philosophy of Dog Butt is when a beautiful (often times extraordinarily so) woman (or girl) PURPOSELY adorns her face and body with intentionally ugly articles of clothing and accoutrements. Now this phenomenon is extremely popular here in the Burg, and frighteningly so.    

            You know what I mean, right?

            Super pretty girl, a total knockout in a black evening dress and some heels, but instead wears large, ugly red  glasses, pale white, stone washed, high-waisted jean shorts, all with an oversized, un-form-fitting blouse with the typical slits up the side revealing the ugliest beige bra K-Mart has ever designed.

            Now you tell me, what kind of sense does this make?

            My Lovely Sister Laura looks over at me, after seeing one of these templates walk by, and says, plain as day.

            “That chick looks like dog butt.”

            Right there.

            Genius.

            And it’s true. Why do obviously pretty girls seek to un-pretty themselves in such a way?

            It seems like an insult to non-model types, who have to earn their stripes the old-fashion way, like having a personality.      

            Not that the guys care.

            Hell, do you see what they have to wear just to sleep with these girls?  Dudes will do anything for sex. Talk about retard peacock feathers.        

            Let me speak now to these ‘dog butt’ girls.

            First, as a visually impaired person who HAS to wear glasses, these frames for style seem a little over the top. I mean, I don’t go rolling down Grand Avenue in decorative wheelchairs for style. Seems a little cruel, don’t you think?

            And as for the shitty bras you so willfully expose, throw down some of that cash your Dad gives you weekly on some sexy shit or just go raw dog. Give us some side boob. Who doesn’t like that? Way hotter than the Grandma Bra you rocking. Grandma’s have never been hot. Ever. Like never.

            The high-waisted jeans weren’t cool when they first came out either. I was old enough to remember (seriously, my mother wore those same ones back when she smoked Salem cigarettes in ‘87). My Lovely Sister Laura quotes: “Fuck gentrification of Williamsburg. I’m worried about the uglification of Williamsburg.”

            There’s an old saying apropos of this philosophy of dog butt: “If you got it, flaunt it.” It’s true. I know now you have every slim-hipped man wearing god-awful clothes to match your shitty style just so he can have Adderall-fueled sex in Bushwick with you at your beckon call, but age comes to all of us.   

            Remember when you looked through parent’s photo album and mocked at how fucked up and weird their style was ‘back in the day’. Someday, you too will look back at pictures of yourself outside The Charleston and whisper, shaking your head:

            "Damn I looked like DOG BUTT."          

            Till next time.