Drinking in Manhattan
For many of us it started our freshman year of college. We would cruise Bleecker Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, or Broadway between 116th and 106th Streets, not knowing any better, just looking for a place that would serve us. We learned to start early, before ten o'clock, before the bouncers manned the doors with their age-identifying flashlights. Once we were in and had a drink in hand, the bouncers just meant that we couldn't leave. Not that we wanted to. We stayed all night, drinking pitchers of the cheapest beer, shots of well tequila, and drinks whose names had words like "sour", "sex", and "screw" in them: drinks obviously designed for children trying to sound grown up. Drinks for people who don't really like drinking.
The bars had different names, different decor, different addresses, but they were all essentially the same. The kids came either from Manhattan colleges or suburban highschools. The boys were frat-boy casual: denim and plaid wrapped around an old ratty t-shirt; 50 percent chance of a baseball cap. The girls aimed for sexy-not-slutty, usually missing the target to one side or another. They wore jeans that were tight in awkward places, tops that were either low-cut or short-hemmed. Each girl had an accessory to conceal whatever bodily insecurity she had recently discovered. Behind the bar there were twelve types of vodka but only two types of wine. The music and the crowds were loud enough that we couldn't really understand what anybody was saying, but there wasn't much need for verbal communication when an evening could only follow one of two patterns: (a) get drunk, then get laid; or (b) get drunk, then get sick.
The crushing repetitiveness of this routine (coupled with the overwhelming prevalence of pattern (b) over pattern (a)) got tired quickly, and eventually we discovered a neighborhood spot, where they never carded us and they always had our favorite beer on tap, a spot that the bridge-and-tunnel kids and those obnoxious freshmen hadn't found yet. The jukebox was never too loud, and it had all our favorite songs on it, although whether they were our favorites before we heard them on this jukebox is something we can't remember. The regular bartender learned our names and slipped us a free drink from time to time. Drinking became less of a quest and more of a way to spend a quiet evening with friends and lovers, slowly nursing a beer and trying to develop a taste for whiskey, gradually slipping free of whatever obligations we thought were so oppressive at the time and sinking into a warm, fuzzy forgetfulness.
By the time we enter the high-flying world of young Manhattan professionals, drinking has become a career skill. The bars are different from those of our college days only in the most superficial respects. The sticky wooden bar has been replaced with sleek back-lit glass; the rickety barstools with velvet upholstery, the din of college alt-rock with the din of last summer's hip-hop. We still can't hear what anybody is saying, but we've perfected the art of looking interested in conversations we neither understand nor care about. The men are business casual, all of them sporting identical flat-front pants and spread-collar shirts in a rainbow of pastels. There is not a baseball cap in sight; the over-under is on sport jackets. The women aim for sophisticated-but-sexy, still missing to one side or another. They now have entire wardrobes designed around the insecurities they nurtured in college. Their accessories are carefully calibrated to telegraph both the wealth they expect from the future and the youth that is fading into the past. En masse, we scour Manhattan for the latest twelve-dollar cocktail. Martinis, cosmos, mojitos, saketinis, sidecars; as soon as you develop a taste for one, it's time to move on. Those of us who worked so hard to learn to tolerate whiskey can now tolerate only the finest single-barrel bourbons and 18-year-old malts. Those of us who drank Bud Lite by the pitcher now sneer at anything less than a dozen microbrews on tap. It's the same game, it's just gotten more expensive to play.
Most of us don't make it back to the neighborhood bar much anymore. We see less of friends and lovers, and our once-fuzzy forgetfulness has taken on a razor's edge. If we went back to our neighborhood joint today, would the regular bartender would still recognize us? And would we still have a taste for the house pour?
I was born on January 29, 1977. A few weeks later, some vines in northern Portugal began to awaken from their winter slumber. A few months after that, bunches of grapes were maturing on those vines, swelling with seaborne rains and basking in the summer sun. By the time I took my first step, the grapes had been pressed into juice whose sugars were beginning their metamorphosis into alcohol. When I was old enough to talk, the young wine was transferred to vats and fortified with a local brandy known as aguardente. Not long thereafter a little under a liter of the resulting elixir was placed into a dark glass bottle, labeled, and laid sideways on a shelf. At some point over the past twenty-odd years, this bottle made its way from the town of Oporto to the New World, finally coming to rest at a wine shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it stayed until the night before my twenty-eighth birthday.
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