Flash Flood - Part Two

The day of Critter’s wedding, I was rudely awakened at eight in the morning. After a few moments of complete disorientation about where I was, why it was light out, why I was the only person in a room with two double beds, and what the hell was beeping, I realized I had a text message. As I was pondering the proper epithet to express my distaste at the early hour of the text, I realized that it was probably a response to a text that I had sent late the night before. You see, I have a problem: I drunken text-message. A natural outgrowth of the drunk-dial, the drunk-text allows all the joy of a drunken voicemail, without the slim chance of the other person picking up because they think it “might be important.” Anyhow, my drunken-texting habit comes and goes, but at its worst includes sexual provocative content to people I haven’t seen in ages or, perhaps worse, too much information about things people don’t need to know. In this case, neither of those two things had happened, and whatever the text was about it did not contain an angry retort. Instead it was a message from Muffin asking if I was golfing that morning with the groomsmen. In lieu of replying, I decided to get out of bed and give Muffin a quick call. It turned out that he was out wandering the golf course. When I queried why, he merely replied that he found solace on hung-over mornings by walking outside. I accepted the answer and, for the moment, the issue of morning golf was forgotten.

Now that I was awake, I decided I might as well shave for the wedding. While doing so, I started day dreaming about two things above all else: a nice mid-morning, post-shower nap, and eggs. I happen to love breakfast, and this particular half-hungover, half-still-drunk day, I seriously wanted some eggs. Probably over easy with wheat toast, but I was not feeling all that picky – as long as it was greasy and egg-based, I would be all right. Anyways, after a somewhat lengthy stop in the bathroom, I returned to my bed, turned on SportsCenter, and looked forward to napping for the better part of the morning. Right about then, the phone rang. Though I wanted to ignore the call, and was close to doing just that, it was from the one person I could not ignore – the groom. One of the groomsmen had bailed on their nine o’clock tee-time, and I was suddenly invited to join the fun. Though I said I would be down to the lobby in fifteen minutes to meet up, I actually has zero intention of doing so; I still wanted my eggs and nap.

After ten minutes of lying in bed – perhaps still drunk and definitely still naked – I stood up out of bed, put on some shorts, a shirt, and a well-placed baseball cap, and headed down. While I am quite bad at golf, I decided that it was Critter’s day and if he wanted me to play some utterly horrendous golf, I would go play some utterly horrendous golf. (Note: The fact that I will be expected to play nine the morning of Brad’s wedding, for which I will be reprising the role of Best Man that I first occupied at Cory’s wedding, may have played into it. I mean, I could use the practice.)

The golf was, as predicted, abysmal. But the time that was had was anything but. I ended up being paired with Muffin, who has been a big part of my life ever since he started dating my twice-ex-girlfriend (they are now married), and Dietel, a member of my old fraternity who I know, but not well. The three of us decided to play best-ball, which was an especially good choice because Muffin had never actually played golf before. And so, we duffed the ball around for next few hours, making a lot of bad shots and a few blessedly beautiful shots (Dietel had better drives, my short game was pretty decent) on what turned out to be a beautiful day. A completely atypical October day for Michigan – too warm, too sunny, no blizzard – but a beautiful day nonetheless.

While we were on the sixth hole, we got a call from Jason. Seems our activities and high-level of boozing from the night before had left him a little bit worse for wear, but he was now out of bed and ready to get moving. I informed him of our location and that we were parched; it was Sunday and the golf course could not serve beers before noon. (Note: Don’t judge me. You would have wanted a beer at eleven a.m. too that day.) As we finished the seventh hole, a simple pitch and putt where all three of us, along with Critter, made nice approach shots from the tee, we saw Jason pull up in a golf cart with a backpack full of beer. As we sipped our first, delicious Keystone Light of the day, I asked Jason how he had acquired the cart. His response was simply “hey, I’m a salesman, I get shit done.”

The rest of golf went off without a hitch, though I did make a note of the excellent water hazard on the ninth hole. As we got off the course, having spent the morning riding three to a cart (which meant having someone hold on for dear life from the back or side of said cart each time we moved), several negative things transpired in quick succession. First, Muffin had a relapse of his hangover that left him horribly nauseous. (We later heard from his wife that she found him standing naked in the bathroom doing his best to try and pull the trigger about thirty minutes after the round ended.) Secondly, we discovered that Critter, and more importantly Critter’s Bride, expected all of the boys to be on the “early bus” which left at one-fifty p.m. for a three-thirty wedding. And third, and perhaps worst, we discovered the kitchen was no longer serving eggs. In the course of an hour, I had gone from enjoying life and riding haphazardly around a mediocre golf course to being deprived of my hoped-for nap and my desperately needed eggs. I was not a happy camper.

After an unhappily cold lunch and the quickest shower-and-dress myself routine ever, I headed up to Critter’s room to join the rest of the guys. Upstairs, where I did my part to save the wedding by switching my black wingtips for the brown pair of shoes that one of the groomsman had accidentally brought, Critter was handing out gifts to members of the wedding party. What he had purchased for everyone was a set of matching whiskey glasses – one with the initials of the guy in question and one with his initials. The idea behind this gift, which I think is kind of cool, is that Critter keeps all of the glasses with the various guys’ initials on them, and we each take one of the glasses with his initials. This way, whenever we are at his house we have our own glass to drink out of, and vice versa. Before we could even make it out the room to catch the dreaded early bus, however, another mini-disaster struck. The Captain, whom you may remember from the high-kicking incident the previous night, had sat down on the one chair in the room without looking, and had inadvertently knocked someone’s glass on the floor, where it promptly shattered. Even worse, it was not even his glass. Oh, and the reason he was sitting down? He needed to put on the black wingtips I had brought – it was not shaping up to be his weekend. (Note: To those females out there who might worry that the shoe-switch, which once again may have saved the wedding, left me with a mismatched outfit – fear not. I was sporting a grey suit that day along with a reversible belt; I still looked pretty good.)

Once we embarked on the bus to head to the wedding, a dismal scene took hold, as more than half of the groomsmen had to lay out across entire rows of seats in order to avoid getting sick and to catch a quick nap before the church. We were a pretty beaten bunch for two o’clock.

At the church, the boys milled out without a whole lot to do – which was not all that surprising as we are guys, and inherently out of our element when it comes to planning/executing/not f-ing up a wedding. One image from the hour or so directly before the wedding is one of Jason, Muffin, and me sitting in the last few rows of pews. I was alternately lying down and slamming back bottles of water, Muffin was sitting in the row in front of me wearing dark glasses and trying not to move too much, and Jason was taking shots of whiskey straight from the bottle (the boy gets a touch nervous at weddings – everybody’s weddings).

Right before the wedding started, Muffin vomited in the basement of the church. Everyone decided that this was a good omen, even the guilty party, who quickly felt better. The wedding itself was a decided un-pompous affair, with the older brother of the bride presiding (it was his first wedding), Jason and I both doing readings, and the bride and groom playful teasing each other and speaking at random times during the ceremony. Needless to say, it was my type of wedding. The enduring moment, I believe, came when Jason stood up to speak. Instead of sticking to the script and reading what was in front of him, he decided to ad lib a little. He first turned to the bride and groom and said “Hey, Meg. Hey, Critter.” (Yes, he really called the groom Critter while he was at the alter. My friends are really quite classy.) He then turned to the assembled crowd, raised his arms and said “Hey, Guests.” The image of Jason, standing in front of the podium with arms raised quickly earned him his latest nickname – The Wizard.

The reception was going to be a multi-part affair, and that is before you even consider the multiple impending after-parties. It was going to take a big effort by the boys to bounce back from the night before and make sure that we made this reception an affair to remember. For my part, I had perked up during the wedding when I got up to do my reading. Being in front of the crowd in a small church – so small that the groom’s two younger sisters were standing less than three feet from me looking up at me from a step down – got my adrenaline running to say the least. The party started with a one-hour cocktail hour. The cocktail hour was, as cocktail hours often are, a bit odd. No one was yet lubricated enough to unabashedly approach strangers, and yet there were plenty of twenty somethings that did not know each other at all, but might want to know each other biblically by the end of the night. The solution for this was, perhaps obviously, to begin drinking heavily; it was not uncommon to see a Phi grab a drink and then promptly rejoin the line at the open bar, all while flagging down appetizer girls and snagging some tasty eats. By the end of the hour, we had almost turned it into an art form.

After Cocktail Hour, as seems to be the standard progression with weddings this year, came Dinner Hour. It turned out that during dinner the open bar was going to be closed. Though initially aghast at this prospect, a little investigative work revealed that this is a way to make sure people stay seated during the speeches and cake cutting, and not the booze-limiter that we at first suspected. Regardless of the reasoning, word of the impending closed spigot had leaked during cocktail hour, and each person at my table arrived armed with a full beer and a whiskey on the rocks to help them last through mealtime. With these rations and some champagne to tide us over, we survived through a few rambling speeches until the band started playing and the mixed drinks started flowing once more.

Once the dance floor opened up, it became clear that everyone was ready to get after it. Most of the younger guys were more than happy to dance with whomever was available, including dancing with some of the post-cougar females who were there, though of course those dances were really just done to try to impress any available females that might be near. The convivial atmosphere saw most all of the Phis take to the floor and start swinging, bumping, grinding, and doing whatever else the girl of their fancy was up for. All kidding aside, it might have gotten a little dirty by the end. The band played until almost midnight, during which time there were a few songs with the bride and groom brought on stage for fun and one killer conga-line led by the Captain. The fact that he got it moving at all bears some mentioning, as when the requisite song started playing (i.e., Feeling Hot Hot Hot), it was already pretty late, and people on the dance floor looked like they were not going to have any part in bouncing around the room holding onto a stranger’s ass. Then, about thirty seconds into the song, I noticed the Captain holding a tambourine that he had quietly lifted from percussion section. Or rather, I noticed him rallying people to his side for the conga line by whacking the tambourine so hard that a few of the cymbals flew off and landed on the dance floor. The conga soon commenced, wound itself around the reception hall, and included almost everyone left at the party. It was strong work.

After the main reception, the first of the after parties began. It seems that the groom’s father had decided that he wanted to have a blues band play, so he created an after party in a different room of the hotel just so it would happen. As the main band ended, and most of the Detroit-based wedding guests began to filter out, those that remained were beckoned to an adjoining room by the sounds of the blues and a female vocalist. This after party included not only tons of pizza, a continued open bar, and a dance floor, but also all the candy one could ever want at midnight during a wedding, laid out like a candy store at the back of the room. We were suitably impressed. The dancing at this after party, unsurprisingly, was even more sexual and rowdy than at the reception, but everyone who was there was eating it up, including the families of the bride and the groom.

This is perhaps a good time to point out that when Phis from my year and the years around me get together for a party with a substantial amount of dancing, it has a tendency to get “interesting.” And by interesting, I mean homoerotic. You see, most of the boys are pretty comfortable with their sexuality, and many of them not living in New York are already married, so we have no issue pushing the girls out of the way – as attractive as they may be – and bumping and grinding with each other. I believe this somewhat odd fact was pointed out to me on this night by Muffin after a group of five Phis and one female had formed a mass of front-to-back, front-to-front, and on-the-side grinding. I’d feel odd about this whole thing, except that I don’t, and haven’t since at least my junior year of college. While some of our brothers were openly gay in college, and others were undoubtedly in the closet, homophobia never played a large role in our house, and we never saw a problem with having fun with just the boys, even on the dance floor.

Regardless, after an hour of the blues band, which a rumor floating around the party claimed was the best in the upper Midwest (though I might have drunkenly started said rumor), the party shed a few more people and transitioned first to the hotel bar, and then up to people’s hotel rooms. That’s right, this party had no fewer than three after-parties, and that is if you count all of the room parties as one event. The spirit of the event cannot really be overstated, considering the fun that was had by all involved, the dancing, laughter, and free-flowing drinks, and the fact that even the mother of the groom hosted a room party after the bar closed. (Her daughters eventually kicked everyone out and made her go to bed. Sadly.) While details for the end of the night are a bit foggy, I can clearly remember the post two a.m. festivities included breaking into a room where one couple was half-sleeping, half-arguing in order to snag a bottle of Jack once the beer was gone, as well as one Jason (last name redacted) leaving the party with one of the bride’s maids, only to return alone forty-five minutes later telling us somewhat cryptically that he “got the job done.” In addition, multiple Phis made out with new and interesting female acquaintances, and, perhaps amazingly, no one was seriously injured or escorted out of the premises. By any account, it was a great, great party.

The evening finally ended around four in the morning, as a few Phis made a ceremonial trek over the water trap next to the ninth green that I had spied earlier. As has become custom at Phi weddings over the last few years, a couple of the brothers took a plunge to celebrate the loss of bachelorhood for another good man. In this, the Captain and Jason managed to navigate the placid waters of the man-made hole in the ground while Muffin and I stood on the shore and broke down the night, the weekend, and – in an admittedly cursory way – the last five years. As we stood there, with few cares in the world and a weekend full of memories, rekindled friendships, and great stories behind us, I thought to myself that life, for all its peaks, valleys, and foibles, certain is good to me. I also thought to myself, and said to Muffin, “damn I hope these fools don’t start to drown.”

Flash Flood - Part 1

This past Saturday, after a Friday night of boozing, watching hockey, boozing, almost being rejected from a bar because I was wearing a hockey jersey (note: never a good way to earn my repeated patronage), boozing, and a late night feast of automat food and pomme frites, I woke up and dragged my arse out of bed with the knowledge that I would soon be hopping on a plane to Detroit. Why Detroit? Because I had a Sunday wedding that I kind of, sort of, needed to be at in Grosse Point. One of my favorite fraternity brothers was finally marrying his long-term girlfriend – we’re talking the better part of a decade here – and I was not about to miss it.

Before I caught my flight, however, I had an errand to run. I had been convinced by my drinking compatriots the night before that if I wanted to help make sure the wedding weekend started off with a bang, there was one thing I absolutely HAD to do – have some t-shirts made up. With my flight not scheduled to depart until a leisurely two-thirty p.m., I had plenty of time to make this happen. More important than time, however, I needed to have an idea of what the hell to put on these shirts! With a catch phrase in mind from the wedding that kicked off the summer – or more accurately from the impromptu wine tour that took place the day after the wedding – I set off for the t-shirt store. The store was just opening when I arrived, so I got some much needed Gatorade and then returned to discuss what I thought should go on the shirts with the store’s sole Saturday morning employee. After discussing the best way to apply my message to shirts (turns out you can’t screen print in under an hour – who knew?), we selected a few ringer t-shirts in the appropriate sizes and colors, and then she set to work setting the letters and gluing them to the shirts. When I came back a little under an hour later, the shirts were ready and I was set to head to Michigan. I’d even had enough time to rebuild a couple bridges that I had done my best to burn down the night before – not bad for a Saturday morning. Regardless, thanks the bored... err... dedicated t-shirt girl, I had in my hands four shirts emblazoned with a simple, but powerful term: Rain Maker.

Rain making, or more specifically “making it rain”, is a term that had developed among my friends out of a throwaway line from the touch-football scene in Wedding Crashers. (“I was first team all-state. I can put the ball anywhere I want to. I’ll make it rain out here.”) What it has come to mean to a small (but growing) subset of my friends is doing something – anything really – well, especially if that anything happens to be drinking. People can make it rain on the dance floor, during a presentation at work, or in bed, but most often the term means that we are gonna go out carousing, live it up, and probably make some ill-advised choices. Basically, live life the way it was meant to be lived. (I'm not totally sure, but I'm pretty sure the Platonic ideal of living on a Friday night is drinking one's self into oblivion. Look it up.) As with any term that is created, used, and abused by a group of people (which seems to happen a lot with my friends), variations on Making It Rain have quickly developed. Rain Maker was my own (totally obvious) modification, but some other variants this summer have included “can we make it drizzle a bit tonight?,” and “I’ve been practicing my rain dance all week to get ready.” Clearly the phrase has become a contagious monster that we can’t contain, but at least most of us know it means that we are going to go out and party like we meant it. Ya know, like we aren’t just practicing anymore (which is apparently what we do most nights that we get wasted and say dumb shit). But I digress.

After landing in scenic (ish) Detroit and being bent over by a cabbie to the tune of $60, I arrived at the rehearsal dinner a stylish hour or so late. I immediately pulled my co-conspirators aside to show them the shirts. Okay, so I may have greeted a few friends and mainlined a few vodka tonics first, but still. As I brought two of the three shirt recipients, Jason and the Captain, upstairs to unleash my totally awesome purchase, I must admit I was a little worried. I mean, the three of us had really been the ones to break in the term during the early part of June, but what if I had made a mistake and the shirts weren’t cool? To put it another way, what if I had been too friggin’ hung-over that morning to actually use my brain when I purchased the shirts. To my relief, the boys were ecstatic. We decided that we would try to stay classy for the majority of the rehearsal dinner – always a bit of a challenge for a group of guys who could serve as a cover story for Modern Drunkard – and then bust them out right before the roast of the bride and groom that the Captain was set to lead after dinner. With that, we were off to do some damage at the open bar that had been set up in the living room (complete with quarter keg), and to put the hurt on the shrimp cocktail.

When the sit-down dinner had been finished and it was almost time for the Captain to start the story-telling festivities, the three of us excused ourselves and returned sporting our Rain Maker shirts with sport coats. (Hey, we’re classy like that.) To our surprise the groom immediately put on his shirt as well, and they were an instant hit. It should be noted at this point that the Captain was a bit nervous to start the roast/story-hour, and had downed a fair number of drinks before rising to speak. (Spoiler Alert: This wasn’t the best plan ever.) As different people spoke about the almost-marrieds, a constant theme among many of the bawdier speakers was the sheer decrepitude of the personal hygiene habits exhibited by the groom. While Critter’s little sisters harped first on the state in which he keeps his car (short answer: disgusting), and one mentioned how he had first told his bride-to-be that he loved her a crisp one week after they started dating based on some bad advice from the other sister (she was 13 at the time), the most telling story was related by Muffin, another of the Phis in attendance. He had shared an apartment with Critter one summer during college, and, aside from discussing the impressive, photo-documented weight gain that summer by the man of the hour (both before and after pictures show Critter, sans shirt, with his current weight written on his gut), he decided to share the details of the cleaning bill they received from the landlord after they moved out. Apparently the professional cleaner had made comments about such interesting items as “bloody buggers attached to wall” and “closet used as a dumpster.” As you stop to process this amazing streak of uncleanliness, I should perhaps mention the profession of the groom – he’s a student in an MD, Ph. D program and one of the smartest people I know. Yeah, I’m pretty scared by that too.

For my part, I closed the story hour with an anecdote about the groom centering around the time he dressed up as a meteor and jumped off a rotten tree into the campus pond in order to help one brother finish a required video project. While I threw in the fact that Critter was one of the few people in history to join a fraternity in order to drink less (note: it worked – the liver problems went away in no time), my main point was that Critter would always do whatever needed to be done in order to help his friends. I’ll save you the sappiness of my ending comments and instead point out that after the roast ended, it was time for us to pile into the bus and return to the hotel (and hotel bar) for the night. As the masses – who were already pretty drunk – streamed towards the bus, a few of us realized that the forty-five minute ride might get very boring, and perhaps we should make a few drinks for the trip. Knowing that the rest of the twenty-somethings would undoubtedly be stricken with brutal thirst as well, we decided to grab all of the empty plastic mixer bottles that we could find, and fill them with beer and mixed drinks. We even defied the odds and grabbed a fair number of cups to distribute our bounty on the bus.

On the bus, the old college crowd set ourselves up in the bus because that’s what the cool kids do. I kept much of the booze with me at my seat, and used the conveniently placed reading light to both see to pour and to make it clear that I had the booze (and thus was going to be everyone’s favorite person on the ride). A few minutes after we got underway, one of the members of the wedding party turned around to compliment me on the nice bouquet of the beer that I had poured for him out of the two-liter Sprite bottle, but was cut short by a surprise Roman Incident. The Captain, who was seated across the aisle from me and was about six feet away, had taken a sip of his drink and promptly cough-vomited on me. Seriously, he tasted the whiskey he was holding, and then projectile booted across the bus, conveniently hitting nothing but me. Needless to say, I was not impressed. Luckily, the rest of the back of the bus had seen it happen as well, and immediately laid into him about his apparent lack of manners (and tolerance), and the fact that it was only ten p.m. Though he tried to blow off the incident as “no big deal” (easy for him to say – there was no vomit on HIS shirt, after all), the Captain seemed appropriately chastised. It would soon turn out that everyone had underestimated just how much the man had consumed at the house.

Back at the hotel, we quickly invaded the bar for the after party. The bar was happy to have us, and had a nice mix of indoor and outdoor space, including a few gas powered fire pits outside – a pretty sweet touch. As we first arrived, a guy with a guitar act was just finishing up. The Captain promptly grabbed a drink and ran outside to perform an air guitar solo in front of said performing act. While the reaction to the solo was hard to gauge, we were all impressed (or was that worried?) by the exuberance with which the Captain had attacked the song on his non-existent guitar. Soon after, the Captain – who was clearly gunning for Rehearsal Dinner MVP honors – declared that he could high-kick the top of the doorjamb at the entrance to the patio. Despite serveral suggestions that this might not be the best idea ever, he attempted to do just that. (Note: what you should be envisioning at this point is a six foot three inch white man wildly contorting his slightly overweight body as fast as he could in an attempt to reach maximum kicking height. It was not a sight I ever need to see again.) After a first attempt that was marginally close to connecting (note: very marginally), his second resulted in the Captain crashing quickly – and loudly – onto the floor, ass-first. The bartender, who had previously pointed out that attempting the high-kick would be good for absolutely no one, promptly send the Captain packing. Though a bit of a downer, this allowed the rest of us to enjoy the remainder of the evening and get our drink on in relative piece (and really was probably the best for all involved).

When the bar closed at two, I assumed that it was time to turn in. It turns out I was wrong, and I found the After-After Party in the room of my female roommate R and Jason. This party was anything but a tame, late-night affair, as the seven people I discovered hanging out in the room were taking turns jumping around from bed to bed, including taking running leaps onto one bed and trying to hang on while the mattress dislodged. I had my misgivings about this new found sport – and in retrospect the chance of injury to one or more participants was probably around a hundred and fifty percent – but nevertheless decided to grab a beer, enjoy the music being lovingly selected by Lee (a known playlist control freak dating back to the first time we let him near the stereo during a basement party), and take part in some light jumping around. (Note: Turns out that people who weigh under a hundred and twenty or so pounds are easy, and fun, to throw around.) Eventually around three I decided I’d had enough and it was time to hit the sack. What I couldn’t fathom was that we still had a friggin' wedding to pull off the next day! It would no doubt be difficult to replicate the absurd drunkenness of the night that had just ended, but I was pretty sure that we would somehow need to step up and make it a big time rain-making event.

(to be continued…)

Beer and Economic Postulates

Like most other twenty-somethings, when I first moved to New York I did my own laundry. Doing the wash was in many ways a continuation of a ritual that had started in college (ignoring those times when I would drive two and a half hours back home for something or other and just happened to throw my wash in the car). In my case, doing laundry has always involved heading out to the laundromat, dropping a bunch of quarters in the machines, and reading a book while the industrial strength, side-loading washing machine did its thing. (Side note: I stopped doing my laundry in the dorms after an unfortunate blue-pen-in-the-wash-incident. Though it was completely my own fault, I decided that the extra room provided at the Wash and Blow downtown would lessen the chance the same debacle occurring twice.) I continued this pattern of quarter dropping and reading during my first year in New York, despite the fact that the closest laundromat to my apartment was three and a half blocks away, requiring me to use one of the incredibly manly wire-mesh carts that old ladies like to use to push around their groceries and small dogs. (Have I mentioned how awesome living in Midtown East was?)

When I moved to the East Village, we happened to move in to an apartment directly across the street from a laundromat. Compared to laundry treks resembling the Oregon Trail at my previous apartment, having a place across the street to do my wash seemed like quite the coup. A night soon after moving in, however, I met up with my friend James at the bar. When he asked me how I liked my new place – after cursing me for the near-heart attack he had helping me move in – I mentioned a number of things. In addition to the proximity of fun bars, the young feeling of the neighborhood, and the availability of cheap food, I told him about the laundromat. My mention of a place where one can manually do their own laundry caused James to admit that, mainly out of laziness, he had been dropping off his dirty clothes to have them cleaned by a nice Chinese family for several months in a row. He claimed that he did not feel good about this fact, but it was what he had been doing, and hey, maybe it was more cost effective anyways.

As we began to chuckle heartily at this idea, we looked at each other and realized “wait a minute, what if it IS more cost effective?” Clearly, we were on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in both guilt-therapy and the economics of twenty-something New Yorkers if we could prove our newly formed theorem true. Suddenly, doing one’s own laundry would be a choice not a chore, and perhaps one that was ultimately costing people like us cash that could be better spent on booze and pizza!

With the issue broached, the only thing for two enterprising young graduates to do was order a round a shots (with some beers for good measure), take out a pad and paper, and do a little algebra. After estimating the number of pounds of laundry an average load of wash contained, we multiplied that by the cost in quarters of a doing the laundry ourselves and compared it to what James was typically charged per pound by his laundromat of choice. (I’d insert the exact formula here, but it was way too complex to repeat. I’m not sure if I even fully understood it, it was so amazing.) After all of this hard work and math, and only a slight amount of lubrication (read: at least five rounds each), James was still on the losing end. There was no way we could claim that having the (insert appropriate ethnicity here) people down the street clean our clothes for us was cheaper than doing it ourselves. As defeat seemed to be closing in upon us, and our quest to justify having someone else do basic “living on your own/growing up” shit for us appeared to be dying a cruel death, an old cliché came to mind. What if, as pretentious Wall Street types have liked to say since at least the Bronze Age, time really is money? If this maxim of self-involved work-a-holics and blow-hard bosses everywhere was true, then perhaps all we needed to do was to tweak our Nobel Prize worthy formula to account for the fact that we use our time doing laundry – and that our time isn't free.

As we debated the finer points of this theory, it became clear that other people, namely our respective employers, most definitely did not think that our time was free. Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, the illustrious law firm where I spent my days while trying to find some better place to work, not only thought my time was worth money, but apparently thought it was worth a metric shit-ton of money – the firm had a habit of charging clients around a hundred and twenty dollars an hour for my third-rate legal assistant skills. As for James’ midtown financial firm, suffice it to say that clients that have him as part of their investment team aren’t getting his services for free either. Armed with this new-found realization (and a giant tub of popcorn from the movie theater next door) our theorem virtually proved itself. We soon realized that doing laundry ourselves was definitely costing us cold hard cash, and that we would be much better served by dropping our laundry off and then picking it up when it was done. (Economists might say that we correctly factored in Opportunity Cost to our equation to make it work. We said “whatever, this is awesome!”)

The hard work done, the next day I took my laundry down to the aforementioned easy-access laundromat and, instead of doing it myself, dropped it off. Liberated from the monotony of sticking around to actually supervise the cleaning and drying, and guilt-free about it thanks to the knowledge that dropping it off was better for me than doing it myself, I set off to attack the day. (And by "attack the day," I mean I "went to work" – but still.) Since that day, I haven’t done my own laundry in New York. Instead, I drop it off with the nice family across the street (in my case Ukrainian), and while I sometimes have a sneaking suspicion that clothing isn’t the only thing they launder over there, I am still more than happy to give them twenty or so dollars every two weeks to have them take care of my clothes. And what do I do with this extra freedom I have? These extra two hours or so per week when I am not shackled to a washer and dryer? Whatever I damn well please. And that, for my money, is always time well spent.

Recovery

There is a significant aspect of my long and prestigious – some would say infamous – career as a sports fan that very few people in my life know or remember. It is a secret so deep and dark that almost none that I have met since moving to New York have ever heard the tale, and those who once knew it have mostly forgotten, so well has it been buried. This truth is so shocking that many of you may not believe it, but I promise it is true.

I am a recovering New York Yankees fan.

I know, I know. It may be hard to believe, but there it is – despite my avowed stance as a supporter of the Mets, my frequent enjoyable visits to Red Sox bars, and my occasional vitriol-laced rants against the personal habits and embedded hubris of Yankees fans, I used to be a believer in the Bronx Bombers. It’s been almost six years now since I realized I had a problem, and while I haven’t had any urge to cheer for the pinstripes in many moons, growing up a Yankees fan is still a part of who I was and how I got to be who I am.

The story of how I became a Yankees fan is one that is common throughout sports. I was young and impressionable and the money was good, and the town I grew up in was a Yankees town. While some kids latch onto the sports heroes of their fathers (or occasionally those teams' hated rivals), my dad was not a dedicated fan of any baseball team, leaving me to find my own way in the sport. And so I followed the hometown team, even though those were days when being a Yankees fan was not easy. As I began to follow the team in the late ‘80s it may have been dominated by the formidable Donnie Baseball, but his supporting cast revolved around the likes of Steve Balboni, Jesse Barfield, and a pitching staff of no-name hacks. These were the dark times of meddling by George Steinbrenner, when over-priced veterans were gobbled-up with reckless abandon while the core of the team withered. I lived through and remember (vaguely) Andy Hawkins throwing a no hitter in 1990, only to lose the game four to nil due to some mind-numbing fielding errors late in the game. It was a bad time to be a believer in the team from the Bronx, but I was. (Note: Okay, so maybe when I was ten years old I did not really understand how amazingly awful losing a game where you pitched a no hitter was, but I figured it out within a few years.)

And then, almost without warning, things changed. Steinbrenner was suspended by Major League Baseball, a new GM took over, veterans were shown the door, and young talent was fostered, not traded away – a time of plenty began to descend upon the land. The successful run that started with the epic five-game play-off series against the Mariners in '95 was quickly followed up by the Yanks winning the 1996 World Series in a season which saw the debut of Jeter and the beginning of the rehabilitation of Joe Torre. (Many people may forget, but Torre was considered a failed manager with a few previous teams before starting his Hall of Fame-worthy run with the Yankees.) That first World Championship was followed by a second, third, and fourth in unfathomably quick succession. The good times were at hand and I was a part of it. A faithful fan for a decade, my youthful exuberance was being repaid many times over.

So why then, am I now in recovery? While I’d like to say that perhaps the time for our love had passed, or that we grew apart while I was on assignment in Guam, the truth is that the Yankees abandoned me, and so I abandoned them. In my mind they left behind the players and precepts that had made me love them, and instead embraced something sinister. This break with the past, and the subsequent hardening of my heart towards the Yankees, started with the trade for Roger Clemens before the 1999 season. For years, this man had been built up in my mind, and in the minds of Yankee fans everywhere, as Lucifer incarnate. Initially hated while he was a hard throwing youngster for the BoSox, then reviled as the back-to-back Cy Young winner for the division rival Blue Jays, this was a man who I had been groomed to hate since before I could remember. And suddenly, he was a Yankee. Not only was he a Yankee, but everyone’s favorite gout-sufferer David Wells was the price paid to Toronto for his services. While this rattled my soul and made me question ethics, morals, standards, and the goodness of everything from kittens to sunshine, I was able to rationalize the move as “necessary.” Wells was getting old and fat, Clemens was the re-chiseled hotness (read: juiced), and perhaps the fact that Wells was Big Man On Campus in New York truly was a distraction for the team. My fandom and faith continued on at that point, though it was no longer the pure love of my youth.

The Yanks and I had a few more great years together in college, with homeruns and championships galore, before the massacre of 2001 struck. No, I’m not referring to the loss to the Diamondbacks in the Series, a heart-wrenching blow to be sure, but rather the gut-check response that came that off-season. Suddenly The Boss was back in control, and it was time for vengeance against his team in the face of their World Series loss. (It was totally justified, though. I mean, how could a team be expected to win only three out of four World Series rings? Team chemistry and past service be damned, those a-holes needed to be taught a lesson!) Gone were long-time stalwarts Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill, with Scott Brosius being pushed aside along as well for good measure. In one fell swoop, much of the heart and soul of the team I had adored had been banished to a combination of retirement and St. Louis. To make matters worse, Steinbrenner had signed Jason Giambi, the long-haired leader of the rebellious and uppity Oakland A’s, to be the new first baseman, and for an absurd bounty at that! The horror of it all! Were there no baseball gods left? Did money truly rule everything? Would I have to become an investment banker after all?

After this crushing string of events, and the taste of ashes that it left in my mouth, I became adrift. Left without a favorite team in my favorite sport, I had troubled knowing what to do when the next season came around. I considered giving it the old “college try” and following the Yanks again, but my heart wasn’t into it – my soul had been crushed. Like Moses in the desert I wandered (okay, so maybe not for forty years, but work with me here): I tried to follow the Cardinals, but they were too far afield; I watched the Blue Jays but that just left me feeling empty inside; I even tried embracing Billy Beane, Moneyball, and the A’s. All of these efforts failed to fill the hole and merely served to confuse the hell out of my pro-Yankees friends. Apparently they didn’t get the memo that GM Bob Watson had been canned, the Devil now wore Pinstripes, Wild-thing Giambi had been hired, and Cotton was King. Errr… Cash was King.

While I had yet to find a new team to call my own, the change in attitude of the Yankees, and more importantly the change in my view of them, had given me a new team to hate. With the Zeal of the Converted I attacked everything that was the Yankees. I rooted for the Red Sox, hoped that Clemens’ arm would fall off mid-pitch, prayed for the Knicks to be decent and distracting to New Yorkers – anything to frustrate the Yankees and their partisans. And while this made me feel better and helped start me down the long road to recovery, I still had no team.

This situation was upended in the summer of 2003. As I started a new job, I was thrust into an office of Mets fans and surrounded by newspapers talking about a different and new (to me) New York baseball team. In this environment, a world I didn’t know existed – who knew there were Mets fans? – opened up in front of me. Before I knew it, I was talking Glavine and Piazza, visiting Shea, learning Lazy Mary, and believing in the power of making pitchers bat. My newfound status as a fan of the Metropolitans was solidified in the summer of 2004 when I dated a die-hard Mets fan, one whose dream growing up had been to be the first female Mets third baseman. (Side note: How hot is that?!) As I embraced my new team, its worn down (but easy to get tickets for) stadium, and its gigantic baseball-headed mascot, the next step in my recovery from being a Yankees fan had been taken. While I am still not completely healed from the wounds I received at the hands of the Yankees front-office, I have come a long way in the past six years and have firmly established myself with a new team; I am in a better place. The Yankees were my first team, and helped nurture my love of baseball, but times change and I have moved on. My recovery is going so well that these days I no longer consider Yankees fans to have an indelible mark against their soul and a personality flaw (or at least not an unforgivable one), and I seldom feel the need to break out my PowerPoint presentation entitled Why Rooting for the Yankees is like Cheering for the Communists. This recovery should not be construed as forgiveness, however, as come October – when the playoffs start and I consume a potent number of beers during almost every game – I’ll be ready to chant “Yankees Suck” with the best of ‘em. I just won’t mean it with quite the rage I used to, or with quite the hatred that I feel towards the New York Football Giants. Stupid freakin’ Super Bowl XXV. Man do I hate those guys.

Finnerty's 1.0

After one semi-tortured year living in Mid-town East (motto: now with less flavor than the UES) I was blessedly able to move to the northern part of the east village, only a few blocks away from the uber-useful Union Square subway stop. I moved in with two friends I knew from college – one male and one female. Three years on, the guy has moved to greener pastures in London while the girl and I are still living in the same sixth floor walk-up apartment, having had our third version of a third roommate move in two months ago.

While we moved into our apartment in 2004 – on a hot July day where I kinda, sorta, maybe held a half-dozen of my friends hostage and made them carry junk into my apartment before we could all head down to DC for the fourth – the move to the East Village actually started in the summer of 2003. It was that summer that I really got to know my two future roommates, R and R. I feel the need to emphasize the word “really” here, as R (the girl I still live with) always feels the need to point out that I had, in fact, pledged with the other R during college and met her in the fall of 2000. While she raises two good points, it wasn’t until the summer we spent hanging out in the city that the three of us clicked as part of the same dipsomania-based group. Anyhow, female R still had one year left in school at that point and was living in NYU housing, while male R was stuck in the wilderness and great uncharted area that is Hoboken. For my part, I was stuck in the basement section of a duplex on 54^th street. (Upside of said apartment: huge backyard; downside: no natural light. Seriously, not even a cruddy “garden window.”) Early on in June of that year, just after a few folks we know had settled into various NYU dorms, the three of us were dawn together on a random night thanks to calls from our friend Jason. It turned out that Jason had discovered a new bar right around the corner from the dorm that he was staying in, and that we should all come join him. The bar in question, located on Third Ave between 13^th and 14^th, was Finnerty’s Irish Pub.

The fact that Jason happened across this particular dive on this particular afternoon was really a stroke of dumb luck fortuitous timing: his dorm had had a fire drill at 2pm, which he took as a sign that he should blow off his afternoon session at Stern and find a bar. Luckily he didn’t have to go more than about a hundred yards to find one that fit his fancy. When R (the male) and I arrived at this new found oasis (separately, of course), we were greeted with one of the divey-est dive bars imaginable. To enter and begin quenching our thirst, we had to first go down six steps from street level – always a risky move. Inside the bar, the ceiling was about eight feet high in most places, stickers were spread indiscriminately about the walls (especially behind the bar), and five raised tables with stools provided most of the seating. Adding to the ambience of the place was a pair of dartboards in the back, an internet-enabled jukebox, and $7 pitchers of bud, bud light, and some less-than-designer – but still drinkable in mass quantities – stout. Having gone to school in Central New York (yes, “Upstate New York” actually has several regions… no seriously), we instantly fell in love. From that day forward, Finnerty’s became our de facto home base in the East Village. Oh sure, our group of seven or so would often hit up Nevada Smith’s for Wednesday Kareoke or some place like Bar None for dollar drinks on ladies night, but Finnerty’s was the “go to” watering hole, and it was here, during that summer, that R, R, and I became good friends.

When the summer of 2004 rolled around the male R and I decided we both wanted to live somewhere totally 100% more awesome than where each of us were living. Since this is NY, and more roommates = more affordable, I suggested that we try to get the other R involved in our new apartment too. She was surprisingly okay with the idea of living with two former frat guys who each outweighed her by a solid hundred pounds and had ten inches plus in height on her, so we started looking. The place we eventually found may or may not have been the best place we looked at; none of us can really remember because we were all so winded from hauling ourselves up the stairs to the top floor that first time. But the living room was huge and the bedrooms were um… bedrooms, so we considered it. Given our past history, the only logical place to consider such a decision was Finnerty’s. Conveniently, Finnerty’s was only a block away! So off we went, and as we debated things about the apartment – such as the fact that none of us had been able to locate the bathroom – we drank. After about an hour of aforementioned cheap pitchers and a discussion that gradually came to revolve around only two issues (the affordablity of the apartment and its proximity to Finnerty’s), we called the broker and told him we wanted it. Truthfully, we might have been slurring our words by then, but he got the point either way. And that, as they say, was that. Or rather, that’s the reason behind why I am here, and why the East Village has come to so deliciously dominate my life over the last few years.