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.