Chapter 8: Nights in Manhattan

People might say their city "comes alive" when the sun sets. That doesn't really apply to Manhattan. The streets, shops, eateries, bars-you name it-are almost always crowded. Crowded with locals, tourists, people from Jersey (yes, they get their own category), foreigners, et cetera.  And with them comes the noise, garbage, bad fashion, unattractive offspring, and general sense of entitlement. Sometimes it's more than irritating, but mostly it's fascinating. 

So generally, what do people do at night in Manhattan? I don't know, but let's talk about bars.

Manhattan has a lot of bars...A LOT. Bars come and go here-some more quickly than others. When I first moved here, it was almost a full-time job to hit all these places. But in the name of exploration, I had to do it. There were indoor/outdoor Moroccan bars with sod floors, perfurmed rooms and intricantly carved tables. Mod bars whose walls were made up of raised white lacquer dots, had uneven floors that messed with your equilibrium. Ridiculous bars with bras hanging from light fixtures and mounted dead animal heads entertained tourists, sorority girls, and lecherous man alike. Plenty of bars with filthy floors, bad music, scuzzy patrons, and drunk bitches fighting outside, kept things interesting.  

I happen to like weirdly themed bars fashioned to look like the inside of a Pan Am airplane, a William Burroughs-type library, a spacey bar whose bathrooms have transparent doors that turn opaque when opened or closed, and a tiny bar whose name implies they are "big". Two of my favorites come to mind. One was a bar called Androgyny. I think it was in Little Italy of all places. It was a dive bar with a small neon sign out front. It had a fairly non-descript interior, apart from the low-rent trannies playing pool on two very neglected pool tables. But the real stand-out were the small glass bowls of cocaine strategically placed on many of the tables. Yes, I said cocaine. Believe me, we were very consfused by this open display. While this pre-dated any season of "To Catch a Predator", there was no way I was going to touch it.  

The other was a bar called Double Happiness that had one of the first make-out parties before it became a short-lived trend. It was so much like my 7th grade graduation dance that I wanted to run home and put on a ruffled lace-inset dress, fingerless gloves, and style my hair into an asymetrical bob. And in a perfect parallel, my date that night was also destined to become a gay accountant.

Add that to my regular fondness for jazz haunts, late-night choruses of show tunes, modern-day speakeasies and burlesque, drag shows, showcases of depravity, cavernous dive bars connected to dark alleys (perfect for lascivious acts), and many more places I'd either a) like to forget or b) will deny I have even been to.