Drunk of the Day: Me

Hey, all. I will be in Portland, Oregon, until next week, drinking myself into a delicious personality and expanding my belly with marvelously fatty food. And bacon-topped donuts. Expect more hoo-ha next week. Whee!

Drunk of the Day: Party Time

Y’all ready to party? I’m ready to party. There’s a party in my pants—they’re coming off for you.

Drunk of the Day: Gimme a Bit More Tongue

She will get her New Year’s kiss, one way or the other. Yes, yes she will.

Gut Instinct: Driven to Drink

“Sweet heavens, I need booze,” I whisper to my friend Angela on the phone.

“Why?”

“I just spent 13 hours copyediting. And now”—I look around the fluorescent-lit office, where red-eyed drones are mingling—“they’re doing Jäger shots.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I know.”

“Come to Greenpoint,” replies Angela, a perky Ohioan who toils at a medical-advertising firm. She sexes up rheumatoid arthritis medication. “We’re at the Diamond.”

Oh, joyous jelly beans, The Diamond (43 Franklin St. betw. Calyer & Quay Sts, 718-383-5030; B’klyn)! This cute Greenpoint drinkery combines two of my passions: microbrew beer and grandpa-appropriate shuffleboard. When my retirement arrives, with liver spots and dementia, I will so kick AARP butt.

“I’ll be there in a jiffy,” I say. Since my fellow wage earners are transfixed by liquor like snake-charmed serpents, I easily slither away and descend into the subway. F train. L train. Twelve minutes walking. There—the neon diamond glows like a firefly.

Angela and I embrace. After utilizing words like exhausted and stab, I excuse myself to self-medicate. An older-skewing crowd rocking dark jeans, low-cut tops and button-downs—and jobs that help ’em afford $6 brewskis—throngs the half-moon bar. The Diamond’s chalkboard-written selections are separated into sessions—lower alcohol—and strong, sobriety-annihilators like my pick, the Smuttynose IPA. The New Hampshire beer’s floral notes meld with bold maltiness, creating a sipper that rapidly sands my rough edges.

I find Angela manning a picnic table outside. We’ve been friends for nearly a decade. In our early NYC days, we hungrily explored dive bars and dirt-cheap dumpling stalls, staying out until the sun licked the horizon. My tastes have remained disreputable. Hers have molted into something fancier and increasingly foreign.

“When are you going to buy an apartment?” Angela asks.

“Buy…?”

“You should get pre-approved for a mortgage. In late 2009, I think the market’s going to bottom out.”

My idea of bottoming out, I suppose, is far different from Angela’s. “I need another beer,” I say. I buy a summery Southern Tier Hop Sun.

“When did we start caring more about mortgage payments than partying till dawn?” I ask.

“It’s inevitable.”

Also inevitable is my next beer, a can of bitter, creamy Dale’s Pale Ale ($5). I try playing shuffleboard, but a bald man is combating a bra-less blonde.

“Shoot again,” he coos.

Tonight, it’s apparent, will bring zero pleasure. I cut my losses at Cinderella time and bid Angela good-bye. Like numerous New Yorkers, we make future plans we’ll break. At a bodega I buy a 16-ounce Zywiec beer—light, Polish and a buck-fifty. I hail a car.

“Where’s Crown Heights?” the driver wonders. “Today is my first day.”

“Wow,” I mumble. I’m oddly elated to take a cabby’s virginity, before insolent passengers, costly gasoline and paltry pay wreck him. I crack my beer and get cracking. “Take the next left.”

“Thank you,” he says, following my instructions with Golden Retriever obedience.

“So how’s your first day?” Small talk is one of my unavoidable tics, like biting fingernails or sniffing dirty socks.

“Brooklyn, it’s…big,” he says, like someone in awe of a 6-foot meatball sub.

“Where are you from?”

“Connecticut. I drove a car there.”

“So why come to New York?”

“It’s a long story.” He sighs and scratches his head.

“We have time.” Even a long-winded story’s better than 1010 WINS’ news-radio blather.

“Well, my wife and I had problems, and she’s always wanted to move to New York,” he starts, his voice trailing off. “So she left me. And then moved in with her sister in Greenpoint.”

“So now you’re living with her?” I ask, hoping for a Hollywood ending.

“No. I’m with my cousin. My wife doesn’t know I’m here. I just came to New York three days ago. I want to get back together with her…but I don’t know how. Take a right?”

“No, a left.” Silence. I sip my beer and chew his confession. Few men admit to weakness; even fewer admit to failure. It’s a symptom of our haughty hubris, which never lets us ask for directions even—and especially—when we’re irreparably off-course. But my contrite driver is requesting a road map to redemption. Sadly, he’s chosen the wrong cartographer. Just because my mouth functions doesn’t mean the words work.

We arrive at my bedraggled brownstone. “Nice work,” I say, tipping him $3. “It only gets easier.”

He turns around. Our eyes connect. His are Hershey’s brown and watery, filled with far-off longing. “I hope so,” he says. I nod and walk inside, eager to steal some dreamless sleep before tomorrow’s first harsh light.

Restaurant Week: Deal or Dud

Oh, lookie here! I weighed in with my thoughts about Restaurant Week (a time in NYC when hoity-toity eateries sell prix fixe grub for super-cheap) for Metromix. The article’s about Artisanal, a place known for cheese. The moldy kind. Read it up!

Drunk of the Day: Frat Boys Deluxe

Is posting a picture of frat boys cheating? Perhaps. But he’s wearing a tee that reads “cornjerker” and he’s riding a man who appears to be wearing oven mitts. It’s pure, drunken poetry. Or the sign of America’s downfall.

Drunk of the Day: Murder Time

This picture feels like the moment before the guy on the right learns that the guy on the left is a serial killer, and his drink is drugged.

Gourmet Q+A: The Professor of Beer

In my latest Gourmet column, I interview a professor of beer. Yes, a professor of beer. You want to read all about it, don’t you? Here’s your chance!

Drunk of the Day: Umbrella Time

Long-haired hippies: They’re as unpredictable and exciting as cornered Grizzly bears.

Drunk of the Day: Cyclops

No, this picture is two thumbs up.

Gut Instinct: The Science of Eat

During my sexless youth, I was comrades with a kid named Schmidtler. He was well-muscled teen, a wrestler with acne who drove a red Ford Escort decorated with Phish stickers. His dictator handle dated to second-grade art class, when he pencil-sketched Aunt Jemima and her sweet syrup.

“You’re no longer Schmidt,” a twee youth taunted, referencing the nascent artist’s last name, “you’re Schmidtler.” Schmidtler’s nickname stuck like winged insects to tacky tape.

To combat his nasty sobriquet, Schmidtler became angelically kind. Especially to me, one of my Ohio high school’s token Hebes. “Need a ride to school?” he’d ask. Or: “Hey, want to come to my family’s Hilton Head timeshare?” But his greatest gift was proffered during sophomore-year chemistry class: “Want to be my lab partner?”

I accepted the proposal as greedily as a mongrel snatching a fatty scrap. I’m abysmal at science. Formulas and equations are more mind-boggling than that Mini-Me sex tape. Compared to me, Schmidtler was a beaker-boiling Louis Pasteur. His Bunsen burner brilliance saved me from an F; perhaps my dreidel-spinning ways would help Schmidtler lose his -ler?

Fifteen years later, my friends recall Schmidtler by his mistaken moniker, and I still find science confounding. How do air conditioners and deodorant function? Who cares! Just keep me cool and stink-free. But lately, I’ve paid lip (and stomach) service to science. At Tailor, Eben Freeman’s transforming white Russians into booze-bathed Rice Krispies, while Sam Mason’s painting pork belly with miso butterscotch. The West Village’s Smith’s cloaks steamed eggs with gorgonzola-flavored froth, and Daniel’s mixologists are converting Cointreau into gelatinous caviar. I applaud the experimental urge, but if I want foodstuffs crammed with chemicals and congealers I’d rather dine at Mickey D’s.

“But we’re having my birthday dinner at WD-50!” my friend Julie commands. WD-50 (50 Clinton St. betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts., 212-477-2900) is Wylie Dufresne’s long-running innovator. It specializes in scientific novelties like popcorn soup and eggs Benedict consisting of deep-fried mayo sided with an egg-yolk cylinder and a Canadian bacon wafer.

“No.”

“Yes,” she counters, “and we’re going to try everything.”

“Everything?” I reply, waving bye-bye to my hard-pennies. If it were up to me, we’d get our molecular kicks at Sunlight

Bakery (160 East Broadway at Rutgers St., 212-608-8899). Orange-hatted women ladle opaque batter, raw pork, cilantro and green onions into a metal drawer. It’s stuffed into a steamer and, through alchemic magic, morphs into squiggly noodles. For $1.50.

“Yes, everything.”

“Desserts too?”

“Multiple,” she says.

At that, I escort myself to my duty-bound birthday meal on the Lower East Side’s Clinton Street. WD-50 is a spare, muted eatery filled with high-backed booths and hip music kept murmur-quiet to facilitate conversation and mask my gasps upon spotting prices.

“Twenty-nine dollars for Wagyu beef with coffee gnocchi!” I sigh. For $10, I could dunk a broiled Tad’s steak into a sloshing java mug.

“Oh, don’t be a cheapskate,” Julie says, as our six-member party orders an appetizer and entrée apiece.

“Looks like I’m selling my body to science again,” I say—my going rate is $50 an MRI, and $400 buys a two-day sleep-deprivation experiment—before diving into fried quail with a breakfast-esque banana tartar ($16) and corned duck with rye crisp ($14), like a deconstructed deli sandwich.

“I could score a mound of corned beef at Zabar’s for what this costs,” I want to complain, but why ruin this special day? Instead, I quell my kvetching with tender scallops in a spiced-bread consommé ($29)—think Christmas by the sea—and pink lamb with pretzel consommé ($30), a mixture of salty snack and protein that sits queasily in my stomach. I drop my fork and burp, like the star of an ’80s Alka-Seltzer commercial.

“No stopping,” Julie says, noticing my reluctance to overload my gullet. “It’s dessert time.”

I’ve never savored sweets—a point of consternation to an ex-girlfriend, who seemingly subsisted on chocolate, Diet Coke and bilious disdain for me—but WD-50’s desserts ($14 each) plant sugar on a pedestal.

Lemongrass-infused cornbread pudding, cherry-covered chocolates and luscious pistachio ice cream vanish in a snap. Shortly, we’re gifted a bill that’s eerily similar to my parents’ ranch-home mortgage.

“Credit card,” I sigh. I toss my scratched MasterCard onto the table and burp lustily, as my rumbling gut makes me painfully aware that I’ll pay for this meal in more ways than one.

Drunk of the Day: Why White People Should Be Shot

White people are horrible. Horrible! I am all for euthanizing our youth.