Gut Instinct

I can’t tell what impresses me more: The costuming, or the floppy belt sported by the dude on the right. Belt loops!

“I didn’t want it to come to this,” says the baby-faced policeman, walking up to our beer-swilling Brooklyn stoop party one sultry Saturday night, “but you’re drinking outside.”

Our assembled inebriates eyeball one another, wondering, What in tarnation? We’re inside a gate, quietly sipping brewskis. Nearby, a block party rages with partiers screeching like cats in heat. By comparison, we’re positively monkish.

“Excuse me,” I ask, emboldened by bitter, caramel Middle Ages IPA and strong, golden Pranqster Belgian—style ale, “but what law have we broken?”

“No one filed a report,” the cop says wearily, while his likewise boyish cohort taps his feet. “We’re trying to cut down on outdoor drinking and public urination.”

“But we’re doing neither,” I say. My tinkle’s for toilets or potted houseplants—why waste my natural fertilizer?

“You’re drinking in public view.”

I’m flabbergasted. Along with rolling blackouts, broiling heat waves and Chinatown’s unholy stink, outdoor drinking is a summertime staple. Bohemian Hall. The Boat Basin Café. Franklin Park. Heck, the city nets dump trucks of dollars in sidewalk-café fees, permitting patrons to booze in sight of grannies and bugaboo mommies alike. Why curtail open-air tippling? It’s a moneymaker—oh, money.

“What’s the statute?” I inquire, as haughtily as an heiress demanding a second coat of fingernail varnish.

The policeman rattles off letters and numbers seemingly pulled from a Scrabble set.

“We’re in Brooklyn,” I exclaim incredulously. “Stoops are a way of life.” Banning stoop drinking siphons away Brooklyn’s essence. What’s next, a 2 a.m. last call? A cleaned-up Coney Island? No trans fats in my Jamaican beef patties? Um, crap.

“Do you live here?” the cop sighs, sick of my inquisition.

No.

“I need to speak to someone who lives here.”

My French pal Bati steps forward, brandishing his ID like an Olympic torch. Bati is Quaalude calm, perhaps owing to his European temperament—or that he’s blitzed away worries with his father’s homemade moonshine, a fruity rocket fuel. Bati and the cop chitchat. He jots down the Frenchman’s information.

“Are you giving him a ticket?” I inquire, my pressure-cooker temper simmering.

Nope.

“And what if you gave him a ticket? What does that mean?” I am yenta, hear me roar!

“Not much,” the cop admits. “The fine is only $20.”

“So is this just another temporary crackdown? Like when people got tickets for sitting on subway stairs or jaywalking?”

The policemen play mute.

“Fifty dollars. It cost me $50 for riding on the sidewalk. And I only rode five feet from my apartment’s gate to the street.” I fought this ticket in court, but the judge—clearly unswayed by my blue pinstripe suit—upheld my ticket with “guilty” and a gavel thwack.

“Well—” the cop starts, before I cut him short.

“Let me tell you a story,” I begin, like a drunken grandfather lecturing a captive grandkid audience. Several years ago, I rode the subway to Brooklyn’s leafy Prospect-Lefferts Gardens to attend a party. With fireworks hidden in my jacket, I splayed my feet on a neighboring seat and opened a Corona. I was cold chillaxing until cops yanked me and my smorgasbord of illegality off the train.

I awaited judgment with armpits sweatier than the beer in my hand.

“Did you realize you had your feet on the seat?” one meaty cop asked.

“Uh, sure.”

“That’s against the law.”

“Uh— ”

“Throw the beer and the fireworks away. You’re getting a ticket for your feet on the seat.”

“Quota enforcement,” I say, addressing the drinking police. “Now what happens if we keep our beverages in plastic cups?”

“That’s still drinking in public view.”

“But last month, a cop told us it was OK if we poured the beer into plastic cups,” chimes in Emily, Bati’s schoolteacher wife.

The cops are silent, their fight stripped away as if they’re schoolyard bullies who’ve been de-pantsed to their tightie-whities.

“Look, just don’t do it again,” the instigating cop says, shaking his head, a beaten man. The law enforcers shuffle into the noisy Brooklyn eve, searching out lawless drinking and illicit urination. We stomp inside, crack cold Yuenglings and King Cobras, crank the stereo’s thumping soul tunes and drink deep into the night, getting royally pissed far from the prying eyes of the NYPD.

Woo! Is it hot in here? I feel so…hot. Who knew shell necklaces and pasty tongues were such firecracker turn-ons?

Holy heck, it’s the beer patrol. I’m truly stunned.

It’s like he won a contest to see who could open a single eye the least.

In three seconds, that youngster will attempt to insert that beer can into his—her?—gaping maw and fail horribly, negating a orthodontics-filled childhood.

Ah, age 17. How I miss you so. Except for the bacne. And undescended testicles.

A school bus trip to a forgotten borough gets to the meat of the matter

It was an offer most folks could refuse.

“Show up at the City Reliquary at 11 a.m. Saturday, and we’ll ride a school bus…somewhere,” was my fancifully mustached pal Matt Levy’s pitch. He was orchestrating arts collective Flux Factory’s inaugural Going Places (Doing Stuff) outing. Rent a school bus, give the guide free reign and then ask passengers to depart to destinations unknown.

“Sign us up,” I reply, for I’m a man who enjoys mystery—meat and otherwise. My girlfriend and I arrive in Williamsburg with my stomach growling like a muffler-less Mustang.

“I told you to eat dinner,” my girlfriend says.

“I did.”

“Beer is not dinner.”

The previous eve we visited the recently revived International Bar (120 1/2 First Ave. betw. 7th St. & St. Marks Pl.). Though the grit and communicable diseases have been Mr. Cleaned, the drinks remain panhandler cheap: I pounded $4 whiskey-Schaefer couplings in lieu of solid food.

“Well, let’s eat before the bus leaves,” she says, leading me to cupcake-mad Cheeks Bakery (378 Metropolitan Ave. at Havemeyer St., Williamsburg, B’klyn; 718-599-3583). I order a strawberry scone the size of a mouse’s torso.

“Three dollars,” the counter lady says without irony—surprising, since we are in Williamsburg and the price is a joke.

I disappear the crumbly scone in two bites, then I investigate a bodega’s choices for sustenance. Amid Doritos I discover Engobi—caffeine-infused Energy Go Bites crackers, bearing an orange $.99 sticker reading value priced. The flavor is “lemon lift,” which inspires as much culinary confidence as Cheez-Whiz.

For experimentation’s sake, I purchase a bag and crunch brittle, scoop-shape crackers. Engobi tastes like puffed Fruit Loops rolled in crushed Lemonheads candy, sticking to my teeth like peanut brittle. Enough Engobi: It’s time to go places. And do stuff.

“Who think we’re going to Manhattan?” asks Matt, as adults pretzel into the cramped kiddie seating.
Crickets.

“Brooklyn?”

Zip.

“Queens?”

Nada.

“Bronx?”

A couple hands.

“What about…Staten Island?”

As travelers clap and hoot like A-Rod smacked a World Series grand slam, we bounce across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the first stop, Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s grotto. It’s an artificial stone-and-seashell cave containing religious iconography, much like our next stop at the Castleton Hill Moravian Church.

“We’re going to a labyrinth!” Matt announces.

The group cheers. Then we discover that this labyrinth shares little with goblins or David Bowie: This labyrinth is a circular walking path for meditation.

“I’m not feeling too meditative,” I tell my girlfriend, sliding away to my ulterior motive: visiting thin-crust pizza shop Joe and Pat’s (1758 Victory Blvd. betw. Manor Rd. & Northrop Pl., Staten Island; 718-981-0887). Our tour craves pizza for lunch, so I accompany Matt to lend my expertise in ordering ’zas (about $20 apiece), including pesto, broccoli rabe, arugula and, umm…

“What’s scungilli?” Matt asks.

“Conch,” replies a chubby-cheeked counter boy.

“With garlic,” Matt says.

Twenty minutes later, our adventure posse attacks the crisply charred pies like fallen Slim-Fasters. In a cheesy tsunami, the pizzas—creamy pesto and crunchy broccoli rabe are clear winners, with briny scungilli far behind—are reduced to grease-stained cardboard.

“Sated,” I whisper to my girlfriend, rubbing my belly.

“I doubt that,” she says.

Fattened up, we mosey to the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art. We learn how a child actor from Cincinnati, Ohio, married a chemical industrialist and created this verdant center for Himalayan art in Staten Island, complete with Zen-calm terraced gardens. Now filled with knowledge, too, our motley crew departs to our final stop.

“Who’s ready for beer and meat?”

Matt asks.

“I am!” I shout.

“When are you not?” my girlfriend adds.

The bus disgorges us at 19th-century Killmeyer’s Old Bavarian Inn (4254 Arthur Kill Rd. at Sharrotts Rd., Staten Island; 718-984-1202). Though this is my second visit, I’m still in awe of the beer hall. Stuffed critters decorate ornately carved wood, while dirndl-wearing waitresses deliver half-liter mugs of wheaty, lemon-dunked Franziskaner Weiss ($6.50).

“Staten Island tastes good,” I say, sipping myself a beer mustache.

A perky blonde waitress saunters over. My meat-averse girlfriend orders a salad, but I go whole hog with a sausage platter ($15) and a “beer stick.”

“You eat it with beer,” the waitress instructs, delivering my thick, mild, chewy sausage. It’s lip-smacking with a liberal stripe of tangy mustard.

“Look, I’m smoking a meat cigar,” I tell my girlfriend, inserting a brown length into my mouth like Groucho Marx.

My girlfriend shakes her head, then she wisely averts her eyes when I receive my fat, nearly pornographic tubes of bratwurst, knackwurst and weisswurst. I knife clean juicy wheels, spin them in grainy mustard, chew and repeat, like I’m the hungriest, happiest worker on Staten Island’s heart-attack assembly line.

Little does she know, but my heart is found at the bottom of that glass.

I love this action shot: her hair in motion, his hand reaching for the promised land, and random dude just sippin’ on his Bud. Hells yeah, yo, that’s a Friday night.