Kat Tales of the City: Part I.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day in New York. I can’t say that I’ve ever been to the parade, but I can claim one St. Patty’s Day belly up at an Irish bar with my pals from college, The Pig N Whistle on 47th Street. I have, however, spent a lot of nights walking these streets and avenues tottering my way to the bat cave on 19th Street I rented. Tonight, after dinner with Vanessa at Shima Sushi on Second Avenue, I got to witness to the revelers tottering their way from bar to bar. To be sober in New York on March 17th is a whole different experience.

Insert any year here, location Manhattan. Drinking and making merry on these evenings that call for it, like tonight for instance, Halloween, or New Year’s Eve, the faces are different, but the actions remain the same. Girls cry, (I passed three on my way home, one sobbing into a cell phone, another to a gay friend about his lover’s bad behavior, and an Asian twenty-something blubbering in her native tongue. I couldn’t translate what she was so upset about, but I could keenly surmise that Cosmopolitans were the catalyst). A kid on a skateboard stopped to vomit between two parked cars. The streetlights were out at 10th & 2nd Avenue, and traffic was beginning to pile up, the two cops walking the beat more concerned about a group of college boys drinking 40s wrapped in brown paper. My brother and I spent one New Year’s Eve drinking beers out of paper bags, but we had straws. We knew the score. A lengthy line had gathered at 11:30 PM outside the infamous McSorley’s where, if memory serves me correct, you have to drink or get out. Your selection: beer or whiskey. Non-alcoholic beverages are not to be found unless you count the tap water from the tiny bathrooms in the back. Even when I was a regular bar hopper, I refused to cue up, preferring a good local place with a well-stocked jukebox and a bartender who knew me. This trait follows me. For example, all week long, I’ve been anticipating the Trader Joe’s opening on 14th Street, and tonight, the line for purchases wrapped completely through the store right out the front doors, an employee holding a sign with a large green clover announcing “Line Ends Here”. Discouraged, I left. Clearly, waiting is not my forte.

As I trotted Lily around the block for our last evening’s pee-mail, I wondered why people were shivering outside of McSorley’s so late. And I think, it must because they haven’t yet found someone to make merry with tonight, that stranger who you hope will hold the answers. Although the odds are long, there is always that expectation of something more. We hear those fairy tales of one-night stands turning into the love of one’s life. I know these stories intimately having friends happily married who have met this way. So we wait in the cold, biting wind, at an hour when “nothing good can happen” my mother would say, with the hope that Some One Wonderful will fall in love with us over a pint of Guinness. And we’ll totter home, happily ever after.