How to Not Ruin Your Life When You’re Drunk
By any credible metric, New York is one of the top two or three drinking towns on the planet. Want to choose from a selection of over 200 vodkas in a joint controlled by Moscow mobsters? New York’s got you covered. Or maybe you’d rather sip a Pink Lady while getting your nails done beneath a vintage chrome dome hairdryer. No problem. If you’re more of a mood to drink Burgundy out of baby bottles while eating fondue, that can also be accommodated.
But New York’s drinking life does have a flaw. Sports bars, or rather, lack thereof. And before you get your angry pants on, I’m not talking about the plentiful number of cozy joints where you can knock back cheap drinks and watch the Yankees win, the Knicks lose, and the Rangers play that funny sport on the ice with sticks (curling is it?). Those exist, and they’re lovely. In fact if I had to choose a city outside Europe to watch a soccer match in, NYC is head and shoulders above the competition. But I’m talking about the modern sports bar, those expansive palaces of beer and sweat, where there are flatscreens everywhere you turn, along with giant plates of artery-clogging foodstuffs and every sporting event in the western world, as well as a few pretenders (I’m looking at you, cricket).
One such place did arrive, like a visitation from an angel, in the fall of 2009. The Ainsworth — a 6,000 square foot pleasure palace in Chelsea that boasts more TVs than a Best Buy showroom. The folks who own the place will tell you the Ainsworth isn’t so much a sports bar as it is a gastropub that caters to sports enthusiasts. You say tomato I say it’s a fucking sports bar… an upscale one, sure, with its rustic-chic décor and pork chops drizzled with apple chutney and a balsamic reduction, but a sportsbar nonetheless. For a while it was the best place I’d found in the city to watch virtually any sport and any team at any time… like my beloved Phillies.
Problem is, in addition to its TV collection, the Ainsworth also has one of the sexiest bar- and wait-staffs in Manhattan. Why is that a problem? Because at the very goddamn top of my ironclad laws of how not to ruin your life while drinking is “don’t shit where you eat.” Where by “shit” I mean, “have or attempt to have sexual relations with the staff,” and by “eat” I mean, “get drunk and eat chutney pork chops and watch the Phillies.”
Because the awful truth is that putting the moves on a waitress at your favorite bar never, ever works out in your favor. Ever. If it doesn’t go south out of the gate, the chances are stacked astronomically against you that things will work out in the long term. Partly because even good relationships have hard times. And where do you go when your relationship is having a hard time? Your favorite bar! Where the Phillies play! And you can eat balsamic pig. Whether it’s your shame reflex, the management or a restraining order, you are setting yourself up to lose your favorite place.
Now I’ll admit that my life revolves around drinking more than most, but for me, losing a favorite bar is like losing a great friend. As a mistake, I’d rank it up alongside such drinking no-no’s as getting behind the wheel of a car or singing karaoke. There are other things you should not do, of course. Which brings us somewhat circuitously to my advice for you. To wit:
How To Not Ruin Your Life While Drinking
1) Don’t Shit Where You Eat
We’ve been over this. You may get laid a few times, sure. Maybe even have a nice mini-relationship. But when, inevitably, things go south with the hottie who slings drinks at your own personal Cheers, she goes back to work and tells you to go to hell — hell being anywhere but her bar. And then where are you going to go to watch Phillies games and eat pork chops drizzled in apple chutney and balsamic reduction you fucking moron? WHERE?!!! Oh, god, this is too painful. Moving on…
2) Don’t make big decisions involving women
This applies to all decisions more significant than what to eat or what movie you should see. Once a serious subject is broached (Should we move in together? Keep the baby? Change our Facebook statuses to “it’s complicated?”) you need to do some quick math in your head. Tally the ten most recent times you and this girl were together. Were you drinking heavily on seven or more of those occasions (i.e. 70 percent)? If so, the answer is no. Whatever it is she wants, if you need to get wasted around this person to find them tolerable, the answer is no. Unless she wants to break up, of course.
3) Carry rubbers
Like my dear old grandma always used to say before her liver finally gave out, nothing takes the shine off a drunken roll in the hay faster than a baby. Or an STD. Or a baby with an STD. While researching this item I Googled “drunk sex” and came across a rather interesting video made by a cute recovering alcoholic in which she waxes nostalgic about the days when she used to get blotto and screw every guy in sight. Among other things, she claims she loved drunk sex because it’s “sloppy and crazy and messy and no one cares and you’re bleeding out of different orifices.” Been there. Luckily you can avoid the vast majority of the problems associated with awesome drunk sex, just by tossing a bag over Mister Happy at the right moment. But you can’t do that (nor are you likely to be willing to wait) if you’re not holding. So be holding.
4) Don’t consume forty shots of vodka and take a nap.
In the trade, we call it “riding the John Bonham express,” next stop Pulmonary Edema, everybody off the train. And I hear that town sucks.
5) Avoid Cameras
Hard to overstate the importance of this one. Thanks to this thing they call the Internet, there’s a high probability that any remotely embarrassing thing you do in front of a camera will be available almost immediately for scrutiny by millions. Indeed, a Google search for “drunk photos you don’t want to be in” turned up nearly 11 MILLION results, including those great ones of Mister Braveheart himself, Mel Gibson in a bar with two blondes about a half hour before he called a female cop, and I quote, “sugar tits.”
Remember, cops carry cameras. Just ask Nick Nolte.
Same goes for video. It might even be worse. You just know some smartass is going to remix it and it’s going to go all viral and… Oh, let’s not beat about the Hasselhoff…
And while the Hoff was pathetically wasted, there’s something that goes past pathetically wasted. And that thing is called Brad Ferro, the now-infamous Queens schoolteacher who claims to have been so befuggered at a North Jersey bar a few years back that he has no memory of cold-cocking Snooki. And that guy’s not even on a reality show, he was just near one. Now If you do happen to be on a reality show, you have cameras around you all the time. In this case, you need to resort to a little-known corrolary to rule #5.
5a) If you are on a reality show, don’t be The Drunk.
Oh but wait, silly me. You’re on a reality show. That means you already ruined your life. As you were.
You should also bear in mind that while my rules will keep you out of most of the major forms of booze trouble, they are by no means an ironclad guarantee. Alcohol has strange and mysterious powers to create havoc wherever it is applied. Which is, after all, why I love it so. Let’s be careful out there, OK? Ta ta for now, I finally found another great place in New York that plays the Phillies. I’ll never forget you again Rule #1.
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