“Somebody To Love,” or Write Me a Love Poem Freddie Mercury

Down The Hatch is not your average sophisticate bar. It’s not even a swank bar at that. It’s roughly some weird cross between the Delta House in Animal House and a honky-tonk lounge in Nashville. It’s located in the West Village, it features four or five fiftysomething inch plasma screen TVs, a beer pong table, twenty-five cent buffalo wings, and if you head to the back where the restrooms are, there is a placard directly across from the women’s room that reads “Proudly celebrating debauchery for fifteen years.” Yet still, though awash with three dollar Bud Lights, backwards baseball caps, and bad tans, there is a ready faction of young women at this bar that are trying to look like something out of Sex and The City. I know this because before the end of the night, I will be re-buffed by one of them (along with my friend, Slim The Man) as they all surround each other in a force field of empowered, post-grad, estrogen-flavored femininity and await their other well-dressed male friends to arrive. These gentlemen, frankly, appear to be as shallow as they are. But those guys are the “real men” and Slim and I are shrugged off as another product of the frat boy set; despite the fact that I look nothing like an Abercrombie reject. That’s the ultimate price you pay when you party at Down The Hatch: stoke or be stoked. The real irony is, of course: what the fuck are these wannabe yuppies doing here in the first place?

You don’t look for a girlfriend at Down The Hatch. Similarly, you don’t look for a boyfriend either. Down The Hatch has only one functionalist use: it’s a substitute frat house for all of the local N.Y.U. kids. It’s also the only frat house I’ve ever been to where you have to pay five dollars before you can get you hands on a Yuengling. I’m at Down The Hatch to reunite with some old friends from college: Slim, Jean Grey, the Dark Phoenix, and Captain Amazing. For a few hours on this particular Friday night, we are all still in college and, from my perspective, it seems like nothing has changed: everyone’s having a good time and I’m not getting laid tonight. This place very clearly is not my scene. While I have no problems returning here in the future, I’m doing so knowing full well in advanced that no girl who hangs out here regularly will ever sleep with me. At one point in the evening, Bret Scallions, the former lead singer of Fuel, shows up and no one will make a big deal of it – this is in part due to the fact that no one gave two shits about Fuel after their first album. Scallions will be able to enjoy anonymity and I even get a few good words in with him. I tell him that I dug his early stuff (which is honest -“Shimmer” was a catchy single). He is, for the most part, a nice, congenial guy. But then he will become distracted. That distraction will come from the group of about five or six sorority girls who gather before him as we talk and, in one split second, I don’t exist. Never mind the fact that these girls were hitting puberty when “Shimmer” first hit the airwaves; he’s going to enjoy the fringe benefits of being a C-List rock star. I, meanwhile, am being told to take my new found love of a wonderful Brooklyn band called The Hold Steady and bug off.

New York remains a curious study on sexual politics. Jim Gaffigan has that immortal joke “Have you ever noticed that when you’re single, all you see is couples? And then when you’re in a couple, all you see are hookers?” On one hand, it seems as if everyone is rushing into monogamy these days, while everyone else is trying to channel David Bowie from 1972. Most of those who are in monogamy and under the age of twenty-five seem to be in one of three mind-sets: “I’ve never been so happy!”, “I’ve never been so miserable.”, “I’m more or less indifferent.” For my own part, monogamy and I are not getting along at the moment; in fact, we’re not speaking to each other at all. This is perfectly fine with me. I don’t get monogamy. Monogamy doesn’t get me. Yet, for some reason, everyone else young seems to understand it in one way or another. Somehow, a contemporary twenty-one year old is as apparently as well-versed in love as a man ten years married. Something in this seems ludicrous to me when I think about it. And yet, as I’m looking back out at the whole Down The Hatch tableau, I wonder about all of the rest of us single folk and the raucous adventures we all seek out. I should probably contextualize this a bit: ironically, I was in this same bar earlier in the week, at an after-party for the company where I work. Before the night was out, I got to watch several less-than-attractive men make out with women that are way out of their league, I was actively hit on by one of my assumedly straight male co-workers, and I was treated to five female co-workers licking vodka off of each other’s cleavage on top of the bar, followed by activities that would qualify the evening as a casting call for Girls Gone Wild.

Does watching something like this still excite me? Not completely. It more so just reminds me of how far many people will go for attention. Which is the great irony of many single, young people here: many of us look for somebody to love. Is this why we all choose debauchery and “balls off the wall” partying – to hope the one holding us while we do a keg stand is Mr./Mrs. Right? Maybe. It seems a little paradoxical (or quixotic) that we would find someone in all of this mess. But then again, isn’t it as arbitrary as assuming that by the time we are all in our thirties, we’ll all be settled and married with our first kid on the way? The question shouldn’t really be: “How long do I have left?” It would be better as: “What can I do while I have the time to do it?” Sometimes I wonder if my generation even completely gets that.

Before the night is out, I will spot some lonely, cute blonde stirring a martini in the corner of the bar. She has her head balanced on her palms and looks like she’s waiting for Godot to show up. To be honest, he’ll probably show up any moment, because she is ridiculously cute. I contemplate playing the part tonight, but opt not to. My voice is hoarse. I’ve had my two beers. It’s two in the morning, and I have to be at work at 10:30. Tonight, I put on my coat, say goodbye to my friends, and cab it back home to Brooklyn.

It’s not my time yet.

And I don’t want it to be.