Bank of Phone Booths
WITH INDIAN SUMMER'S final, feeble heat-seeking arrows flying off-target, it's imperative to spend every drunk-making minute outside. Soon, New York City winter will whistle down the avenues, turning patios, gardens and rooftops into refrigerators. Yet what outdoor venue deserves the last licks of warmth?
By late October, the Delancey's rooftop garden lacks its chlorophyll luster. Astoria's Bohemian Beer Hall & Garden has been totally Czeched out. The Gowanus Yacht Club is nearly ready for dry-dock. So why not call an old friend, the phone booth?
Here's the situation: Every blue moon, it's neat to awake post-bender, scratch red-rimmed eyes and laugh about $60 spent on tequila shots. But come month's end, when rent looms large and ridiculous, and drinking is most definitely in order, bars are verboten. The antidote: Make your own. In a phone booth.
Welcome to a recent Friday night. Along with three friends, I attended a fine, catered fiesta in which lithe, pierced women liberally distributed Jägermeister shots. No matter how they tried, however, the tattooed lasses failed to distribute frigid, licorice hell before the party's end. While thick-necked brutes ushered sloppy patrons outside, we snuck into the kitchen. Inside, manna: Unopened liters of booze, freshly washed glassware and a distracted waitstaff. While my friend Joe attacked the cherries, our remaining threesome jumpstarted a chain of events featuring-
1. Five Jägermeister bottles
2. Four large backpacks and briefcases
3. Two shot glasses
4. Loose morals
-which aided us in absconding from the fête loaded with tools necessary to fashion a makeshift phone bar.
Justin, Joe, Andy and I ambled to the corner of 1st Ave. and 1st St., outside of One and One. The sports bar cum Irish dive is a decent respite for those with flash cash for five-dollar pints. But Brooklyn rent is not as cheap as it once was, and our pockets were ailing. Instead, we set up bar at a phone booth, enclosed from prying eyes on three sides.
"The shot glasses," Justin said, brandishing matching receptacles and setting them on top of the phone receiver.
"The Jägermeister," Joe said, removing a liter of chilled hangover.
"My stomach," I said, pouring myself a weighty measure, clinking the handset for luck and, with a deep gulp, finding both the cure for common sense and a new favorite bar.
Over the next several hours, our quartet became bartenders stuck on permanent buyback.
"Excuse me," Andy said, tapping a portly, bespectacled gentleman, "but Chuck Yeager is on the phone for you." He motioned to the phone booth. Several brimming shots of black evil awaited.
The gentleman stopped, puzzled, more wary than a female in an Upper West Side frat bar.
"No, no, no, we're safe," I said, sucking down a shot to assuage. No matter how jelly my legs are, I mentally telegraphed, we're not going to tie you up and slip an apple in your mouth.
Our bonhomie was reciprocated, and soon we gained another accomplice in the toboggan ride to inebriation.
The phone booth's charms were legion. No bartender to tip for cracking a PBR. All the smoking we wanted, none of the ban. Proximity to friendly patrons stepping outside One and One for a toke. And, best of all, no national-debt-crushing tab.
But the downside, ooh, she was a doozy. Without a bartender to dissuade us from taking that 10th shot, rationality became but a suggestion, and a flimsy one at that.
"Why don't I see how many shots I can do in a minute?" I suggested, and Joe responded with four rapid-fire pours.
"Paging Chuck Yeager! Paging Chuck Yeager!" Andy shouted, before dashing toward the phone for a Superman slurp.
Most ignorant, thankfully, was the bar's doorman. We stood 10 feet from his ID-checking eyes, yet he refused to acknowledge our phone bash.
"Mind your own business. That's why I love New York City," Joe said.
But I hated gravity. Unlike our last party, this affair came to a crashing conclusion: After slamming down my shot, a glass tumbled to the ground, shattering into several dozen twinkling shards.
"What do we do now?" I asked.
"What else?" Andy said. "Steal another shot glass."