Buster's Garage
Last Wednesday I played "Beirut," one of the filthiest ways to shed brain cells. The rules are fairly straightforward: Set up cups. Fill with beer. Throw a ping-pong ball toward your competitor's cups. If the ball lands in beer, the competitor drinks. Repeat. The game ends when every cup is empty. Or the contestant is unconscious. This may explain its regular status on Buster's Garage's event calendar.
Tribeca's Buster's is where frat boys turned financial analysts go to drink to forget-and, sometimes, revel in-the fact that they're financial analysts. The bar is situated across the street from the Landmarc eatery, in a former auto-body repair shop.
At the entrance, where a grease monkey once sized up an Audi's mysterious clank, sits a bouncer. With a flame-covered stocking cap, amply inked arms and a black t-shirt, he resembles a Biohazard roadie. His name is Larry, and while he scrutinizes my ID and my friend José's, I ask, "So, how do I get a game of Beirut going?"
"You going to buy a pitcher of beer?"
"Of course," I say.
Beirut doesn't start up until 9, he says, but since Buster's is kinda empty at 7, it's our lucky night. "Give me five minutes; buy your beer and I'll heat up the room for you," he says. He gets up to reconfigure the enclosed patio into the end of my sobriety.
Sidling up to the bar, we order an $8 pitcher of Miller Light from a man with gelled red hair and a black shirt. Blue-state status means nothing here: Georgia Bulldogs memorabilia shares wood wall space with a car hood spray-painted "Rusty was here." The jukebox offers Lynyrd Skynyrd. Plasma-screen TVs broadcasting three kinds of ball-based sport are the only clue that we're north of the Mason-Dixon line.
"You ready, guys?" Larry asks, cranking open the patio door (the repair shop's original garage entrance).
He shows us to a plywood board resting on two tables. Water-filled pint glasses anchor the ends, each containing a bobbing ping-pong ball. We take a stack of 20 plastic cups and, on opposite ends, set up dual, 10-cup triangles.
"How much should we pour?" I ask Larry.
"Oh, depends on how fucked up you want to get," Larry says. "Me, I like to fill it up about that much." He holds his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart.
José follows his advice with a heavy hand.
I go first and, blessed with a white suburban youth's b-ball skills, miss wildly. The ball rolls beneath a table, gathering black schmutz. José drowns the ping-pong in water.
"Does that make you feel better?" I ask.
"Yes," says José, a man who once stopped patronizing a restaurant because its bathroom soap dispenser was empty. His shot careens off the table, cozying up to a family of dust bunnies.
I retrieve the ball. "Make sure you put it all the way in the water," José says. Now I laugh: The cups contain plain tap. The first dunk may appease germ fears, like covering your mouth during a SARS outbreak, but this charade has the hygienic efficacy of bathing in a septic tank.
I nonetheless oblige, then calmly toss a wet ball into one of José's cups. He drinks. He shoots. He scores. I drink. And the evening is stuck on destructive repeat.
After three pitchers and two rounds won by José (elapsed time: 47 minutes), we're launching balls into the pleated chinos of button-downs circling the women, rare as a 4 a.m. taxicab. Needing to slow down, we peruse Buster's full menu, which includes pulled pork, rib-eye steaks and fried-cheese products. We select wings. They arrive steaming hot and spicy, but $11 for 11 wings? I guess there's a testosterone surcharge beneath Houston St.
After eating, two men wearing collared shirts and shit-eating grins ask for a challenge. We agree. In the summertime, say Brendan and Kevin, three Beirut tables are set up.
"It's super competitive," says Kevin. I can't tell if he's kidding or if grown men really attach significance to a game played by teenagers after their parents fall asleep.
We set up our cups and start throwing. Our motor skills, by now, are those of a newborn. Ten short, belly-distending minutes later, a loud, sickening plop sends us to defeat.
The victors' reward? Watching us swallow their leftover beer. Ten years and a college degree ago, defeat would've tasted a whole lot sweeter.
180 W. B'way (betw. Leonard & Worth Sts.),212-226-6811.
-Joshua M. Bernstein