Dark Room

IT WAS A LATE fall evening, and I was drinking Olde English on the Lower East Side with my friend Aaron. The malt liquor did its diuretic trick, and we were soon searching for an alley.

"There!" Aaron said, pointing to a dim-lit, glass-strewn crook on Rivington.

"Perfect," I replied, stepping toward a graffiti wall.

Tinkle-tinkle went Aaron's emptying bladder. Mine refused to follow. At times I am pee shy, and nothing short of waterfalls prods me to action. Still I squeezed, hoping to nudge out a few drops. I was drunk. I squeezed hard. The wrong end opened up. A line of slick, brown bad news shot into my underwear, running down my jeans-covered legs.

Oops.

"Come on, man, let's go to Ludlow Bar," Aaron said. "We have to meet some friends."

It was too late to beg off, too late to buy new underwear. So with great caution, I waddled to Ludlow Bar, a sauna-hot subterranean dive known for drunkenness and dancing. Inside, I bowlegged it to the bathroom. I promptly removed my skivvies, cleaned up and kicked back Budweiser, soon wiggling my gone-commando butt to hiphop.

In its heyday, that epitomized Ludlow Bar: the kind of joint you could enter with shit-stained drawers and still rock it solid. Eventually, the Upper West and East Siders laid claim to Ludlow Bar. It was a short journey to the end and, of course, a new beginning.

Last month, the former piano storage room known as Ludlow Bar returned-remodeled and renovated-as Dark Room. Step down a flight of stairs and enter a bisected bar. To the right, a spacious, handsome room adorned with rock walls, dark wooden bar and Gothic purple paintjob. A makeout nook hides by the bathroom, near a mirror with burgeoning graffiti:

"I live on the other side of the world, but this place is my local," reads one scrawl. "I lost the best week of my life here," reads another.

If your best week includes half a bar. Soon after wandering into the larger room, the adjoining space and makeout nook is sealed. Nothing like a trompe-l'oeil to feign more customers, right? On a recent evening, denim jackets, torn jeans and tousled hair congregate. They sit in plush curved booths, colored black. Above them, cone-shaped lights dangle, emitting soft red light. It's almost sleazy-sexy, in an I'm-going-to-cheat-on-my-girlfriend way, but drinkers instead look like warmed-over McDonald's burgers.

Still, Iggy Pop, Pixies and Libertines songs are easy on the ears, as is happy hour: three dollars, draft and well, from 6-9 p.m. Beware: Put on sunglasses before ordering a pint.

"I hope the 'Dark Room' is not giving new life to irony," says Aaron, whom I've convinced to revisit our bygone haunt.

"It's like God beaming down and commanding you to get drunk," I say, pointing at a whiskey bottle shining like the Holy Grail.

Dark Room may be the name, but the main bar-long enough for 20 lonely drinkers and connected to the secondary bar through a partition-is lit up like an ad campaign for halogen lamps. We squint and order several Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen. They're drawn by an aloof young man wearing a pin-festooned jean jacket.

"Damn, I mess this pour up at least once a day," the bartender says, setting a one-fourth foamy glass to the side.

"Why?" I ask. It has been a long time since I drank a quality-controlled pint.

"I'm always so anal when I pour," he says.

"Oh, that's fine," says Aaron, who would drink beer wrung from a bar's slop towel.

"No, now I get to drink it myself," the bartender says, smiling. He hoists the beer lightly-kidding, not kidding?-then sets it behind the counter.

We return to our table and sip wheat beers, pondering what Ludlow Bar has become. For starters, I say, there's no pool table. Sweaty dancers have been replaced by sedentary hipsters, says Aaron. And the place feels so sleek and spic-and-span, it insists you clean up after yourself, I note, napkining up a beer spill.

But Aaron cracks best: "You'd probably feel guilty leaving your underwear in their bathroom." o