The Blushing Greyhound

The Blushing Greyhound, despite its benign components and demure shade, can be even more dangerous than a midnight bus to Chinatown. Buckle up, pup; this summer-licious spritzer can bring on one hell of a bumpy ride.

For me, the Blushing Greyhound will henceforth be known the drink that made a hole in my wall. It's such a mild concoction, refreshing and tart. Add salt on the rim, and it becomes a Salty Dog. Add two jiggers of Jamison, two shots of Eagle Rare, a muddled strawberry vodka mojito, a ginger-beer cocktail, and two glasses of wine, well, then it just becomes a bitch.

THE BLUSHING GREYHOUND

2 oz. Grey Goose vodka
5 oz. fresh-squeezed pink grapefruit juice

served in a highball glass over ice

The Bee's Knees

A touch of tart swaddled in velvety sweetness, Bee's Knees, could you possibly be called anything else? What's in a name? Who cares. What's in a Bee's Knees? Now you're talkin'.

I have a special kinship with the honeybee. In part, my bond is based on being a Leo. Since my star is the sun (top that, eh?), and the honeybee loves himself some sunshine, it's a natural alliance. I love their furry little coats and the fact that they are quite officious workers, yet still vindictive little fucks. Couple that with my recent discovery that the honeybee is basically "a flying penis" (thanks, ol' Mr Insight, for that pointed tidbit), and perhaps you understand my affection for the little bug. Also, as previously noted and often revisited, my favorite spirit of all is gin.

The Bee's Knees is what I wish cough-syrup tasted like :: sweet, but not too sweet, refreshingly citrus, soothing with its kiss of honey and purifying with its cool gin chill. Then again, if cough syrup tasted like this, I'd be licking subway poles around the city just to catch the constant cold. Perhaps things happen for a reason.

THE BEE'S KNEES

2 oz. of Plymouth gin
1/2 oz. of honey syrup *
1/2 oz. of fresh-squeezed lemon juice

*honey syrup :: mix equal parts honey and boiling water,
stir until honey is completely dissolved, then refrigerate until cold

garnish with a lemon twist and serve cold,
on the rocks in a double tumbler glass



* * *

And, an old timey comic for kicks, found in the Fort Wayne Sentinel circa May 5th, 1914::

It's too small to really see, but basically the skinny man asks the fat man for Bee's Knees for dinner. The fat man tried to procure them, and in the end, after chasing that buzz, they both flee the scene, defeated and stung.

Sounds a hell of a lot like my Monday night... Maybe someone should check the bathroom door.

The What Already Was

She agreed to meet him for non-descript after-work outing, i.e. post-breakup peace talks subtitled Fool Me Twice. That's right, against all odds and even more good council, she was considering reunification.

"After all," she reasoned as she waited for the buzzer to ring, "he loves me more than anyone ever has -- and actually wants to take care of me."

Every day for the past week, she'd become more and more into the idea of a reunion. She'd been through a slightly traumatic time just days ago involving accidental painkillers, a dark and handsome Mercedes S Class, and a man old enough to be her father. She was looking for someone to step in and take control. And ol' Mr Insight, for better or for worse, had always been right by her side.

The buzzer rang.

He was dressed in a vintage blazer, a green sweater, and a green tee-shirt. And excess of verdancy. Spring. Rebirth. Hope.

St. Patrick's Day.

She could tell he wasn't sure if he could hug her hello, so she stepped up and was suddenly in his arms. She had loved those arms.

"Couldn't it happen again?" she wondered, grabbing her coat as they headed downstairs.

They ended up at Revival, a small, dank little duplex of a bar just east of Union Square. They sat out in the back, a sort of plywood garden. He drink Jameson on the rocks and she, white wine.

She never knew what kind of white, but neither did the bartender.

"I'm just so glad to sit next to you," he told her, hovering his body near hers, terrified to risk a touch.

"It's nice," she exhaled. "I missed you." The words slipped out of her mouth, and she wasn't even sure she meant them.

"God, if you even know how much I've missed you," he said, reaching to hold her hand. She let him and, without thought, her thumb gently brushed back and forth across his palm.

After a drink, the sun began setting, and the garden sprouted green with the Celtic-philia of a St. Paddy's Parade let loose.

"New venue!" She let him pay, for once, and they headed out in the twilight.

The bar's light caught her attention from across the street. Shoolbred's. They were pulled in by a fireplace glowing on the back wall. Two whiskeys later, they had scooted their big leather armchairs as close as they could. A makeshift loveseat. Peace talks.

"I think we can make this work." Again the words came from a place in her she couldn't quite map. "There was too much good," the same small voice continued. Cait decided to call it Eagle Rare, after the bourbon she sipped between these odd declarations of hope. "Too much good to walk away."

Cait once dated a man who told her, "after the third glass, the wine drinks the man."

She leaned in and the ol' Mr Insight kissed her hard on the mouth.

Who was drinking whom here?

He had ordered a greyhound, made with Grey Goose and fresh-squeezed pink grapefruits. He had specifically requested the grapefruits be pink.

"New venue!"

They walked a mile downtown to East Side Company Bar and ducked into a booth in the back.

"You need to stop playing around and get a real job," she told him. Eagle Rare with a whip.

"I know. I will."

"And not some stupid pipedream pothead job like glass blowing, for God's sake."

"I know. I was thinking -- maybe talk therapy?"

"Jesus Christ."

"I could be a guidance counselor."

She ordered a Bee's Knees.

"Cause that's what she is," he slipped in after her order.

She ordered a Gordon's Cup.

"I could sell my art and gingerbread."

She was definitely drinking too much.

He was keeping pace.

"I will always love you, Cait."

She ordered a big glass of water.

"New venue!"

Home.

He followed her upstairs and she fell into an incredibly deep sleep. The next morning, she awoke to an enormous pair of eyes staring into her own.

"I'm so sorry," were the first words she heard that day.

"What for?" she asked, her breath stale and entirely unbecoming.

"You don't remember?" He was completely taken aback, and for a moment thought this was a dark-humored joke of hers. But her face was entirely curious, entirely free of resentment.

"I punched a hole in your bathroom door."

She checked the door, and sure enough there was a hole as large as a cantaloupe. Suddenly Cait remembered a few lines from one of the first poems she had ever written.

Or how a heart can explode
like a watermelon
run over by a freight truck.

"This is not a good thing." She looked at the crumpled wood, a tossed away lunch bag of a door. "This is not a good thing for us."

"You just," he started arguing, "you just don't communicate to me! I asked you last night what you meant, what you meant when you said we have fifteen layers between us. When you said you didn't feel anything. I asked you what you meant and you just rolled over and fell asleep. You needed to communicate with me!"

"So you punched the door?"

"You wouldn't talk to me!"

She wasn't even mad, just defeated. And annoyed she'd have to go to her own personal hell, Home Depot, to buy a new door in the name of botched communication.

"This is just so sad." Her tone was quiet, even. "Because now there is physical proof of what I should have known all along. We will never be good for each other. This will never work. We will never get back together."

"I will always love you."

"Never..." Her voice trailed off.

He stood up and walked to the dining table, put on his pants, his green t-shirt, his green sweater, his blazer. Verdant again, he walked to the door.

"I guess I should leave."

She didn't look at his face, just at the door and the imploding crater it held.

"Goodbye."

The Gin Gimlet

The Gin Gimlet is like a child -- not all that complex to conceive, but stunningly easy to screw up along the way.


The Gin Gimlet can be served straight up (in a martini glass) or on the rocks (in a tumbler). Either way, it should be very, very cold and have a sort of granular quality -- a pixelated texture owing to the drink being just this side of liquid, a single warm breath past frozen. You can make a good gimlet from Plymouth's, from Gordon's, or even from Bombay, though, for me, Tangueray is always the best -- the complex mix of citrus undertones against the juniper base adds a rounder depth when paired with the fresh squeezed lime juice in the drink. And if you are willing to slum with Rose's lime juice, well, you may as well use house gin and sleep on the barroom floor.

THE GIN GIMLET

2 oz. of Tanqueray gin
1/2 oz. of fresh-squeezed lime juice

garnish with a lime wedge and serve incredibly cold,
either in a tumbler on ice or straight up in a martini glass

Chill and Serve :: the East Side Company Bar

Dating at the East Side Company Bar :: love may indeed be all you need, but strong cocktails, warm lighting, and the conspiratorial aphrodisiac of drinking in a secret nook never hurt, either.


A hole in the wall that transforms into a glittering art-deco jewel of semi-speakeasy calm, the East Side Company Bar is what you wish Employees Only, Death & Co, Milk and Honey and all the other liquored-up lemmings of Prohibition-envy could be :: a decidedly chill nook with obvious yet incredibly drinks, bar keeps with the skill to earn those old barber shop arm bands, and a gimlet like a lime night sky poured into a glass.

As far as a venue for first dates, the East Side Company Bar is a singularly stellar choice. Discreet to the point of vague modesty, the bar folds out from its plywood doors into a tin-tiled box of red, silver and candle-light. The only downside to dating at the ESCB :: you're practically contracting yourself to a goodnight kiss. Wait, did I say downside?


EAST SIDE COMPANY BAR :: 49 Essex Street at Grand Street, New York, New York

The What Could Have Been

"Alright," she thought as she headed out for her first blind date since her horrifically emotionally saturated break-up two weeks prior. She brushed herself off, more metaphorical that literal, but a definitive gesture all the same. 

"Here I go again on my own."

He nipped the endless choruses of Whitesnake in the bud with his kiss on the cheek.

"Hey Cait," he said, red hair a-fluttering in the late winter wind. "It's great to meet you."

"It's great to find this place," she joked, referencing the fact the New York cocktail lounges, if anywhere you'd ever want to find yourself, where rarely in locations you could ever honestly find by yourself. This one, in particular, was relatively easy. Four plywood doors on a deserted street in the last bastion of uncool Lower East Side, marked only by a gold shrunken name-tag. "East Side Company Bar," it whispered.

She felt lucky she had even arrived at all.

"Funny thing you chose here," he said, pulling back from the slightly pre-emptive hug he'd given her. "This is the one place I can get us in."

Apparently he had thought her profession as a publicist enabled her city-wide access. She thought this over, quietly. Maybe he was right. She planned to storm Milk & Honey should there be a date two. All the cards on the table, she thought, feeling slightly empty-handed.

They went inside.

She ordered a gin gimlet; he ordered something far too feminine with enough rum to bring back her PTSD of tiki cocktails. She told him the story of Waikiki Wally's, and immediatly wished she hadn't. She was now that drunk girl with publicity access, she reasoned. All her secrets were out and none of them were even all that true. "It's a bitch when your subtext is all lies," she thought.

They both ordered round two. The same. He ordered for her. "Hot," she thought. "Damn hot."

He put his hand on her leg. She laughed at his jokes. They talked about Los Angeles, why she hated it, why he loved it. He owned a Vespa. She loved Vespas. He aspired to cars. She hated cars. Hot / cold / hot / cold.

Third round.

They talked about jobs, Manhattan. He lived in a duplex in Soho. "A duplex in Soho," she thought, "is probably worth more than my honor."

She was drunk enough to think she had honor, and in a solely monetary sense, no less.

They left the bar to get arepas.

"I was raised Mormon," he confessed.

"Are the magic dundies on then?" she asked, three gimlets to the wind, sheets far from mind.

"Of course not. I'm lasped. I have a very estranged relationship with my family."

"Oh. Well, mine is full of heretics. So you'd all get along just fine."

He smiled, apparently finding her future fire and brimstone beguiling.

"Would you like dessert?" the waitress offered after three rounds of arepas and wine. It was late, and half the tables had cleared. She was praying for a "no thanks just the check."

"Yes!" he said, ordering the chocolate pudding.

He fed Cait with his spoon.

"I would like to see you again," she said, between him feeding her those dainty mouthfuls. She felt like a bride on the sly, but couldn't resist the automatic intimacy implied in such a simple gesture.

"Yes," he said, his fingers smoothing over her right knee.

He walked her home, kissed her with intentions as dark as the chocolate, and she responded just as deep, but braced with a bitterness, too.

This wasn't a connection, but a glimpse into something dangled. The carrot the rabbit will never bite. The rabbit the greyhound will never capture. Something in the chase of things, the pudding one arm's length away. The open mouth, the dish-washed spoon.

A possibility un-pursued.

He will call four days later. She won't pick up. She won't know why, but even know, fumbling with keys outside her front gate, she has a strange, specific sense of what will happen. She also knows what won't.

And somehow she find solace in this ::

Here I go again on my own
goin' down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.
An' I've made up my mind, I ain't wasting no more time,
but here I go again, here I go again,
here I go again, here I go,
here I go again

Come Here Often?

Another day, another blog -- but this time let's not just talk of first dates, of compromising networking and of adventures in random promiscuity (though, honestly, wasn't that kind of fun, even if only in a peeping-tom sense?).

This time, let's go beyond all that frippery; let's also talk about the bars :: the bars behind the first dates, the compromising networking, and, of course, the random promiscuity.

Any good story blooms both setting and character study. Here goes, then, in the name of the story -- of any good story.

This round's on me.