So
Hoboken, well what can you say about Hoboken? It’s a funny place.
I’d always heard of Hoboken, one of the many ‘burbs of the late, great New York
City, but the thought of it actually being a place, with people, stores and
bars; well that just eluded me. A few years ago, a very good friend from
college moved there and so began my sporadic, yet always fulfilling,
relationship with the little big city across the Hudson River. Now, I
don’t know much about the place, I mean as an autonomous space where people
live and work, where they buy groceries, the DMV, the location of a post
office, all that civic stuff. But I do know how they play!
Ah, the
good times at the cool names: the Yard, Hobson’s, Texas Arizona, Lou and Jays
(my personal nickname for the place). All bars, all cheap (compared to
the inflated chaos that has overtaken all the drinking spots in the city) and
all with their own sort of characters, flies, locals and dirty deeds behind the
bar, in the bathrooms, down in the basement and naturally, after they close and
lock the doors. Instances of entertainment involving the “juice” like
these are nothing new to me, really. After all, I did spend my most
insightful years of life learning how to hold down the sauce in Chapel Hill, NC
(somewhat of a notorious drinking college town), so I’ve been there, done that.
Only,
Hoboken’s style is one that I always gaze upon in admiration. Doing
things I know I shouldn’t do has become my mission in this life and of course
that damn place didn’t help me at all. With that said, I should recall
the 2007 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Round 4 (I think), where my fabled
Tar Heels took on the Georgetown Hoyas, marking the 25th year anniversary of
the 1982 NCAA National Championship game played between the two. That
single match, probably the most notable in contemporary college basketball
history, vaulted my Tar Heels to the front of the line as one of the teams you
let it ride on and put a stink in the taste of Georgetown that, well, they'd
wanted to get rid ever since!
Hangin’
out at Hobson’s, on a Sunday afternoon, watching the game with my Carolina
buddy and a new found friend, we watched as those damn Hoyas let us lead the
whole game and smacked us down in the last five minutes like cheap whores
trying to short change a pimp! Now, part of me knew I should have just
swallowed my pride and accepted the L, got my mess together, crossed the street
and took that damn PATH train home, but this was Hoboken! That night we
was drankin’! I don’t mean like getting a strong buzz and having a few laughs
at the expense of some innocent bystander who’d just spilled his drink on his
way over-priced Armani button-down. I mean, I probably would have
attempted to drink a light bulb if I came in a transferable liquid form
(alcoholics, lushes, winos and all sorts of hard drinkers know what I’m talking
about).
At one
point in the evening, after what was to be our first round of bar hopping, I
weighed the depth of my inebriation and any and all possibilities of making it
to work the next day. The scales broke! Those two girls and I
literally drank a hole in the liquor supply of northern New Jersey for the next
week. Common place for a young man in his prime on a Sunday night, says
anyone who has ever frequented or even lived in the birthplace of Frank Sinatra
and baseball.
But, I
digress. What is it about Hoboken that I am hopelessly in love
with? It could be that this quaint, semi-suburban town of commuters and
locals has the highest number of bars, and/or establishments committed to the
disbursement of alcoholic beverages, in one square mile, than any other place
in the US? Could it be that everyone I know who lives here is over 25
years old and has learned how to get their shit together after doing shots of
Jack Daniels and snorting elicit substances off some putrid, dirty bar until 3
am, to somehow eke out a full day’s work or at least phone in at a decent hour
to inform “the man” that they were sick? Perhaps it’s the abundance of
“recreational materials” that keep people busy in the wee hours of the night
that, in the manner of the fabled mafioso said to have lived in this bastion
of “Jersey-style” decadence, make you an offer you can’t refuse? Yes, no
and maybe?
Of all
these main attractions for big kids, ages 21 and up, the most profound was the
drama that swelled and ebbed like a tidal wave, on a nightly occurrence in this
town, that kept me paying the extra $3.00 train fare to get the hell away from
the passé art scene of Soho, over-hyped, over-priced and tired ass clubs in
Chelsea and the desperately fading underground music scene of the Village to
flock to the “Land of Midwestern Yuppies” and the premature attendants of AA
meetings. The drama that went down was monumental!
The
ridiculousness of Ridgemont High was way too under-aged and the controversies
at “Melrose Place” were marked up, over-priced nothings involving silly
jackasses way too into themselves. Hoboken is where things you could only
experience in real life (or maybe would watch in some Art House flick full of
heroin addicts that takes place in the East Village during the late ’80s) go
down. For fear of exposing players in the many games of sex, drugs and of
course Rock ‘n Roll inherent of underground life in Hoboken, I leave the
explicit details of my memories and stories up to your imagination (and if you
yourself happen to remember some rather 'vulnerable' occurrences that I might
know of that went down there, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone).
To assist
you in setting up an itinerary for your own personal, mental tour of Hobo city,
I ask you to imagine these “scenarios” (in no necessary or cognitive order):
doing something naughty in a bathroom stall with a broken door and about an
inch of piss on the floor while trying to pee yourself and attempting to fold a
suspicious looking dollar bill to safely hide away in your pocket, jacket or
purse, because someone is banging on the door, screaming “I gotta fuckin’
pee!”; sitting at a bar, drinking a pint of Sierra Nevada, watching over-aged
frat boys do tequila shots by snorting the salt, taking the shot, then mashing
the lime into theirs eyes, then looking at you like you got a problem because
you have the look of “Damn, I’m fucked up, but not that fucked up” in your
eyes; waking up on a friend’s couch on a Monday morning and realizing
that phone call you made to your boss was just a dream and running to the
bathroom to drop to your knees and puke a gastric cocktail candy apple red in
color, fearing it blood but then realizing that you’d eaten about 4 slimy and
rotten chili peppers at some restaurant bar after eating an undercooked burger,
while drinking the biggest damn mug of beer you’d ever seen, all the while
wondering what time you should say goodbye and catch the train to go home and
sleep it off; walking into a bar, already having drank too much and a guy
coming by in a flash and punching some other, totally random guy in the fucking
face for absolutely no reason, knocking him unconscious and showering blood all
over the floor, then being swarmed by 4 very attractive women (all claiming to
be EMT) to help mop up the blood gushing out of the poor saps head, all the
while you staring and continuing to sip your beer before considering, “Hey, you
want to get out of this mess and go to Louise & Jerry’s before last call?”
Oh yeah,
most important, in your little trip to Hoboken in your mind, remember that if
you go outside to have a cigarette after last call (because the shitheads in
New York City have convinced everyone that smoking indoors is a sin and so you
can’t smoke in bars in New Jersey anymore either), you’ve just fucked up and
it’s time to call it a night, because they are not going to let you back in and
you can’t buy beer anywhere! Of course, if you’re with someone from
Hoboken in your dream, it’s okay; they’ve got lots a beer at their place for
the late night and probably a little present to give you when you get home.
-
Hoboken, New Jersey (Spring, 2007)
