So today’s my last day in New York. Shall we continue where we left off?
From The Faucet, we made our way to Pearl Street. Despite being chilly, we definitely walked, because it was always faster than taking a bus. And in May (even if it had snowed that morning), it’s not like the weather is generally bad enough to warrant a bus ride to an outdoor mall — even though sometimes it snows in June (and one year, maybe even in July; the weather here is weird).
“We should go to Gun Slingers,” Grant suggested while we were walking. For whatever reason, I had ended up beside him and my Big. A minute before he broke out in that suggestion, they had been talking about her plane ride the next morning.
His suggestion was met with various levels of distaste from the rest of the party and a few other bar suggestions. “No, we should go to The Downer.” “Around Midnight?” “The Med!”
And of course, these suggestions were also met with various levels of distaste.
“We should let Hannah or Lauren decide,” Caitlin piped up before turning back to face us.
I shrugged and turned to Hannah.
“Okay, I’ll pick,” she conceded to me, “But you pick the next one.”
“Sure,” I nodded.
She stopped for a minute, “Well, don’t we always go to The Sea Lion first?”
“Yeah.” Chris rolled his eyes.
“Well, why break with tradition now?” Hannah smiled and started walking again.
“Does that mean we’re ending with purple drinks at The Basement?” I smiled. It wasn’t just this particular group that had that tradition, either. In general, everyone started at The Sea Lion (because it’s awesome), The Downer (kamikaze shots were always on special), or the Irish Pub (but only if it was a special occasion, like a twenty first birthday or a graduation). But regardless of which of those bars you started in, you always ended up at The Basement for purple drinks. I’m trying to think of a good way to describe them… I’ll come back to it.
“Obviously. We’re also going to the Pub to kiss the mascot.” Her statement was matter of fact. Like I said, you just can’t fight tradition. It’s just the way things are done around here.
The nice thing about starting the night on Pearl, regardless of if you were going for The Sea Lion, The Downer, or the Irish Pub, was that you always headed to the same cross street: Walnut and Tenth. All three of those bars were within a block of each other. Although, The Downer and the Irish Pub were both actually on the mall on Pearl, whereas The Sea Lion was actually over on the cross street of tenth and Walnut. Around Midnight and The Med were right there too, as well as The OC’s. The only bars that were a bit out of the way were Gun Slingers (the cowboy bar) and O’Neil’s (another pub). Of course, there were like six other bars on Pearl Street as well, but these were the most frequented by any of the groups I hung out with (aside from the few on The Hill, but those were either the start of the night, like we did with The Faucet, or a separate night entirely, usually one of the week nights that wasn’t Thursday).
And so we all followed Hannah over to The Sea Lion. We made it there within the next five minutes, probably, and then we waited in line for about five or ten minutes. The line was actually better than it usually was on any given Friday, but that may have been because a lot of people were already gone for the summer. I guess it really depended on who you knew that was graduating.
Or so I thought…
It may not have been that bad from the outside, but once we were all inside, it was packed. Recently, it seemed like the crowd of usual Sea Lion goers were transferring over to Gun Slingers (similar to Grant’s suggestion that everyone go there rather than the tried and true Sea Lion as the starting bar). Of course, even knowing that, you would question the sincerity of that idea today. The Sea Lion was packed. Not that it isn’t normally, of course, but the sheer number of people was almost claustrophobic.
Grant gave Hannah a little, albeit gentle, push and grabbed on to me to get the three of us through the crowd. It was nice to have someone around to protect us. Caitlin and Morgan grabbed a booth while Hannah, me, and the boys all proceeded to the bar. Mike saddled up with Hannah, asking her what she wanted. The other guys fended for themselves through the crowd. I went to pull out my debit card when Grant stopped me.
“What do you want?” He smiled and pushed my card back toward me.
“Um… I guess another vodka cranberry would be good?” I wasn’t really sure what I wanted and since it was what I had been drinking at The Faucet, it was the first drink to come to mind.
Grant nodded and pulled us through the crowd around the bar. We were now at the front with Hanna and Mike. That was really nice, despite the crowd. Generally people tended to just congregate and chat around the bar, so often times, it was really easy to push through and get faster service.
The bartender was mixing our drinks within minutes and Grant, Mike, and Hannah were talking about how crazy the bar was.
“You think this is crazy? You should see Gun Slingers right now. It’s definitely the new Sea Lion.” Grant threw out this gem again – I did already know this to be the truth, though.
Hannah shook her head, “The only reason you keep suggesting it is because you’re a suburban cowboy at heart.” She laughed.
From what I remembered of Grant, this was absolutely true. During college he had been a handler for our school mascot. The uniform was complimented by a black cowboy hat. He had opted to stay through another football season and graduate a semester later because he wanted to continue this activity. And, of course, he definitely wasn’t from a mountain town or a ranch by any means. So, yes, suburban cowboy was actually very accurate.
The bartender handed the four of us our drinks and we did a quick cheer.
“Thank you for the drink,” I smiled at Grant.
“No problem.” He nodded.
He continued to push us through the crowd. That was the nice thing about Grant. He was probably six feet and a bit stocky, not unnaturally heavy or anything, but he was very well toned and had a presence. Being a mascot handler, he was quite the runner. Anyway, because of this background, he was nice to have around for crowds, especially for small people like me. I felt really safe having him around as we navigated the bar.
“Hey listen…” he started.
But at that point, while we were making our way to our booth, I ran into a couple more sorority sisters: Jamie and Lee. We gushed about graduation — both Jamie and I graduated today; Lee had graduated last year. We also all took a picture together because, really, celebrating graduation was a time for photographs. A couple of our other sorority sisters and Grant jumped into the picture too and we had Mike take it for us. Hannah had already made it over to the booth by the time I had run into them and no amount of calling her over was going to make her get up again.
After our picture, we exchanged a few more excited, high-pitched squeals and congratulations before we parted ways to different parts of the bar. Our group of ten was large enough as it was anyway, so this was fine.
Help! I'm Post-Grad... 