Corona #1
It’s the end of a long week, it’s hot, I just put on deodorant and my armpits have chosen to take that as a challenge, and these goddamn Old Navy cuffed capris don’t have any goddamn Old Navy cuffed capri pockets, man. The inadequate and nonsensical deployment of pockets in women’s clothing has annoyed me for many years, and it’s annoying me right now. My cigarettes and lighter belong in my back right pocket, not in the inside flap compartment of my bag, where I will have to scrabble for them over and over again all evening long because my lighter feels like my keys, which feel like that super-size pack of gum, which feels like a knitted finger puppet in the shape of a…whale? (Don’t ask, because I surely don’t know.) My change and bills smaller than twenties belong in my front left pocket, not in that horrid little partition in my Filofax where I stuff those things when my outfit doesn’t have any pockets, only to open it months later and get hit in the face with a jack-in-the-box of dimes and pennies and ATM receipts. I like pockets; I need pockets. Pockets give me the illusion of safety and security in an unpredictable and scary world. Why did I wear these stupid pants? I feel so naked, alone, unable to produce exact change quickly! Oh, hello, festive and comforting little lime wedge.

Corona #2
I can’t stop staring at Kiefer Sutherland’s upper lip. Sitting in the dark on one of those typical-East-Village-bar vintage couches with springs so badly busted that the accelerated gravity field of the cushions forms a black hole and your butt disappears and you have to sit there with your knees above your head and feel vaguely amateur-porn about the whole thing, Kiefer in flickering close-up on an eight-foot screen above me, I stare and stare and stare at his upper lip. It’s like a little fleshy widow’s peak that never changes shape. I can’t get up, because the couch has sent my ass to another dimension, and I can’t…look…away…from…that lip. Mesmerized, I accidentally poke myself in the eye with a spinach-ricotta puff pastry. Then I biff myself in the teeth with my beer, and somehow that snaps me out of it.

Corona #3
Couch Baron: “Fancy meeting you here.”
Sarah: “Oh, thank God it’s you.”
Couch Baron: “What? I’m five minutes early.”
Sarah: “No, I know, it’s just that — okay, do you ever get the feeling you’re going to run into someone you know? Because I’ve got that feeling, and I’ve also got the feeling that it’s going to be someone I don’t want to run into, and when you said ‘fancy meeting you here’ and you were behind me so I couldn’t see you, I thought you were going to be that person. So I’m glad you’re not that person, is all I’m saying. Hey, remember that time we saw Tim Roth in here?”
Couch Baron: “Okay, what’s with you?”
Sarah: “What’s with me what?”
Couch Baron: “You’re all babbly. And jumpy. Also, you’re babbling.”
Sarah: “Oh, it’s these pants — they don’t have pockets, it’s upsetting, I don’t know. It’s my round, right?”

I cross my legs under the table, and when I try to re-cross them, I can’t — my knee has gotten stuck to a fresh wad of chewed gum on the table’s underside. Well, it’s official. The universe would prefer it if I didn’t wear Old Navy cuffed capris, and it has elected to express said preference with a blob of Trident Original Flavor so recently masticated that I can still see saliva glistening on it. Thanks, universe. Thanks a lot.

Corona #4
Outside, the occasional Navy boy ambles by in his tight white pants. Navy boys all walk with the same snappy, bandy-legged H.M.S. Pinafore gait, and I’ve always loved watching them bob down the street in those goofy little hats during Fleet Week. A few minutes later, a group of Navy boys files into the bar, attired in the slightly less Village People-y light-green-shirt-dark-green-pants version of the uniform, and orders a whack of Coors Lights. I find their immaculate turnout endlessly fascinating — not a hair out of place, not a whisker missed in shaving, not a crooked nametag or a scuff on a shoe — not to mention the fact that these guys look more and more heartbreakingly young every year. I mean, they don’t miss any whiskers shaving because most of them only have seven or eight whiskers to start with.

The Yankees manage to take it into extra innings against the Red Sox. Lucy won’t change the channel from the basketball. I beg her. I smile winningly. I point out that it’s extra innings; I point out that it’s, you know, the Red Sox. No dice. I’d like to stick around, maybe tuck a freshly-hatched Navy boy into my bag and take him home and feed him cookies and milk in my underwear, but it’s extra innings against the Sox, so…time to hit the road.

Corona #5
“Carlos Baerga? Carlos BAERGA?”

Corona #6
The conversation turns to September 11th. The phantom limb of that day is still waking us all up in the middle of the night. The Couch Baron and I remember out loud, again, what happened to us that day — what we did, where we stayed, how we got home — and even as I say the words, I wonder why. We know each other’s stories by now, after all. It’s like I need to keep going over it or something so that I understand, or don’t forget, but that day isn’t subject to understanding or forgetting, so…why?

Corona #7
The city is very quiet. It’s gotten chilly again and there’s nobody around, so it feels later than eleven. I trail off in the middle of a sentence to watch a plastic bag eddying in the breeze, wafting and jerking around on funky air currents. I think to myself that I’d like to spend a day like that, light and filled with air, blowing wherever the wind took me. Then I think to myself that I’ve gotten weirder in the last few years. Or maybe I started out as weird as this, but don’t care as much anymore if people know. I do know that it’s weird to stand on the corner and imagine a day in the life of a plastic bag, but my mind has taken off without me as it likes to do, composing a short story narrated by a plastic bag about how it had its moment of glory carrying a roll of toilet paper and a lemon and a package of hamburger buns back to a mysterious apartment, then got stuffed into a cabinet under the counter, and at first it really felt claustrophobic but then it went to a party on the back shelf and made a few friends, and the cabinet became a home until it made the mistake of opening its heart to a cookie sheet with commitment issues and where did it all go wrong, and should I scribble down a few notes and work up the story and send it to The Paris Review, or walk on over to NYU Medical Center and voluntarily check myself into — hey, you know what would make a great story? Okay, there’s this girl, and she’s in a bar with her friend, and she orders a Corona like she always does, but then — the lime? Freaks the fuck out and attacks her, and then it’s a whole saga with her getting PTSD and the lime lifting weights in the prison courtyard and then there’s a grand Russian-lit denouement in a citrus grove in Florida…brilliant. Dammit, why don’t I ever bring scratch paper when I go out?

Corona #8
Ah, the first pee of the night. I try to put off the first pee of the night for as long as I can, because after the first pee of the night, it’s every ten minutes after that, but the first pee is a long pee, and I tap my fingers on my bare knee and read the graffiti. People suck. Other people love each other. People plus other people, forever. People on spring break, which evidently rocks quite a bit. People…with my handwriting? Wow. An angry graffito I left here in 1993 has survived, my drunken old-maidy scrawl clearly visible on the edge of the door. “Fuck off,” it says. No name. Not even an exclamation point. Just: “Fuck off.” Washing my hands, I think back to 1993, how we used to come in here all the time, how they’d see us coming out the picture window and have the Heinekens open on the bar when we got inside, how I used to do a karaoke of one with Frank Sinatra while Ernie clapped her hands over her ears and bellowed, “Look, I’m sorry, but it was just not that good of a year, okay?” Wouldn’t someone have scratched it out by now? Added to it? Written “no, YOU fuck off” underneath?

Corona #9
Sarah: “Oh, God. Shut up, girls at the bar with ugly shirts.”
Couch Baron: “Seriously. ‘Eeee, I love that song‘? Please. Nobody ‘loves that song.’ It’s a terrible song.”
Sarah: “I know. I mean, it’s sad that Michael Hutchence died and all, but it doesn’t change the facts.”
Couch Baron: “God. So what did you put on?”
Sarah: “I put on good songs, man. I put on…I put…I don’t know what I put on. I have absolutely no memory! Of what I put on! One! Minute! Ago!”
Couch Baron: “That always happens to me. I walk away from the jukebox and the songs just…fall out of my head or something.”
Sarah: “Or you only remember the middle one? Because when I remember, which I never do, it’s always the middle one.”

Corona #9
When lime juice squirts into your eye, it hurts. A lot.

Corona #10
It’s time to make lists about boys. It’s often time to make lists about boys; in fact, it’s never not time to make lists about boys. Tonight’s list begins almost by accident and consists of boys we wish we’d just gone ahead and slept with when we had the chance. Tall boys who punched things. Dark-eyed boys inexplicably covered in packing excelsior. Boys who held our hands and wrote us out song lyrics and went mad and flunked out and disappeared. Boys with tennis bodies. Boys visiting friends. Boys who lost their shoes and got us locked in basements. Boys who could have died for all we knew.

Corona #11
We don’t like musical montage sequences on Buffy. We’ve tried to give them a chance, but we just don’t like them. We don’t go over to Marti Noxon’s house while she’s reading a book and look over her shoulder until she gets to A Poignant Moment and point at the page and tell her, “That’s poignant, see? Because she — do you get that? Hold on, let me put a CD on. Okay, now do you get it? Okay. Let me know when you get to page 143, because it’s resonant, and we don’t want you to miss it,” now, do we? No, we certainly don’t. And we want her to stop doing it to us.

Corona #12
“She said WHAT?”

Corona #13
Whenever I go out — and I don’t go out anywhere particularly hip, either — I always see her, chittering away to her friends like the fat sorority girls in Midnight Madness and trying not to look at herself too obviously in the mirror above the bar. Yes, it’s The Girl Who Tries Too Hard, and she’s having some sort of problem with her tank-top strap, or she can’t quite manage her shoes, or she’s got one of those teeny baguette bags that only holds a single mint, so buying a drink becomes a whole fussy procedure with a teeny jack and a teeny crowbar, and I just don’t get it. Just wear the comfortable pants! You can still find love with an ironic-haired man if you wear the comfortable pants! And if you must wear the binding, shiny, high-maintenance pants, wear the comfortable shoes — the flat, cushy shoes that don’t leave your feet looking like a rib-eye! But whatever you do, stop picking at yourself! There’s nothing on your ass! There’s nothing in your teeth! There’s nothing left to do but dance! Stop tic-ing all over the place! It’s! Making! Me! Nervous!

Corona #14
I thought I’d always have to bear the burden alone, the way I’ve borne it for so many years. I’d resigned myself to it. I’d accepted the fact that nobody else can even tolerate ELO, much less enjoy singing along to it while doing the hustle. Not that I do that, like, every day or anything — just once in awhile. I like the drums, okay? God. ANYWAY, so then I saw three dozen other people mouthing the words to “Don’t Bring Me Down,” and in my heart, a little butterfly struggled free of its cocoon and flew into the sunshine.

Corona #15
Yep, I’ve gotten weirder in the last few years.

Corona #16
I’ve gone months, even years, without having a face-to-face conversation with anyone about how I think it’s unfair that Hemingway has fallen out of fashion. It’s not that I hang out with people who don’t read, but either they’ve heard the rant several dozen times before, to the point where they get up in the middle of it to go to the bathroom, or the subject just doesn’t come up. I finally find a person who hasn’t endured my customary blithering on the subject before and who actually seems interested (read: eyes not rolled in my line of sight), and the music is so loud that I have to act my comments out using semaphore flags, but not so loud that the entire floor of the club can’t hear me screeching, “I HATE Richard Ford!” and pretending to stab myself in the eye with a straw.

Corona #17
“It’s LOCKED because it’s OUT OF ORDER, dude!”

May 27, 2002

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