First stop, 7pm, at the hallway-shaped Milano's on East Houston. There was a hair in my beer. I settled next to a stoic old man. Despite the crowd, however, the only political discussions were coming from the TV. Second stop, Mars Bar, 8pm. There are exactly two bare lightbulbs lit, and exactly three people in the bar: a middle-aged guy who looks like a Bowery bum, a young blonde guy who looks like a junkie, and a black lady from Oregon who "lives here now." With a tubercular cough left over from a cold, I fit right in. The older guy, Mike, asks if I'm reading Freud. "Believe it or not Interpretations of Dreams was one of the first books I read when I was a kid because I was having nightmares. Say, have you ever read Jung? No?" "You vote?" Mike asks the pretty brunette bartender, who barely looks of voting age. She sighs. "No, because I fucked up my registration. I just... fucked it up." "Tell you what, we're having going to have our first black President," Mike offers. Two laborers from Connecticut come in, the younger of which didn't bother to vote. "I think we're going to have McCain," he says. "It's all rigged up anyway." The payphone rings and the bartender answers: "No, Benny, I'm sorry. I told you before I'm not going on a date with you," she says before slamming it down. With that, we sit and wait for the night bartender, who is a half an hour late for her shift. [Photo courtesy psych101]
