The Pink Pony, Part 1, Jan. 25, 2003

Andrew leaned over towards me and rolled his eyes in a gesture to the table next to us. Then, very lightly, he cranked his long thumb toward them too.
"I guess they don't appreciate this too much," he said, gesturing with his cigarette.
"I hadn't noticed," I said.
"Oh, believe me, you will. It's a 'quality of life issue' you know," he said hanging his index fingers crooked in the air.
“What about my quality of life?”
"Good point," he said.
Their table was only about two feet away from ours, the hipster fashion bitches I mean. I guess this wasn’t surprising, considering. I mean, this was the Pink Pony, and the Lower East Side, and this was Saturday night.
"Jesus Andrew, why did we come here again?"
"You're the one who wanted to come here."
"Oh yeah," I said, wondering why I can never quite reconcile myself with them.

Andrew was speaking in a kind of personal code utilizing sophisticated face-scrunching and, alternately, high-pitched and glottal vocal techniques. He was leaning over close to my face to avoid looking suspicious to the hipster fashion bitches. But it wasn’t working. They were crossing their scrawny Lycra-clad legs, and swinging them furiously, in a hushed, decisive manner. The tabletop candle flame wagged with the force of his breath.
"They're really getting pissed! I can't fucking believe the nerve!" he clucked.
"Well I say fuck them. It's not like it's illegal."
"Yeah, you’re right, fuck them," he said.
The place is tactfully outfitted, easily, airily, ochre-walled, sufficiently dimmed, positively tasteful, even Parisian, or whatever Silver-Screened wartime expat version of tastefully Parisian the hipster imagines. Angel-faced Arthur Rimbaud, rendered lightly pale in burnt watercolor, stares wistfully from the welcoming wall. The group at the next table began waving their hands in front of their faces and making symbolic ‘P-U’ gestures, holding their noses and pressing their cold fingers to the bases of their necks, faux-coughing, tepidly. Apparently, they didn’t appreciate the cigarette smoke. Then their food arrived, fucking bitches.

Barring the pickled variety, the Pink Pony is perhaps the only bar in the United States that serves complimentary hard-boiled eggs. Andrew cracked one, working it between his palms until the shell was only an enameled drapery and he could pluck the jewel safely from its case, dust it lightly with salt and pepper, and swallow it in one primordial slurp. Ahh, the Pink Pony’s bowl of peanuts – that is to say – the hard-boiled egg. Quite telling, the difference between the egg and the peanut. One: life, the seed, the potential, simple in form yet infinitely complex in design, one of our most diverse and wide-reaching foods, given to elaborate ornament, jewel-encrusting, well known in certain high school sex education courses as an apt substitute for an infant baby human, symbolically wealthy, think Easter, Spring, rejuvenation, 'the goose that laid the golden egg,' and so forth.
The Other: satisfying with a beer, it’s true, and symbolically wealthy as well, but it cuts the other way with peanuts, as in: 'getting paid in peanuts,' or 'Jimmy Carter was just a humble peanut farmer,' or (in exclamation): 'Ahh nuts!' Very nearly they are polar opposites, these two.
Yes, this bar appeared far too thoughtful for hipster fashion bitches. It's a shame, really.

I watched the hipster fashion bitches butter their bread and dribble their dressing and lick their petulant fingertips. They wore knee-high gold vinyl boots, offensive fringe, they emitted unnatural odors, and car-crash laughs; they wore flaky, crackling base and awful glitter. They had swollen, weeping lips, and gaping, gasping, tongues with one million taste buds blinking menacingly out from the death-wind caverns of their mouths, tongues that man-handle all of their senses. I knew why they didn’t belong here, next to us, bitching, wheezing: Because they are the peanuts and we are the eggs. Peanuts to be pawed indiscriminately by asshole sports fans, and the whiskey and urine spotted fingers of sloshed riffraff. They are salty and shriveled, dusty and dry, they are a common allergen. Nobody knows where they come from (where do peanuts come from?); they are to be liberally consumed by drunks. We are eggs, Andrew and I: we have yolks, magic velveteen middles, nutritious guts, proud, doting mothers. We are smooth and delicate, graceful and plain, and if left to our natural course we will grow and burst. We demand preparation, our age must be noted and catered to properly, our environment must be accommodating lest we go bad, and if we go bad, watch out, because we become foul and dangerous, indeed, we can be deadly. I realized that I was going bad sitting there next to them, they are rotting my nutritious guts, I thought: They must go.


Stay Tuned For Part 2, The Exciting Conclusion Of The Pink Pony

*The Term

A rumpled sheet
Of brown paper
About the length

And apparent bulk
Of a man was
Rolling with the

Wind slowly over
And over in
The street as

A car drove down
Upon it and
Crushed it to

The ground. Unlike
A man it rose
Again rolling

With the wind over
And over to be as
It was before.

William Carlos Williams

*A humble memorial to the astronauts of the space shuttle Columbia.