Once upon a connecting flight, I was completely whisked past the fact that the JFK airport had its own dedicated line that stopped at all of the terminals. I remembered waiting for the air trains because I remember what it was like in the stops - but the last time I was there, I was on my way to Europe. I thought nothing of the airport.

Since that time, I had attended a college where a lot of my friends were from out of town, and since I was a local, I was a good candidate for picking them up from LA’s version of an airport. I had come to expect an automotive clusterfuck out of a visit to an airport. But it didn’t strike me until I looked up at a “You Are Here” map that the Air Trains at JFK shuttled around the entirety of the terminals. It didn’t matter which airline you were going to take, your method of transportation was something on rails. It drove the point home that, in fact, the point is not going to be driven at all. It will be walked.

Ah, yes. This is New York. A walking city. The biggest walking city in the United States. I love walking cities because I’m from a driving city. In LA, my only method of getting around is in a box of plastic, metal, and glass that circulates air of moderated temperature, and sings back the songs I command it to sing, lulls me into a droning, unconscious zombie of a commuter.

That’s not what I feel like in walking cities. Sure, if I’ve been walking a distance, I start to stare off into the distance and turn into a zombie in that respect - but let’s face it, walking is a much easier motor skill.

My experience in walking cities before this had only been relegated to Western European cities.  London.  Paris. Rome.  Hamburg.

This was sure going to be different.

My phone rings.

Lucas: Dude, where are you?
Nico: I just got my bag, I’m outside having a cigarette.
Lucas: Are you by the curb?
Nico: No I’m between … Something A and Something B.  Just follow the smoke, that’s me!
Lucas: Wait… I think I see you.  Dude you’re on the other side of the road!
Nico: I don’t know which side of the road I’m on, I just got here!

We both let out a loud laugh and a lot of the other people in the airport look in either my direction or Lucas’s.  Why are they having a good time?  I’m stuck here waiting for a cab.  Well, see, tourists, that’s your part of your problem.  You don’t have to take a cab.  And unlike me, you are not meeting with one of the best friends you’ve ever had for a week in the greatest city in the world, a place he now calls home.

Catching up with an old college friend is always blurry.  It’s a reminiscing of shared stories, a mental flow chart attempting to match the timelines of new stories, a series of recommended bands, a striking profundity of being young and professional, a shared shock of how student loans are nothing compared to monthly rent, and of course, an unfaltering excitement for the days to come.

And it makes sense that getting re-acquainted with Lucas would be blurry, because it was almost like foreshadowing - even though we knew very well how much drinking would take place.

After the excited “How the fuck are you!?” and the catching up in just-as-excited chatter on a series of trains, we dump my bag in his apartment in East Williamsburg - an apartment he shares with three ladies.  All of whom surprise me with how chill they are until I discover they are also not from New York. Huh. An entire apartment of West Coast transplants.  That’s kind of welcoming.

And then, shortly after settling, I meet the first significant character in my time in New York.  Lucas’s friend Ashley meets us at the apartment and the three of us go out.  We take the L to Bedford.  And in a place where our conversation seemed to percolate over the idea of the irony-hipster-mustache, I get my first NYC pizza!  I don’t remember the name of the pizza place, but it’s the gateway drug peddler that creates for me an addiction that lasts about a week.  For you So-Cal nightowls: NYC pizza is the equivalent of the LA taco stand.

Ashley had mentioned something about the rain beginning to come down, but we didn’t really feel it until we we left the pizza place.  We had already decided to go out, and it was my idea to go drinking, so it wasn’t like we were going to turn back now.

Running through the rain and looking for a bar landed us at a place called the Turkey’s Nest Tavern.  One of the main attractions of this place, or so the bartender tells us, is that they serve the most Budweiser in all of Brooklyn.  And once your order a large… container of beer, it’s easy to see why.  They fill up giant styrofoam tubs that I’m pretty sure are ordinarily used to contain soup.  Enough soup to serve four.

Drinking commences, and the benchmark revealing we are starting to feel the effect is that the one arcade game in the back of the bar becomes immensely amusing to us - not enough that we spend any money to play it, we just really liked the plastic guns.  But before we can make fun of them, Lucas has already picked one up and is posing with it.

And as all alcohol is a social lubricant, I get to know Ashley better after she has been drinking.  We’re both drummers, and we’re both drummers of similar work ethic.  We both firmly believe that, sure, gracefully rolling 64th notes prove an impressive dexterity, but they still can’t beat four well-spaced and relentlessly violent cracks on a snare drum.  “Power drumming is better than fancy drumming,” she says.  I respond, “You know what? You and I are gonna get along.”

Upon the ordering of the next round, the bartender probably took a liking to Ashley as he hands her some bags of potato chips for her patronage.  She promptly and gleefully stuffs the scored chip bags in her purse.  “No,” she says to me, “I don’t think you understand how excited I am about this.  This is amazing.  This is great.  Coming here was a good idea.”

With the next round of drinks in hand, the three of us are happy-drunk enough to start singing along to Sublime’s Santeria which is playing over the house speakers.  It turns into an icebreaker that lets us meet some communist DJs.  And upon a cigarette break, we continue conversation with said communist DJs.  We talk about Trotsky and higher education in Bolivia - and, incongruously, the reliability of Apple computers in relation to DJ equipment.

I’m sure it was fascinating at the time, but conversation specifics escape me as this is probably well into my second beer tub.  3rd?  I forget.

So, in less than three hours in Brooklyn, I had already eaten pizza and gotten drunk cheaply and effectively.  More than appropriately, the styrofoam tubs accompanied us back to Lucas’s place, where we all crash.

One note about the cups, though - Lucas and Ashley decided to not be wastrels and would save the remnants of their drinks in the refrigerator.  They never returned to those drinks.  Nobody likes flat Budweiser in a styrofoam cup.

Of course, looking back, saving Budweiser in a styrofoam tub isn’t useful for anything but novelty.  But a lot of things seem like a good idea when you’re drunk.  And when you’re drunk, isn’t novelty really a good enough reason to do anything?