Numero Uno

#1 – Mangia Italiano (10/4/2008)

It seemed fitting that the first stop on this winding road of drunkenness be my default drinking venue. An ex-girlfriend first introduced me to the South Grand watering hole as a great place for inexpensive and decent Italian food. Shortly thereafter, she reintroduced it as a great place to drink until 3am. Sadly, the girl and I didn’t pan out. Mangia and I, however, have enjoyed a very successful run.

The reasons to love this place are many. First of all, it’s exactly one and one half blocks from my apartment. The comfort of knowing that you don’t have to drive and that your bed and several bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch are so close makes for a much more relaxed evening, one free of designated drivers and all other boundaries for alcohol consumption.

There are no televisions, so the business conducted at Mangia is the right business: drinking, talking, drinking, talking shit, screaming over loud music, drinking, gawking at absurdly cute girls with glasses and tattoos, gawking at not-cute girls making out with each other while unironically wearing leather pants, paying tab, leaving.

It’s always insanely hot and loud in Mangia, so unless it’s the middle of July, leaving is in itself a beautiful experience – stumbling out of the sweltering, smokey cave and into the cool night where you can breathe easy and the empty streets are quiet enough that you can really concentrate on the incessant ringing in your ears.

This most recent visit reminded me of a rule I needed to make about this whole “100 Bars” thing: One must not get drunk at every single bar. I will die. I am thirty-one now – not a geezer by any means – and I just don’t bounce back like I used to. In fairness to myself, this time wasn’t really my fault. A former coworker of mine – let’s call her “Laura,” because it’s her name – this “Laura” lured me into drunkenness by claiming that she liked a shot known as a Sandanista. To some, the most diabolical concoction known to mankind. To me, sweet nectar of…sweetness. When a pretty blond girl tells you she likes a masculine shot such as this, and then says “Let’s have some,” what choice do you really have?

At any rate, number one is in the books, and I guess it’s kind of uninspiring, with it being Mangia and all. This weekend will probably include #2, and it’s another stretch. This one is a whole TWO blocks from my apartment. But you gotta crawl before you can walk, and since I am deep in the relatively safe womb of of my neighborhood, I end up crawling a lot. There’s a whole “birth-of-the-journey” analogy I’m trying to make here, but it is clearly escaping me. And I haven’t even had any Sandanistas.