New York report

by RAF KATIGBAK

What would you rather have sex with: a dog or a dolphin?

This was the million-dollar hypothetical question making the rounds last Friday night in the VIP room of the Ruff Club, a Lower East Side hipster bar whose patrons seemed to be an odd mix of overly styled girls with bakery string headbands and beefy jocks ordering “hooter shooters.” Without hesitation, Amanda, a six-foot fashion photographer in a perfectly coiffed bowl-cut chimed in, “A dolphin, definitely.” Her answer didn’t surprise me, I think because she was Australian. Chuck, a 26-year-old Wall Street powerbroker from Portland, retorted, “Are you kidding? Male dolphin ejaculate is dangerous; apparently the force of it is so strong it can rupture human organs. Those motherfuckers are sex maniacs.” Jason, an effete graphic designer with a rattail, countered, “Oh please, that’s a myth. Sure, dolphins ejaculate about 14 feet, almost three times more than men do, but a Super Soaker can go 20 feet, and that’s safe enough for kids to play with.” “Okay,” I finally added, “has anyone here ever been fucked by a Super Soaker?”

New York conversations can get pretty ridiculous. What’s perhaps more ridiculous is that this particular question stemmed from an earlier Passover dinner conversation I had about, of all things, Furries. Don’t ask me how we went from explaining what the bitter herbs on the Seder plate represented to looking online for videos of sexy skunk costumes. I must say, even though we had left an extra glass for the visiting prophet Elijah as is the Passover tradition, I have a feeling he might have just bounced after witnessing us squeamishly Xtube-ing a guy humping himself with a $300 animatronic miniature pony (its head, ears and eyes moved and everything!).

Okay, I know exactly what you’re thinking: that’s fucked up. You’re thinking, “Raf, how could you be having a Seder dinner on Friday when everybody knows it was on Saturday!” Well, there’s only one thing stronger than religion for me, a higher power that trumps any kind of God, Buddah, Allah or Xenu the Intergalactic Warlord. That thing, my friends, is playoff hockey. Yes, I made my friend reschedule this holy of holy days because the Canadiens were scheduled to give the Bruins the spanking of a lifetime (which obviously didn’t happen). The only challenge? Good luck finding a bar that shows playoff hockey in New York.

“New Yorkers are 50/50 when it comes to hockey,” says my uncle, who’s been living there for 20-odd years, “50 per cent don’t know and 50 per cent don’t care.” He added, “there are two kinds of sports fans in New York: Yankees fans and retards.”

But baseball has always been beyond me. During the Seder afterparty, Quinn, a 30-year-old recent NYU graduate who is about to move to Boston to “teach young impressionable girls about modern European history,” tried to sell me on the American pastime. “It’s about being outdoors and the laid back pace of the game combined with the explosive excitement of hits and playmaking.” I told him that if I wanted to watch guys standing around scratching their nuts and patting each other on the ass, I’d just go to the locker room in the Chinatown YMCA back home. I guess the charm is you can get completely shit-faced and talk trash with your buds for an evening, but it seems to me that it’s just a lot of hanging around. I’ve been to a baseball game and all I remember doing is just sitting around for hours waiting for it to be over. Things happen in hockey.

Luckily, there’s one single bar in all of Manhattan that plays Canadiens games. On a big screen. With the sound on. The Third & Long Corner Saloon on 3rd and 34th saved my weekend. On the subway ride over from Brooklyn, I was excited to experience playoff hockey in the Big Apple. I expected the atmosphere to be somewhat bigger and brasher, as most things in New York are. Would there be a sea of red jerseys, air horns and foam fingers crowding the bar, intermittently erupting in cheers of “Go Habs Go”? Oh my gosh, what if there was a major Boston contingent there, how would the Habs fan deal with that? Would we get along all sportsmanlike? Or would we be reduced to fisticuffs in the streets should the taunting become too much? Would there be breakdance fighting?

When I finally arrived, worried I wouldn’t get a seat, my head reeling with the various Street Fighter moves I’d pull on some unsuspecting Boston fan, I was greeted not by a scene of utter playoff mayhem as it should be, but an empty bar save for one lonely Habs fan Chris, a young architectural engineer from NDG who’d been living in the city for six years. Deflated, I hunkered down next to him, ordered a pint of Molson Canadian and asked, “So, what would you rather have sex with: a dog or a dolphin?”

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca