No Bourbon For Me

After living outside of New York for most of the past three years, the best part about being back is the ability to reconnect with old friends and family. It's not that I didn't like living in North Carolina because I did, but my social network runs much deeper up in NYC. Considering I grew up here and lived here for two years out of college, it really should come as no surprise.

As a result, I've spent the better part of my first couple of months in New York feverishly trying to catch up with old friends. One of these friends is a buddy from college that moved to Manhattan while I was in North Carolina, which makes it a lot easier to hang out with him.

He's a ton of fun, so I'm usually down to meet up with him, except of course when he wants me to join him for his regular Thursday visit a bar called Bourbon St. on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

He has a good reason for going there, and it's because Bourbon St. serves $1 drafts on Thursdays, and he tries to get me to join his group of regulars almost every week. I just can't do it, and there's a good reason.

When I was in high school, Bourbon St. was known as one of those places known for being rather relaxed when it came to scrutinizing IDs at the door. Therefore, it was also a place that had a younger clientele. When I was a junior in high school, a friend of mine and I decided to finally get up to speed with the rest of the country's teenage population and get fake IDs. With IDs, we reasoned, we'd finally be able to get into cool bars like Bourbon St.

One Saturday afternoon, we made a trek down to the West Village to one of those shady stores where it's kind of hard to tell exactly what they sell, but you know they have fake IDs.

We didn't really know what we were doing, and it showed. Our problems were further complicated by the fact that we didn't want to spend more than $40 or so per man. This meant that we wouldn't be getting replica out-of-state licenses, but rather generic-looking college IDs. We had friends with similar IDs, however, and those seemed to work OK. We figured we'd be OK.

I like to think that we were pretty bright kids, yet we decided to get IDs that were virtually identical, except mine said "St. John's University," and his said "Rutgers University." You'd think we'd have realized that since we planned on using these IDs at the same time, our IDs would look better if they were from the same school. Apparently not.

We were pretty proud of our purchase, and we looked forward to getting to try them out. I was a little bit of a wimp, so I didn't want to risk using them anywhere out of fear of them being confiscated, or worse, us getting arrested. As you can tell, I was a bit paranoid as a teenager. One place I wasn't afraid to try my crappy fake ID was Bourbon St., and sure enough, my friend and I waltzed right in.

What I didn't realize at the time is that bars either take fake IDs, or they don't. This wasn't a situation where my ID was being examined for its authenticity, because it was obviously fake to anyone with a third-grade education. The biggest lesson I learned from that experience is that it behooves any teenager to spend the money on a good ID. You're high school years will be more fun, and you won't have to worry about whether you're good enough for places like Bourbon St.

When I first got back to NYC in December, I begrudgingly joined my friend on Thursday at Bourbon St. because I hadn't seen him in a really, really long time. And while it was great to see him, I couldn't shake the feeling of being anywhere from 5-to-10 years older than the everyone else there. After that, I vowed never to go back there again.

To turn a phrase from Groucho Marx, I don't want to go to any bar that would have a dorky 17-year-old version of myself as a patron.