Welcome to My Gut Instinct

I have moved. And I have been remiss in telling you. Now I live at My Gut Instinct. Tasty!

Off to London

This is D-Day, my dears. I am leaving on a jet plane to go to London, the first leg of my journey in the Mongol Rally. Am I scared? You better believe I'm wearing dark underwear for a reason.

Anyway, this little sporadically updated portal will likely go dark for a bit. For updates, please check our team Web siteMr. Dinosaur, and starting in early August, we'll be making bloggy updates on the food we eat in CHOW. Will I ingest horse meat? Who knows! But in the wilds of Eurasia, my friend Flicka may make a dainty appetizer.

Meat Your Match

Oh, yes. It's the tale of the meat saddle (pic courtesy of my pal Dogseat). I'd write a long, lovely introduction, but what can I say? It's meat! And we made a saddle out of it! And rode it hard. I'll stop now. And let you eat it up!

Meat Your Match

When you and several friends are preparing to drive 10,000 miles from London to Mongolia, in a car with an engine powered by handicapped gerbils, there’s few better ways to celebrate than riding a saddle made from meat.

“Sweet Jesus, is this a crime against nature?” you wonder, googling PETA.

Nature? No. But both schemes are crimes against common sense, chiefly the Mongol Rally. It’s an inane adventure in which entrants race crappy cars (think Yugos) across a quarter of the globe. My three-person team, Mr. Dinosaur (slogan: “Stupidity isn’t extinct!”), will embark July 21 in a white hatchback Subaru with a busted driver’s-side door bought for $585.

“Don’t tell me the details,” my mother said, exercising the blind ignorance that allowed her to think my teenage years were cigarette- and alcohol-free, despite my cigarette-burnt clothes and Friday-night slurring. I agreed not to divulge details. Even I don’t want to contemplate cruising across countries with unruly consonants (hello, Kyrgyzstan) and corrupt cops. But American ignorance is another tale. Today’s topic is: Why did Mr. Dinosaur build a meat saddle?
“Genghis Khan rode a meat saddle!” explained Andrew, the hairiest third of Mr. Dinosaur. We were discussing methods to make our going-away party amazing or, barring that, utterly terrifying. “When the Mongols killed animals, they sliced off flesh and stuck it beneath their saddles. While riding, their butts softened it.”

Myself and Mims (yes, that’s his name), Mr. Dinosaur’s remaining two-thirds, nodded sagely. A world with Mongolian ass-tenderizers was truly a reason to be alive.

“Are you sure?” I asked, utilizing my probing fact-checking technique.

“Yes,” Andrew said, eyes widening with unhinged glee. “And people will ride the meat saddle. Just like Genghis!” Why not, we said. A meat saddle made as much sense as the Mongol Rally itself.

“Great,” Andrew said, smiling. “Now we just have to build the damn thing.”

Crafting a meat saddle is far simpler, and infinitely more dangerous, than it sounds. “It’s not like we’re building something that must obey common sense,” Andrew said several days later. He dropped two-by-fours onto my apartment’s wood floor. “We can just…wing it.”

“Wing it” meant sawing and nailing together an open-sided rectangle roughly 3-feet high and 6-feet long. “But what’s going to be the meat saddle?” I asked Andrew, as the 73rd nail squealed into wood.

The answer was in the trash. My apartment contains salvaged coffee tables, bookcases and a toilet seat, mostly discovered in a nearby apartment building’s refuse mountains. Once more, the mountains bore fruit.

“Look what I found,” Andrew said, hoisting a wooden, tail-less rocking horse. “Now that will make a meat saddle.” He tied the horse to the structure with sturdy Boy Scout knots, suspending it mid-air and hopping aboard. “Yippee!” he shouted, bucking wildly. The contraption quivered like half-hardened Jell-O, but remained intact.

“Now,” he said, “we just need meat.”

This task fell to Andrew’s girlfriend, the dreadlocked Rachel, who recently graduated from a craft college, specializing in fiber arts. Fashioning a meat saddle provided a new challenge not found in her ex-college’s curriculum.

“Mwahahahaha,” she said when asked, roughly translated to “Yes, you sick bastards.” Rachel received several pounds of roast beef, salami and ham and set to work, weaving black thread through fibrous veins to create a multilayered masterpiece. “Next time, get thick-sliced roast beef,” Rachel said, threading a thin, rough-edged disc of cooked cow. “We’re gonna ride this rough.”

When our party arrived, the completed meat saddle attracted abundant onlookers. They eyeballed it with curiosity and revulsion typically reserved for watching a caged monkey masturbate.

“What is this?” a tee-wearing girl asked, fingering ham.

“A meat saddle,” I said.

“Those two words should never go together,” she replied, walking far, far away.

Yet the meat saddle and my behind were made for each other—especially after alcohol emboldened me with false bravado. I slipped on waterproof ski pants, aka “the meat shorts” provided for the occasion.

“Here comes the Jewish cowboy,” I said. The saddle was slick, cool and incomparably comfortable. Besides raping and pillaging, Genghis certainly understood ergonomics.

“Ride it! Ride it! Ride it!” the drunken crowd chanted. I bucked back and forth gently, like I was riding Tiffany glass, gathering my bearings and fighting the urge to upchuck. Despite the watertight pants and my Herculean alcohol intake, the lunch meat grinding against my buttocks remained disconcerting.

“Faster, saddle boy!” someone screamed. I responded with gusto, riding as hard and spastically as I did when losing my virginity. Back then, I wasn’t following a manual either.

“Yee-ha!” I squealed, waving my red cap in the air like Genghis, feeling the flesh disintegrate beneath my wide and infinitely misguided rump.

Behind the Eight Ball

Oh, holy heck: I leave for London in eight days. That is why things have been slow over here in blog land. Been dealing with all sorts of hoo-ha, like visas and ensuring that I don't get thrown in some dark, dank prison with nothing but my friend Andrew to keep me compant for eternity. Anyhoo, here's the latest inebriation two-step. Drink it up!

Behind the Eight Ball
Bye, bye BYOB: A Brooklyn pool hall goes downhill by gussying up

Brownstone Billiards was once the skinflint boozer’s Shangri-La. “But you can’t tell anyone,” my acquaintance Andrew commanded. “You’ll ruin it by writing about it.” I followed his order for five years. This is my longest-kept secret. Heck, it took me just 24 hours to inform my circle of friends about a pal’s marriage-by-Elvis in Vegas. That’s testament to my shoddy treatment of friends—and how much Brownstone meant to me.

This cavernous below-ground pool hall, oriented outside Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue subway stop, was a lovely leisure complex. About three-dozen pool tables were available, alongside ping-pong tables and air hockey machines. The sprawling, shopworn room was paradise for stoners, teens and lackadaisical sportsmen who adored the unspoken policy.

“Why hide that Coors tall boy in a brown-paper bag?” a pool player once asked me. “No one cares if you bring in your own beer.” Oh, BYOB, how you bring joy to my drunken heart! This is why I didn’t blow the lid off Brownstone.

Instead, the owners blew up the pool hall I adored. About six months ago, construction workers descended en masse, dry-walling and hammering Brownstone into a glitzier, ritzier hangout more akin to Manhattan.

In came flat-screens aplenty, plump booths, a kitchen sizzling chicken wings and burgers and, most depressingly, a long bar stocked with 24 drafts, like Dogfish Head and Sixpoint ($5 each, with two-for-one happy hour from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.). The writing was on the wall. Rather, the writing was on Brownstone’s front door: customers can’t bring in any alcoholic beverages, the hand-scrawled sign read.

Brownstone is now called Ocean’s 8 at Brownstone Billiards. Sports geeks sit at the bar and down drafts, cheering the Yankees, Mets and other men playing with balls. Kids and families dine at tables, waiters feverishly dash around
like ants.

“I think I’m going to cry,” a friend said, examining the renovation. “What happened to my pool hall?” Surprisingly, it remains integral to Ocean’s split personality: While the front half is suped up like a 51-year-old’s midlife-crisis Ferrari, the gaming area’s largely unchanged. Pool and ping-pong prices remain the same ($5 per hour, or $20 for three hours for two people), as does the motley stew of Caribbeans, yuppies, old-timers, collegiates and kids with salty tongues.
“You couldn’t shoot out of a paper bag,” one wannabe shark shouts on a recent evening. The rebuttal, “At least my mom didn’t give me money to play pool.” Such colorful repartee is what made Brownstone a down-to-earth, no-bullshit hangout. Pay to play, and no one bugs you. Now, inexpert waitresses bumble around, as pesky as flies. Overbearing managers add to the uneasiness, chiding servers in plain view. It’s hard to aspire to upscale airs in a basement pool hall.

So why serve bowls of crunchy Japanese crackers, when salty peanuts will do? Why pour wine? Why are children here, munching cheesy nachos? Good gosh, the pool hall’s in Park Slope—you’d think this would be the one place to avoid kids. Then again, it’s never too early to teach them to hustle and drink.

Ocean’s 8 at Brownstone Billiards
308 Flatbush Ave. (at 7th Ave.), B’klyn
718-857-5555

Hard as Steel

Oh, sweet honeybees: Are any of you masseuses? I am one little stressed-out ball of hairy Jew. It's been a crazy last week, as we somehow try to pull together tonight's Mongol Rally benefit. I could stand to spend two hours getting these grapefruit-size shoulder knots worked out, but that costs money, and I am irredeemably cheap.

That's why I was so perturbed when I was so stupid that I lost my bike key and had to have an overweight gentleman slice my bike off a fence. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Read it up!

Hard as Steel

Perhaps I should burn my white dancing shoes. Doing so would’ve saved me from a self-inflicted nightmare of steel and sharp objects.

The trouble began when my friends and I arrived at a bash, located in a Williamsburg loft with cigarette-scarred wood floors. Partygoers in frayed jeans shorts and tight tank tops writhed to reggaeton, indiscriminately flinging appendages toward the crumbling ceiling. It was that rarest of creatures: a New York City party where people actually danced.

“Oh, yeah!” I shouted gleefully. I humped the air, which equals dancing in my book. Soon, I was moist. “Help me take it off!” I shouted to my girlfriend, unbuttoning my long-sleeve oxford. She pulled off one sleeve, then the other, revealing my gray wifebeater.

“Whooooo!” I shouted, swinging my shirt like a helicopter blade.

Several booming songs passed before panic crept in. My bike key was in my shirt pocket. The key opening the steel chain locking my 10-speed to an iron fence.

“Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit!” I dropped to the bottle-cap-littered floor. I searched as feverish as a 6 a.m. cokehead looking for misplaced blow, but the key, like my dignity after three tequila shots, was gone.

The next morning, I called a locksmith named Raoul. He worked for a company named Champion. Who doesn’t like a winner, especially one with rock-bottom rates?

“Only $35 to come out,” Raoul said on the phone, a departure from the $55 others charged. “And it’ll be another $30 to unlock the bike.”

Raoul arrived in a white van, the kind used to whisk teenagers to sex dungeons. He parked near a fire hydrant.

“You sure this is your bike?” asked Raoul. He possessed a globe belly, walrus mustache and cop sunglasses.

“Yes.”

“OK then,” he said.

If I ever want to steal a bike, I know whom to call.

Raoul examined my chain. “This is steel,” Raoul said. “This ain’t gonna be easy. We can’t just drill the lock. We gotta saw it off. It’ll be $100. OK?”

It was far more than $65, but I had zero bargaining power. “OK.”

“Plus tax.” He smiled. “Lemme get my blade.”

It was one of the few times in my adult life I’ve been elated to hear that phrase. I expected Raoul to return with a Sawzall, a tool making quick work of metal. Instead, he escorted a handsaw outfitted with thin carbon wire. It looked like a device doctors used to saw off gangrenous limbs during the Civil War.

“Where’s your electric saw?” I asked.

“I don’t use ’em. They send shards toward your eyes. And I like my eyes.”

“Why not wear safety goggles?”

Raoul ignored me and started sawing. “You gotta be in good shape to do this,” he explained.

I refrained from mentioning his rotund tummy and neck wattle. It’s probably best not to mock a man with a blade so near your jugular.

After several furious minutes, Raoul examined his progress. Only an infinitesimal channel was ground away. “That’s hard steel,” he said solemnly, his brow beaded with perspiration. “Ten more minutes passed and Raoul again paused.

Only about half a link was cut. “Oh, boy, that’s beautiful steel.”

I agreed that, aesthetically speaking, the steel was beautiful.

“Beautiful steel,” he repeated. Ten minutes later, the link was severed. “Oh, yeah!” Raoul said. “Oh. Yeah.”

I touched the link, hot as a frying pan thanks to friction. “Now let’s pry this off with my money maker,” Raoul said. He grabbed his crowbar and slid it into the cut link, trying to pry it wide so the lock could slide off. It was as stubborn as our president.

“I need leverage,” the locksmith said, his armpits soaked with sweat. “Where’s some goddamn leverage?”

In my overachieving scholastic career, I received C’s exactly twice: for physics and chemistry. “Just push harder,” I suggested, a notion jibing with the American school of repair: If it’s broken, kick it until it works.

“Looks like I’m gonna have to cut another one,” Raoul said, giving up and grabbing his saw. He attacked it with an intensity peculiar to men determined to do it their way, damnit.

Raoul’s frenetic sawing devoured half the link—until the carbon wire snapped, flopping on the ground like a dying snake.

“If this doesn’t work,” the locksmith said, grabbing his crowbar, “then you’re screwed.”

“Will I still owe you $100?” I asked. But more than losing money, I was worried my bike would forever be captive, a casualty of my unquenchable thirst to dance badly.

“Yes,” Raoul said, yanking his crowbar with all the might an overweight Puerto Rican man could muster.

“Ughhhhhhh!” he shouted. “Ugghhhhhhhhhhh!” Millimeter by millimeter, the chain bent backward like an arm wrestler losing strength, until the lock clanked to the ground. Freedom! Sweet, sweet freedom!

“That,” Raoul said, wiping sweat from his brow, “was hard steel. Now don’t lose the key again.”

For once, I was inclined to agree with someone’s suggestion.

Horrible Honey

Oh, my sweet, aching tired eyes and fingers! The last few weeks have been a whirlwind, my chickadees, with me furiously penning enough stories to pay for my summer excursion and helping plan a party where you will get drunk enough to like me. That is my hope, at least. We all need a little love sometimes. Or is that oral sex?

Either way, it's a win-win proposition! For me! This week's tale finds me boozing it up a bar so unfortunate that it's sole redeeming quality is air conditioning. Mmm...cold air. And shitty bartenders. And drinks so disgusting, I couldn't even finish mine. That, my friends, is a stinging indictment of suckitude. Drink it up!

Oh, Honey
Diabetics, beware: sickly sweet cocktails await at a second-rate lounge


“Why don’t you rip more bars to shreds? You’re so good at being a jerk, Josh,” a friend recently told me, justifying entry into the backhanded-compliment hall of fame. I set my sweaty beer bottle—am I ever without?—onto a table and explained my bar-reviewing philosophy.

“There’s zero benefit to informing you that a bar’s sucky. My job’s to tell you where to get drunk—not where not to get drunk.”

“But don’t some bars deserve a good reaming?”

“Of course. But only if they’re hoity-toity or over-hyped and deserve to be knocked down,” I said. “Or if they’re doucehbag depots.”

Like Honey, a lounge apparently named after a plus-size, grade-D stripper working at Atlanta’s infamous Clermont Lounge. There, women weighing more than NFL offensive linemen crush soda cans between breasts massive enough to merit separate zip codes. If only the same debauchery transferred to this downstairs drinkery. It’s located several blocks from the Meatpacking District madness, a distance that would ideally insulate Honey from financial drones, Euros and cosmo-swilling señoritas. Instead, the location attracts unfortunate herds like, well, ants—or other small-brained creatures—to honey.

What’s to love about this cave-like, 3,000-square-foot lounge ringed with mahogany and brick? Happy hour (5 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily), when masses gather to guzzle $5 pink cosmos, sugar-y apple martinis and $4 draft Buds. Finger foods such as fondue, quesadillas and grilled cheese abound, but few indulge in lieu of budget liquor.

“Four cosmos!” a girl with makeup applied via paintball screams one Friday night. The bar is glutted with J. Crew catalog extras, collars open and cleavage on display. Sadly, not a single bosom is used to compress aluminum cans.
I weasel to the bar and order the Picasso Honey: honey liquor, gin, Cointreau and tonic ($11). It’s froufrou, but I adore gin.

“Not too many people order that,” says a squinty, impatient bartender. Behind him, TVs show athletes running toward a ball.

“Well, I feel special then,” I say.

“Sure you want that drink?” He suggests the rum-soaked strawberry lychee punch ($11) or the honey caipirinha ($11). Both sound equally revolting, so I stick with my original selection.

The bartender shakes his head, disappointed, like my father after my first B on a report card in fourth grade. The Picasso is served, glistening with condensation. My first sip is like French-kissing a beehive spritzed with perfume. It’s among the most vile cocktails I’ve sampled since, at 15, I mixed room-temperature chardonnay with Hi-C’s neon-green Ecto Cooler.

“How do you like your drink?” the bartender asks.

“It’s evil. Evil and sweet. Or sweetly evil. Take your pick.”

He pauses for a second, pondering my response. A thoughtful drink-slinger would offer to craft another cocktail, perhaps one that wouldn’t cause cavities.

“Don’t worry about it,” I think. “Bad drinks are a job hazard. Just give me a gin and tonic, good buddy.”

He says aloud, “You should’ve ordered something else,” adding, “I told you so.” Then he tends to ladies with helium voices, leaving me with my syrupy sludge. A smarter man would’ve ditched the liquid abomination, but abandoning an $11 cocktail is a mortal sin—on par with ordering an $11 cocktail. Or entering Honey again.

Honey
243 W. 14th St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.)
212-620-0077

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