Last time I was in a beer garden in Queens, it was the Czech one, which used to be
the only biergarten in NYC. Not only do I now know that there is more than one, I know the location of Studio Square, one of the douchiest bars in existence.
Somehow, I had forgotten complex.com’s ranking of the Top 25 Douchiest Bars in NYC, which featured Studio Square at number nineteen. Or maybe it was that I wanted to accompany my brother and Melissa and Christian, my brother’s ex-co-worker, and not bring down their night.
The outdoor biergarten was swarming. We had to choose a table. After choosing a seat in the middle of the square, beside four girls, all of whom were unattractive, the lone skinny one sequestered between a couple of greasy-haired two hundred pound broettes, we decided to relocate. In the back, next to a clean-headed rotund little man in a starched white shirt, pressed jeans, Queens his whole life, with his two Russian pieces. I thought one was single, and worth talking to, but by the end of the night she was making out with a dude who leaned down to kiss her while she sat.
Broey, too, who was a financial planner, and proof that some angiosperms are more sophisticated than humans. “Heard you’re a writer,” he said. We discussed the benefits of being unemployed. “Wish I didn’t have to work,” he said.
“What would you do all day?”
“Get yoked. Shoot hoops.”
I nodded. He was big enough and dumb enough to have made a great knight, a scenario I presented thanks to my recent readings of medieval romances.
“Shit sounds mad boring,” he said.
The highlight of my night was bumming a cigarette from a guy in a green Yankees hat. “Is that a Newport?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Perfect.”
Imagine the surprise on his face.
EJ comes up to me, “Isn’t this place great?” I look at the table of Hispanic hipsters, all Queens natives, poor bastards, the guy in the white suit that badly needs to be tailored. I was speechless. I sat, staring out over the waves of hair gel and muscle tees, contemplating why I was so content to stare out over the waves of hair gel and muscle tees.
At the end of the night, once we decided to say our Irish goodbyes, we were waiting for Melissa, and we happened to be standing next to the group of broettes we’d first deserted. “Hey it’s the guys who left earlier! Why’d you leave, because we smelled bad?”
I can honestly say I enjoyed myself last night. It was like going on a bro safari– in the middle of the savannah, an oasis, where different species of bro and douche come together to drink pitchers of Dos Equis and Cherry Wheat Ale, showcase skill over Mets knowledge, and hopefully, find a mate douchey enough to bring home to Forest Hills or Woodside, on the eastern edge of Queens, douchiest borough in New York.
Daniel the Writer 