New York scares me. Not in a terrorist sort of way, but in a $30-cover-charge sort of way. I just cringe at how much money is required to fuel a typical night in NYC. However, I have friends there, and despite my pleas that they just visit Boston, a couple times a year they convince me to come to Manhattan.
    My latest trip was to visit my friend Shezad, who lives a block from Ground Zero with his brother, Shayan. Shezad is a gregarious guy—his New York crew calls him “Bobo the Friendly Bastard”—but in college he scowled a lot to encourage the general populace to suspect him of nefarious Middle East connections. I asked him if that’s still his MO, given the possibility of racial profiling, and he replied that he now tells people that he’s Mexican. (So if you ever meet a friendly Mexican with a Pakistani accent in New York, say hi for me.)
    Shezad and Shayan witnessed horrors on Sept. 11, but in the ensuing months they’ve developed an inurement to their neighborhood’s transformation into a surreal tourist attraction. On Saturday at 1pm I was awake and hungry, but Shezad wanted to sleep in a while longer, so he told his brother to show me around: “Shayan, take Ezra out, get some food, show him the buildings that are going to fall down, and I’ll get up in an hour or so.”
    The reason Shezad wanted to sleep another hour had to do with the itinerary of the previous night. Let’s just say that I have a renewed belief that 2am is really as late as you need to be out (London might have an even better idea with their 11pm closing time for most bars). The culmination of Friday night had been a trip to Exit, a gargantuan West 56th Street club that stays open until 8am. We got there at 4am and stayed until dawn. Even if I was a little too white-bread Patagonia for the Exit crowd, I at least got to add an entry to my mental Rolodex of bizarre jobs. Let’s call this one Exit employee “Phil.” OK, Phil, tell the people what you do: “Well, I put on a loincloth, get tied up, then I have a woman wearing a leather dress drip hot wax on me on a stage in front of thousands of people. The wax stings a bit, but not as much as when she frees me by burning the rope with the candle. Boy, I sure do hope this recession ends soon.”
    While I was happy to exit Exit, on some level it hadn’t surprised me much—in the context of New York clubs that stay open till dawn, outlandishness is to be expected. I was more surprised the next night, when I thought I was just going to have a relaxed dinner at a place called Chazal. On the way to Chazal we passed a restaurant that Shezad described as “Indian-American fusion.” I pondered what that might mean (Tandoori hot dogs? Uncle Ben’s biryani?) unaware that I was on my way for some fusion myself: fusion between clubbing and dining.
    It was so dark inside Chazal that people were holding their candles up to read their menus. The tables are also close together, to the degree that I could’ve easily done the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti routine with the girl at the next table. Between the darkness and the close proximity, diners at Chazal are in constant danger of inadvertently grabbing one another’s escargots. And while that might be a faux pas in most restaurants, grabbing someone’s escargots is what it’s all about here.
    I came to this conclusion when the girls next to us got up and started dancing. Other patrons had already begun to do the same when the DJ—yes, the DJ—mixed from “Dancing Queen” into “Billie Jean.” I was relieved they got up, because the girl next to me was doing a version of car-dancing (where you’re tremendously enthusiastic while sitting down) that was threatening to create a serious party foul involving my thon grille au poivre noir.
    I looked around and studied the rest of the room. If people weren’t outright dancing, they were at least car-dancing or doing the overhead clapping move. For my part, I tried to chew to the rhythm while pondering what kind of pickup lines would be appropriate in this environment. “Can I buy you an appetizer?” Or perhaps: “Are you gonna finish that?”
    Alas, there were post-Chazal plans, so after eating we got our check and got up to leave. This prompted one of the dancing girls to remark, “So much for those guys.”
    That’s right, I got busted on for having no game while eating dinner. Is it OK to hate New York again yet? *