Over the course of my writing life, I have worked part time in the service industry as a bartender to help supplement my income. In 2003, I was working at an Upper East Side start-up named the Pioneer Restaurant and Bar. The owner of the place was never around, a cardinal sin when you had just invested hundreds of thousands of dollars open your business. The manager who ran the daily operations was a known coke freak whose main job was to make excuses to the various purveyors and employees for the lack of timely payment. The main victim of this lack of cash flow was the chef, Brad Gates, an old friend I had known since 1991.

"That fucking ass," Gates swore to me one day after he had once again not been paid. "He's not a fucking restaurant person."

"What the fuck is a 'restaurant person'?" I asked.

"C'mon Alex, you're a bar person, you know what I mean," he said. Then Brad started grumbling about various other aspects of the failures of ownership.

I was never able to get a good definition of what Brad's definition of a restaurant person was. However, he was right about me being a bar person. I hang out in bars, have made friends in bars and have met more than one female love interest in bars. It's not some tawdry thing, but something I came upon honestly when I came to the city in 1987.

New York University began to reach out to a large national student body sometime in the early 1980s. I was one of the kids that got caught up in the air of excitement of having the city as well as the university as my campus and learning environment, much to my late father's chagrin. He had grown up on the street and certainly didn't want his eldest son to have the same teachers he had. The men who taught him had names like Jerry the Goniff, Schoolly, the Rabbit and Chicago. He expected my teachers to have titles like Dr., not The Mouse and Dickie the Spic. To this end, he took great pains to make sure that I would be well taken care of by the University when I matriculated to the General Studies Program.

My home when I first came to New York was an NYU dorm - the Brittany - at 10th Street and Broadway, a nice neighborhood that my Mother liked and my father went along with. I choose that dorm because Lou Reed, Jerry Garcia and Debbie Harry had lived there at one point, and if it was good enough for them, then it was good enough for me. It also had the unexpected cache of being centrally located to just about everything I wanted to see.

Once I found my sea legs, I started to take long walks around the city at night. My habit was to drink some beer, grab a bit of whatever drug was floating around the halls, and then walk off and explore. From my reading and the various Dylan and Lou Reed songs I played incessantly, I had a long list of places to see. Granted, most of these places had gone, all that was left were addresses, storefronts, and bars - lots and lots of bars.

One memorable walk I had planned was to walk down Grand Street where the poets had lain, then walk due east to Ludlow Street to find 142 Ludlow, where Cale, Morrison and Reed had lived while forming the Velvet Underground. This was late 1987 and no one had bothered to tell me just how dangerous these parts of the Lower East Side were, not that I would have listened. I'm from Detroit, motherfucker, how bad can it be?

When I got to Ludlow and Delancey, I understood that I did not belong there. The last thing the locals from the various projects wanted to see was a rich boy from New York University in a nice sweater and shirt with pressed jeans walking through their wasteland. This did not deter me, mind you, from being really excited and acting like a fucking fool, screaming out just how cool it was to be here where the Velvets lived. To this day, I guess the reason I kept my money, my Walkman, and my life was that the thugs all around me were in such shock, they didn't know what to do.

On the walk up Ave. A., I stopped into some shitty bars and chatted with the locals and the bartenders. The House of Sublimation, Lucy's, King Tutu's Wah Wah Hut. I was still so excited I was chirping to all in the range of my voice just how cool this walk was. Finally, one of the bartenders at Lucy's took me aside and told me the facts of life vis a vis where the fuck I was.

I took my friends from the dorms back to all these joints and the bartenders remembered me (how could they forget a stupid kid like me?) and to the delight of me and my friends, bought us a round or two.

With in a month, I also answered a Village Voice ad for a man that offered guitar lessons. There is a Talmudic expression that says when the student is ready, the teacher will come. Jon Dorfman was that teacher for me. He played in jazz bands and had grown up in Woodstock when Bob Dylan and the Band were recording some of their classics. He was the third in the triumvirate of teachers - the City, my professors and Jon. Not only did I learn to play a very bad jazz and very good rock 'n' roll guitar, I also had my eyes open up to Lenny Bruce, Be Bop, Beat writers I never knew existed, and the entire culture that surrounded them. A lot of this happened in his Thompson Street studio during my usual Friday night lesson. Once a month, he took me to a bar in the West Village that one of the people we had been studying or I had been reading about had hung out in, thus adding the far West Village to the list of places I went exploring.

By the end of my sophomore year, I was telling my fellow students how to navigate lower Manhattan and, if they had a date in a neighborhood they were unfamiliar with, I could usually tell them which bar to meet in. Granted, it wouldn't always be the nicest place but then we were self-aware bohemians. That meant anti-status, baby. The seedier the dive, the more history it had.