We Do Things: Platonic Date Night

PDA and I like to have Platonic date nights since his girlfriend lives in Amsterdam (that’s Holland, not New York) and I am about as attached as a hangnail.  We do this because we get a massive kick out of one another and are able to peacefully coexist in many ways (he’s also my quiet-Sunday-brunch-at-Justin’s-with-a-New-York-Times partner.  It makes you feel like an old married couple, which is nice.)  Platonic dates usually take place at the Palais (not your idea of romantic?  Try hanging out in the red-lit ladies’ room.)  There is something about bars located on Jefferson that make us feel at home.  Now that McCormack’s (aka the Dive or, paradoxically, “The No Name,”) is no more the Palais has become our go-to place, probably because we just start walking towards McCormack’s and wind up there.  This Saturday our hope was that it would be empty.  “The kids have gone home, right?” PDA asked when he came to get me.  And gone home they had; there were about ten people in the whole place, mostly regulars, and even the 1 a.m. rush of about a dozen more usual suspects wasn’t much of a rush at all.   So we commandeered the jukebox (in order to block the repeated playing of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,’ a mind-boggling Palais ritual) and giggled and drank well vodka and cheap beer until it felt like the right time to go home.  Gotta love Platonic date night….there are no awkward, “Where are we going to go?” or, “Who’s going to pay for that?” moments because we have that stuff figured out.  PDA and I always think that together we have a lot of stuff figured out, which, who knows how true that is.  We can be absolutely positive, though, that it goes: Ramones, The Band, Zeppelin.