It's a new era at 125 Stanton. My old roommate flew the coop, a bird replaced him, the landlord is moving into the building, the front door has a new coat of black paint (tagged a day later), a chihuahua named Henry does his business on a pee pad, and the bedrooms were recently updated with real doors that open/close (even lock!) without the assistance of string or a belt tied around a hanging sheet. Spring or fall, there's been a rebirth. It's how you sway it that counts. I've graduated from rehab and new beginnings start in a corduroy jacket. With minds off October baseball now, it was time to take back the Lower East Side.

So Saturday night, after spending the day in rural Connecticut at a wedding with more fat people than Caroline Rhea's studio audience, I met up with my neighbor past midnight on Essex Street and we took our autumnal moods for a walk through the woods of Filthy McNasty's. As always, the scene was a gas. Or, gas fire. Busty bartender cracked open beer cans, art school lesbians danced to 80's music and outer-borough rejects dutifully hit on them.

I ended up talking to one of the girls and they were RISD students on a weekend roadtrip to see a fashion show that involved female models boxing in TriBeCa. As they say in the south, that's hawt. Flying high now, I was not about to throw in the cum towel. I keep jabbing and it turns out I'm talking to the one straight (or bi?) girl in the group. Either way, the estrogen fest clearly had her jets looking for a place to land other than bushy fields. HBO's Larry Merchant calls it an even fight at this point.

I gave her my standard story which i customize individually: I went to MICA (art school in Baltimore) for a "pre-med" program in art therapy which helped me get into Johns Hopkins med school, and now I'm a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai with articles published in both the New England Journal of Medicine and Granta. Also, I hope to one day get on the MOMA's board of trustees and my golf game sucks so i spend weekends upstate as a motocross enthusiast. She didn't question any of this when I slimmed my age to 24, drank $2 PBR's, and later navigated her through clothes piles in my small, dirty apartment covered in wood dust from the recent door construction.

It didn't take much to get her to ditch Team Sappho, it was a given when we bonded over seeing the Strokes in Providence at Lupo's three summers ago. To sweeten the deal to come home with me I even promised Bud tall boys and some really gruesome surgery photos. ("Shit, I'm sorry. I forgot I have those on display at the Klingenstein Pavillion's annual Arts in Healthcare Exhibition.") Anyway, the good doctor could go on and tell you about this 21 year old's pink sunsets and how I put on a Mexican wrestling mask before performing cunnilingus to summon my alter-ego, "El Box Cutter" but the details are as hairy as a...well, 21 year old art school student.

Where does my vaguely relevant neighbor character factor into this treacherous tale of white lies, lower back tattoos, train engineer caps, and sheet rock? Well he left the bar when it was clear I successfully lowered the boom on higher ed and he spent the night on Clinton Street where he met his brother and they bedded a set of roommates and shared morning coffee.

The real "curse" is over. 125 Stanton is back.

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