I Just Want My Pants Back by David Rosen

apartment versus renting one. After a while everyone started to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me. I just felt like Stacey and Eric, and some of their new friends, were rushing to leave youth behind and become adults. They could not wait to take on the next phase of responsibility. “Give it to us!” they yelled. “We have broad shoulders!” It was just so goddamn dull. So the truth was, we didn’t get together nearly as much as we used to. But I did love them, I really did. They just scared me sometimes.
    Before the onslaught of toxins on the brain rendered me speechless, I voiced my doubts to Tina about the rabbi thing. She was quite supportive. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, sincerely, “You, sir, are fucked.” Then she laughed, “I’m joking, but it’s a huge responsibility, no question. It’s her wedding, you have to be prepared and go into it knowing it’s the most important day in her life. You cannot be the one to fuck it up. I’m so happy for them, but…the hell if I’d want to do it! I mean, you know Stacey, she’s going to have like over three hundred people there, her grandparents are coming from Germany, she has like twelve bridesmaids, blah blah blah. And she’s very, what’s the word…particular.”
    “Oh, I’m feeling way less anxious about it now, thanks,” I said. I scratched my head. “Why do you think she wanted me to do it?”
    “Because of what she told you, you introduced them and all. It sounds silly, but girls are really queer like that, trust me. And you’re funny, and you’ll make the ceremony fun, and she wants it to be really special, not just some other wedding. You’ll be great. By the way, I have to listen to her talk about this all the fucking time, you’re only just getting sucked in now. I’ve already heard her treatise on ‘band versus DJ.’”
    I groaned.
    Finding out you were to stand as a rabbi in front of three hundred people, some from Europe, and fuse two friends together for life required somewhere around thirteen drinks—a true bar mitzvah–style drunk—and Tina and I had been doing our best to reach that magic number. The good people at 7B were obliging. It was your classic East Village joint, the kind of non-theme bar that was getting harder to find—local acts like the Bouncing Souls and the Liars on the jukebox, a couple of slimy pinball machines, tattooed bartenders whose bands were playing somewhere sometime soon—and if those reasons weren’t enough to buy a pint, 7B was also the bar in Crocodile Dundee, the film in which Paul Hogan mouthed the famous words that defined a generation: “That’s not a knife. THAT’s a knife.”
    Tina was single too, although she had met some guy a week or two before who she had “a feeling” about. But as with Jane and me, she hadn’t hung out with him sober and during daylight hours yet, and basically until that happened it could really go either way. The right drugs helped you tolerate the not-so-tolerable, and Tina always had the right drugs. Stacey once told us that one of the best parts of being in a relationship was that you could go home before you were too wasted or too exhausted. There was nothing to stay out late for, to have that one regrettable drink for. That was my favorite one, though, the uh-oh one, the crossover. The one that made you teeter between being fucking brilliant and dangerously out of line. Stacey’s pro-relationship comment was meant to sound nice and comforting, but it lacked the whole reason bars existed. Possibilities.
    I told Tina all about my second encounter with shy, reserved Jane. She told me I could expect a cold sore in four to six days. She started texting someone about something and so I made my way to the men’s room, bumping into more people than I should have. I was shivering with intoxicants. 7B’s bathroom was a little cozy for more than one person, but as there was a line, people were crowding in two at a time, sometimes three, with