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Welcome to the Johnsons 123 Rivington St. (betwn. Essex & Norfolk Sts.) 212-420-9911

Several million brain cells ago, before I flopped into this town of dashed dreams and dirty sidewalks, I knew where I’d get drunk.

“Josh, I found a bar made for you,” my friend Aaron said, telephoning me in Ohio, where I shared a bunk bed with my brother.

Wow, I replied, a saloon where indie-rocking, nonpracticing Jews with crippling emotional instabilities can whiskey their way to surlier personalities.

“Well, not exactly,” Aaron said, “but they have buck-fifty happy-hour Pabst and tabletop Pac-Man. It’s called Welcome to the Johnsons.”

Good enough, I said, back in summer 2000, when my chest was hairless and my idealism endless. Several months later, I relocated into a threadbare Astoria apartment. I was lonely. My cure was Welcome to the Johnsons.

It sat on a murky, sinister Lower East Side block—weren’t they all back then?—beside a Chinese Laundromat and across from defunct kosher wine factory Schapiro’s. I minced inside the Johnsons’ concrete-floor digs and sighed: home. It mimicked my high school pal Chris’ rec room, with plastic-topped couches, wobbly tables, faded family pics and a fuzzy TV broadcasting B-grade schlock.

A tattooed crowd of tee–clad twentysomethings blabbed about bands playing at Mercury Lounge, while head-bangers roared from the jukebox. The bathrooms were covered with illegible graffiti—and, likely, several communicable diseases I hadn’t had enough sex to acquire.

“What do you want, sweetheart?” a tank-wearing bartender cooed.

Sweetheart? Me? I scanned the room: endless Pabst. I bought one can, then two, then three, the price only reaching $2 after happy hour’s 9 p.m. death. For a tightwad earning $10 an hour as a call-dropping receptionist, I was ecstatic.

“You’re thirsty tonight,” the bartender said, as I drank my sixth beer.

“Something like that,” I replied, grinning loonily. That night I trekked home happily plowed.

I revisited the Johnsons the ensuing week, sucking down two-dollar cocktails (until 9 p.m.) and small lakes of Pabst. I returned endlessly, like a homing pigeon, the Johnsons my constant even after I moved to Brooklyn and became a besotted alt-weekly columnist.

In today’s hastily spiffying Lower East Side, hotels reach clouds. Cocktails top $10. Destination restaurants sprout like mushrooms and sell truffles to Euro-trash, who, if I were a psycho protagonist in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, I’d throttle with my carpal tunnel–plagued paws. But like an unpluckable back hair, Welcome to the Johnsons has staying power.

Sure, skateboarders have relented to fixie-riding bike messengers. Tie-wearing wage slaves now bend elbows at the scuffed bar. And the ashtrays have vanished. But Welcome to the Johnsons remains broke-down beautiful, combating the city’s spic-and-span future.

I came back last week and cemented my tushie at the bar. I ordered a whiskey ginger, poured to paint-peeling strength—none of this mixologist nonsense. A girl in bright-red tights shot bad pool, while youngsters with bed head and oversize sunglasses guzzled Pabst. One flipped open his phone.

“Where are we? We’re at the Johnsons, man,” he shouted into his phone, over the jukebox’s rock din. “Where else would we be?”

I sipped my cocktail in silent agreement.