It's March 26, 2010, somewhere around midnight maybe, and I'm clumsily trying to manipulate a Hula Hoop into making a full rotation around my beer gut. Standing in front of Chopstix's dueling piano bar, I take off my suit jacket to allow full range of motion. The shot of whiskey I just downed is starting to hit me now. I've waited 21 years for this moment, and suddenly it feels like a child's birthday party - any second a piñata will drop from the rafters and the rummies and I will take turns beating the shit out of it with a baseball bat.

After all this time, I'm still not an adult.

Happy second 18th!

I've never been comfortable with my age. Throughout my schooling and into real life, my friends have always been older. When I could get away with it, I'd lie and say I was two or three or four years older than I actually was. It would eliminate the need for talking about how mature I seemed for my age.

I was 15 years old on my first day of volunteering at The Grand Cinema. I arrived in a suit and said I was 18 - as if I'd get in trouble otherwise. When I started working there as a projectionist a year later, I changed it to 17 for my friends and, more importantly, the girl I had a crush on who was six years my senior. I waited excitedly for my fake 18th birthday to come around so it'd seem right for her to love me back. When it happened, I had to grit my teeth and tell her I'd lied.

By that point, I'd started drinking. I'd mislead a waitress into serving me several times at a bar. In my defense, I hadn't said anything more than to ask for a beer; she assumed the rest. I recall one time when she wasn't there a different waitress asked for my identification.

I responded, "Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm not of age. But it's been a really rough week for me, so do you think that this one time you could let it slide?"

The Stumble

March 26 again: I've been a drinker for five years at this point, always getting it where I could - through friends and at parties. The time I've spent in bars has been insignificant in relation to the time I've spent out. A few days after my actual 21st birthday, I decide the best way to acclimate myself to the world of bars is to be thrown in the deep end and be expected to swim.

The plan is to start at The Red Hot and pinball my way down Sixth Avenue, hitting every bar along the way - stopping, reasonably, at O'Malley's Irish Pub.

The Red Hot

Though I made sure to prefunk before heading to my first bar, I'm still quite nervous as I enter The Red Hot, a bar that seems to cater to experienced beer drinkers. The place is packed at 10 p.m., and I stand sheepishly by the pinball machines and search the beer list. Erring on the side of caution, I choose a PBR but am rejected by my friend's mom. Instead, she chooses for me some pale ale that I desperately chug before fleeing to the sidewalk for a cigarette.

I'm not ready for The Red Hot on a Friday night, I decide. It's too much.

Onward.

Engine House No. 9

I need liquor.

Having lived by Engine House No. 9 for quite a while, I'm familiar with its standing as a Tacoma institution, a townie oasis in a college neighborhood. I belly up to the bar and order a White Russian, my first real drink of the night.

The prices are reasonable, and this early in the night the feeling inside is warm. People mostly keep to themselves. James Blunt's abysmal early hit, "You're Beautiful," plays on the speakers as I take my first sip. The cheesiness of it all feels right.

Masa

I don't know exactly what I had expected from Masa. All I knew about it was that on weekend nights it was frequented by dudes with untucked button up shirts and gelled hair and their sloppy, high-heeled lady friends.

Inside, I grabbed my $20 shot of whiskey, made my way past the sweaty dance floor and up to the rooftop deck.  I shot it back and lit up a cigarette in the open air. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but almost instantaneously I'm asked to extinguish it (perhaps, I am told, in my empty plastic shot glass).

At this point I leave.

Jazzbones

Entrance here is free for ladies, $5 for me. There's a DJ or something.

It's easy to forget in the dark of Jazzbones that the walls are lined with Teddy Haggerty art. Jazzbones is confusing like that. I down a whiskey sour and make my getaway quick.

Six Olives

Here's a place I had been looking forward to. Six Olives has existed to me as a mystery: I had never seen anyone standing outside the bar, nor had I talked to anyone who'd been there.

The drink I order is absolutely delightful. It's called Need for Speed, and it consists of eight shots of some sort of caffeine and guava-infused vodka. It arrives at our table in a silver tray shaped like a racing car that opens to reveal several delicious pink shots. It's easily a highlight of the night.

Crown Bar

I sit at the bar and drink a Maker's Mark. I feel too sloppy to be here, but the bartenders are very accommodating. I'm given a special free drink for my birthday - some sort of citrus cocktail. I contemplate the possibility of finding a nice booth to curl up and sleep in.

Very drunk now.

Chopstix

Here, again, I am pleasantly surprised. Chopstix is goddamn fun, and I feel ashamed for having made fun of it for the past few years. Sure, it's cheesy as all get out, but the people inside are 100 percent absent of pretension. I take another shot of whiskey and find myself unusually entranced by a dueling-piano version of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."

Too drunk now.

O'Malley's Irish Pub

I can't finish my PBR, so I hand it to a friend. The night is coming to a close - no more submissions for karaoke. My pockets are light; my head is foggy, and I'm covered in the sweet smell of smoke and whiskey. Like most of the bars I visited this night, I still have the distinct feeling that I've snuck in past the bouncer. One thing I've learned is the cooler the bar the less likely you'll feel cool in it.

I'm given a ride home by a friend, and I feel like I used to when I first started going to parties - dizzy, sick and very tired, but excited that this will be the time in my life where I finally stop being a nervous kid. I'd lived the past 21 years chasing adulthood, recently through the bottom of liquor bottles at parties and now finally through bars - bars that had always appeared to me as congregations of grown-ups. After tonight I'd seen it all. I'd seen the grown-ups, taken shots with them, and now it was time for me to be one of them.

That hasn't happened yet, and I'm starting to think that I just don't want it to.