Elevate!

Have I mentioned that Matty works in marketing? I should amend that. Matty is marketing. The living embodiment of presentation as commodity, promotion the coin of the realm. To say that I depend on Matt to connect me to gay life as we know it, I mean it like I depend on my lungs to breathe. And in the world of Matty's social largess, I am the fat welfare queen of Reagan's deepest recession-era nightmares.

As the club promoter of nothing less than the gay scene of Manhattan, clipboard guest list and critical judgment firmly in hand, I am his most pitiful charity case. I am a hopeless Eliza Doolittle in the fair hands of a very impatient Henry Higgins. Even as my public profile has risen, my game is hopelessly stalled in neutral. Even tonight when I assured him on my way out of Barracuda at the end of the evening that I would "step it up" he stamped me with his new idiom "Elevate!"

After the show, I joined Matty at Adam's apartment for an Obama victory party straight out of gay central casting. Adam and all of his subtly hunky friends were J. Crew catalog delicious (Gay Crew catalog, anyone?) and the elegant simplicity of his Chelsea apartment, courtesy the recent interior artistic stylings of Hanno, was the perfect background. It was the kind of cozy clean scene that convinces moderate Republican women that maybe the gays aren't so bad after all.

I always feel hopelessly out of place in environs like these, too thin in the arms, too thick around the middle and always too old. To assuage these and a million other feelings, I like to settle in with the friendliest person I can find or someone I already know. Charlie was there and the way he called out to me from across the spare living room, dotted with snappy gay couples locked together like freshly scrubbed Tetris pieces, said he was looking for the same thing. But maybe he just wanted another blog mention. Either way, mission accomplished. We watched Obama's stellar acceptance speech together while sharing the perfectly made cape cod that Matty had mixed for me in a red plastic party cup in Adam's airmail stamp of a kitchen.

The moment the speech ended was like 12:01am on New Year's Day and the place cleared out faster than the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. I found Matty in Adam's bedroom on the computer with party guest Gray, trying to use Facebook to find the phone number of a faint yet mutual acquaintance to no avail. All our futuristic technological endeavors should be like ideal children: well-behaved, passing through our lives almost unnoticed, and largely confined to the home where when things go wrong they can cause the least amount of trouble and anxiety in front of strangers. At a dead end for the next post-election party, everyone decided to decamp to the old reliable (Sarah) Barracuda for a cocktail.

There was high excitement as we headed down toward the bar and Matty suggested we cartwheel across Seventh Avenue. I was mortified at the thought of my hands touching the urine encrusted thoroughfare. "The street is filthy!" Matty turned to me and deadpanned, "Have you eaten an ass lately? I rest my case." I wasn't sure if the evening was blog-worthy until Matty released that pearl and sealed the deal. Then Gray insisted that I refer to him only as "Will" but since he never explained why, that isn't happening. Besides, Gray is a much better name, evocative, and it's why I instantly remembered him when we first met earlier because of his frequent appearance along with Matty in any number of Facebook photo galleries.

Once at Barracuda, Matty spied a hot young guy in a heather grey t-shirt walking behind me and then tried to shove my lumbering carcass into him. I shot him a dirty look. "You need to get laid!" he screamed at me, the word "laid" lingering in his open mouth for several seconds, which I assume was either to drown out the horrible singing contest in the backroom or to encourage lonely suitors in my vicinity to give me a second, yet scornful look. This started a brief exchange that ended with his immortal insistence that I "elevate!"

Matty is probably right. There is no point in my showing up in public if I am not even going to make an effort to publicize myself. There is no point in putting the goods on the shelf if your primary intention is to discourage the customers from buying. For a moment, I really thought he was on to something, but then that same hot young guy walked by and this time Matty shoved another friend of his into him. I turned to the friend who seemed as equally stunned as I had been and said, "I think Matty just wants us to sleep with the guys that he can't sleep with now that he is in a relationship."

He smiled, a broad knowing smile. "I think you are right."

Eh. In a way, I think we are both right.