The Big Chill

It’s cold. And I know that no one moves to New York for the weather. But still. It is worth mentioning that it is cold. Yesterday, it snowed. In the middle of October. My carefully drawn cotton cobwebs decorating my Douglas Sirk-inspired Cape Cod were laced with real live snowflakes, two weeks before Halloween. It’s most frustrating because we didn’t even have a summer this year. It was just one long rainy spring with five warm days in August, and now this.

In the elevator tonight after the show, Father Dave gently chided me that my fabulous grey wool fall coat wasn’t equal to the weather. It is one of my few possessions that I would actually put into the fashion category. Normally, that coat, with its family von Trapp precision cut, lasts me well into December when I replace it with a bulky snow parka, shades of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. I don’t even know where my leather gloves are. Father Dave is right. I have been caught unawares by the weather.

Not that I have any great love for Bowery Bar and the Stepford gays that swirl around inside it like lost guppies, but I do have an annual tradition of visiting on the last bearable Tuesday evening of autumn. Now I fear I have already missed my window. Where will the gays go, now that Fire Island was a soggy, damp huddle around a firepit and their only viral infection this summer was Miley Cyrus’ “Party In The U.S.A.?” Frost has already descended on the Central Park ramble and they will soon, I have no doubt, open the Highline for ice skating.

Monday night I ran down to The Ritz to see Bianca’s show and hang out with Matt Kugelman, the only good thing that has ever happened to me at Bowery Bar aside from that accidental blow job I got a couple of years ago. I don’t know what happened. Matt and I had a good rhythm going of partying down, pulling it together and then partying down a few days later. I blame the self-imposed end of my blog. The unexamined nightlife is not worth living, I guess.

I told Bianca to put Bobby in the show and he was definitely a crowd pleaser. I wish I had taken some pictures. It was fun, but even The Ritz, usually a reliable screeching twink explosion was down to a dull roar. Then again, it was a Monday night, so I suppose they can be forgiven for lacking their usual Saturday night specialness. After all, how can I complain about a slow evening as the nightcap to a weekend where I hung out with more hung porn stars than you can shake a dick at and slept with one of them?

But as I turn around in bar after restaurant after bar in this town, I am starting to think I am not the only one whose party persona is as worn and threadbare as the fashionably unemployed men that populate the grainy/fabulous black and white images of 1930s Manhattan, fedoras pulled low over unshaven grim faces, suit collars turned up against a chilly economy. Perhaps I have been underestimating the financial deathblow our country has been blown. Or maybe I am not the only one craving a solid night of rest in the city that never sleeps.