The Fox Trot

The lighted spire of the Empire State Building is robin’s egg blue. The yellow daffodils are in bloom parading up and down the sidewalks on every Manhattan avenue. The trees along 34th street are exploding with white blossoms as if punctuated with clumps of snowy cotton balls. There are many wonderful times of year in the city, but I think none is more spectacular than that first real flush of spring, when everywhere you turn there is a welcome splash of color and freshness. When a city known more for its grey hue and jet black fashion sheds its heavy winter coat of snowy blah and reveals a kaleidoscope of bright colors that wipe away the months of misery the first of the year can bring. Time once again to shake out my own mothballs and return to the beating pulse of New York nightlife. Spring is here, I hear.

Just in time for the high season of club activity, Josh Wood has launched a new weekly party at The Park called Fox Thursdays. Matty promoted a party in the same space last year and it was always filled with all the gays of our lives. So I naturally assumed since I heard Matty was there the last two Thursdays that he would be there again. The fact that my text messages beforehand alerting him to my anticipated appearance went unheeded worried me not in the least. No matter. There were plenty of other fun and fabulous people to keep me going.

As soon as I walked in the door, I was pleasantly surprised to run into Jordan, who I hadn’t seen since I did a mercy run down to a birthday party at Pieces and returned the gloves he had left in the studio during an interview. I was so surprised to see him that I didn’t hear the names of any of his friends. Naturally once that happened and we had been talking for a half an hour, I couldn’t very well go and ask them again. I mean, I suppose I could, but I probably would have just offended them and then still not remembered their names anyway. I’m just like that.

We lingered in the front bar for a bit and then ventured into the main floor back bar. The Park is a large space and like the water-tight compartments on the Titanic, as one space fills up, it spills over into the next. The whole thing is ready to sink under its own weight when the massive crowd pours upstairs to the patio party space there, and within an hour of my arriving, it was so crowded there, you were literally drowning in a sea of hot gay men. This is not necessarily a complaint, mind you.

Newly gay Erik joined us there with his friend Jon from college. Since Erik is new to being gay, I knew it would be virtually impossible for him to find me in such a gigantic space, so I went back to the front bar to find him. By the time we three made our way back into the beating heart of The Park, I had lost Jordan and his friends in the crowd. For the rest of the evening, we continued to pass each other, like two ships in the night, but never spoke again. I didn’t even get to say good-bye.

Chatting upstairs by the bar, we bumped into my fashionable friend Sam, who was very happy I was there. “I never see you anymore.” Sam told me, "Thank God for Facebook so I at least can keep up with what you are doing.” Apparently both of us took much of the winter off from going out and like that famous groundhog finally poked our heads out to see who might shadow us. Sam was busy taking pictures of some of the gays in the bar who had the nerve to be wearing trucker hats. “Is it 2002 already?” I asked innocently.

We all decided to wander around with our drinks to see who else was there and in the back of the upstairs patio, I ran into Henry and Dan. Tonight for the first time I noticed something I should have realized quite some time ago: that Henry has a fondness for bowties and Dan, like me, likes polo shirts. I now realize that I have noticed them dressed like that on more than one occasion and yet never put it together like it was a thing. Their humpy friend Adam was also there and did not remember meeting me at Chris’ birthday party last week at The Boiler Room. Fair is fair, I didn’t remember his name. He was one of the guys who went to college with one of the other guys, in this case I think Henry. In any event, the important part of the encounter was that Henry was sniffing Adam quite intensely.

“He smells really, really good!” Henry’s boyfriend Dan didn’t even blink he was so unfazed by Henry sniffing Adam’s head like a bloodhound. I will admit, curiosity got the better of me and I smelled him myself. He did in fact smell delicious, a wonderfully soapy fresh clean smell. But I think Henry was in some kind of a gregarious mood because as I was leaving he informed me he was going to hug me until I felt uncomfortable. While he did hug me for an excessively long period of time, I think Henry is just too marvelous to ever grow uncomfortable or even tired of hugging, even under the watchful if passive gaze of his boyfriend.

Down at the basement-level coat check, waiting in the long line to get my backpack, a group of attractive fit thirty-something guys came down the stairs to carouse in the ancient bathroom. One of them, in a white printed t-shirt and poured on jeans that left nothing to the imagination waited outside next to me for all of his also hot friends to finish up inside. He was so beautiful, it was really something. And clearly the best looking of his crew. Without a doubt, the most beautiful man I had seen since the hot guy working the Mr. Softee truck up on Broadway and 50th street. The one who smiled when he saw my giddy charge across the street to get my vanilla cone in my short trot from the radio studio to the subway down to The Park tonight.

“I saw you from across the street,” he smiled a winning smile, leaning out the service window on his impressive party arms. “I had a feeling you were coming here.”

“This is the best thing about spring,” I told him, “When the weather turns and Mr. Softee arrives on the corner.”

He smiled even wider. “Aw thanks. That’s nice to hear.”

I wish I could have gotten the hot guy next to coat check to smile like that but after a quick glance back and forth he suddenly became very interested in his cell phone. The body and face were perfect as if sculpted from velvety rich cream cheese, even if the whole package was up against its printed expiration date. While still so very, very good-looking, he was definitely about to turn that corner to older gay guy. I thought to myself as I grabbed my backpack and headed up the stairs to the ground floor how difficult it will be for him to get old, to lose all that firmness and beauty that has carried him through so many Fire Island summers and to where? What was his final destination to be? After many a Fire Island summer, dies the gay swan.

Now normally this is the point where I could bring the whole evening full circle making some kind of statement about the bloom of spring and things fading almost before they begin to blossom. Or, about how the cream cheese is still edible even if it is a bit dry and crusty on the edges. But I don’t even have time to form the thoughts in my head before I see a familiar hulking figure looming at the top of the stairs.

“You mother fucker!” I yell, my horrid voice echoing out through the bar as I spy notorious porn hunk Erik Rhodes waiting for me on the landing. He looks suddenly sheepish like a child caught ditching school.

“Uh oh. Was I supposed to do the show and I flaked on you?” He looks a little panic-stricken. “I am suddenly having flashbacks about that.”

Erik Rhodes has been MIA for weeks now. He was supposed to do the show and then we never heard from him again. And then his phone stopped working. He hadn’t updated his blog in months. I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I just assumed he was finally dead. Moving to Staten Island is like faking your own death, but after a while, people will just take it as the real thing.

Turns out that Erik’s boyfriend replaced his phone on him (without asking or telling) which is why he had a new number and didn’t have my number anymore. Moments before arriving at The Park, Erik had just gotten into some kind of verbal argument with an overweight woman at Gray’s Papaya, whom he constantly referred to as “Precious.”

“She even told me she was pregnant. Like I give a shit.”

Despite his instance that he had really calmed down, and to be fair, he did seem more relaxed and normal than I had seen him in a while, he was clearly riled up by a variety of outside forces. “There’s that Alan Cumming. Didn’t he put out a cologne called ‘Cumming.’ That’s disgusting.” This from the man who has told such brain blanching tales on our show gay men have complained that they crossed a line. But, on the good side, he was very happy with his new career behind the camera directing at Falcon. “I love it. I tell the models when they look like shit. They don’t like that very much but I don’t care.” He hasn’t lost an inch of his massive muscle mass or brutish honesty so while I have no doubt the models don’t like it when he says they are in an unflattering position, I doubt any of them challenge him.

It was nice to see Erik again, even if he ended up making me miss the train I had intended to take home. That kind of detour was worth it. He always makes me laugh and if the three hugs good-bye are any indication, he missed me too. Spring is full of wonderful surprises and you never know what fox you might find on any given Thursday at The Park.