The Tippling Point

I still wasn’t feeling 100% after last night, but nothing but nothing was going to keep me away from Henry and Dan’s Beer and Nuts Party tonight. As I noted when I attended their Halloween bash last year, Henry lives in a castle. A castle! The living room is in a turret and behind a rendering of Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, a flat screen TV is secreted. It’s like San Simeon with Henry cast as Marion Davies when knighthood was in flower.

Romaine stayed home from the show tonight to take care of her sick three year old who was projectile vomiting like she was auditioning for a role in The Exorcist. So, I said that ADD Jeff could hang out in the studio, since it is Friday and I knew he would get all nerdy with the guest DJ during the Friday Night Dance Party. And if things got slow, I could always tease him about his sexual habits and his protestations and outrage could easily fill all four hours. But when I encountered him waiting on the subway platform after the show, I considered it fate and invited him to join me at the party.

I feel fairly certain that my RSVP was a tentative plus one, and since their last party had 250 guests and the Fire Marshall, I figured one more body couldn’t hurt. But the Beer and Nuts Party was a more low-key affair. The long dining table in the living room was dotted along one side with bowls filled with various nuts (sugared chickpeas, sweet and hot cashews, etc.), the bar in the corner (do round rooms have corners, really?) drowning in liquor. Henry was back in his signature bowtie, awash in a warm, relaxed mood.

“Eat lots of nuts!” he insisted, “No one is eating them. And if they don’t get eaten, we will be stuck with them for months.” Gay men love to eat, it is just something they tend not to do vigorously in public. You would think they would be more willing to graze on something light, but even here, at a party with nuts in the title, they were coy. The secret to getting gay men to eat is to put two drinks in them, and then they will eat anything. Put more than four drinks into a skinny circuit boy and he will eat a stick of butter if the room is dark enough. True, he will cry the whole time, but he will eat it.

As I journeyed from nut to nut, I spent a lot of time talking to Chris, who was there, as always, with his wonderful boyfriend Cub. Cub was already at the eat-a-stick-of-butter stage of drunkenness when I arrived and that was hilarious. Dan led a bunch of us on a tour of the apartment, which is filled with marvelous details and decorated with pinpoint accuracy. Not my taste in every instance, but a seamless through line of period style. Ironically, I coveted Henry’s square toilet seat more than anything because it defied convention (unless you have a square ass) but more importantly, because it yelled out, “You can’t buy me at Home Depot! I’m special!”

In Henry’s room, Cub picked up a copy of a book on the nightstand. “Henry‘s goal this summer is to get through all of Proust,” Dan informed us as Cub dropped the book and moved his short, drunken attention span to the fantastic old world maps on the wall in the hallway. “Gays who write about themselves. Is there anything worse?” I deadpanned, before marveling at the section of the Pacific Northwest labeled “Parts Unknown.” Everyone ignored my joke, or maybe they didn’t get it. I suppose it might work better here in print. Or the joke itself could also be headed to parts unknown.

At one point, Jeff and I engaged in conversation with Dan’s roommate Sean and Sean’s female friend Alex. Sean and Alex went to the same high school, but didn’t really meet or know each other until they bumped back into each other on the other side of the country at NYU. The two of them were skinny in the way that people are in their early 20s, a skinniness that cannot be duplicated beyond a certain age without living on nothing but cocaine and oxygen.

At first I had trouble remembering Sean’s name and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. As it was, I had been at the party for almost an hour and hadn’t remembered a single new name, which meant that writing about it later on the train would be a real problem. But later when Alex introduced him to someone else in front of me, it all came flooding back. Of course. He is almost twenty and named Sean, just like my delightful yet criminally young boyfriend from 2003. No wonder I was having a mental block.

Sean was being very intense and suave, in a Gossip Girl kind of way, although at one point a gesture got out of hand and he splashed a bit of his drink on the floor. I did much worse later when I tried to take a picture of him with Henry and while lining up my iPhone, poured my drink down the front of my shirt, splashing it onto the leather couch and the parquet floors that are no doubt worth more than I am. I was stumbling around all night like a drunk, but it was just from lack of food. Being queasy all day, I had barely eaten anything and while never graceful, this had clearly driven me to my tipping point.

But I wasn’t alone. Later in the kitchen, I ran into Adam, just as handsome as he was the last time I saw him at GUMBO. I spoke with him for a few moments before I noticed his lovely button-down shirt was completely soaked. Completely. Apparently, he didn’t realize a shower was a shower and had the kind of mishap usually reserved for episodes of I Love Lucy. His friend was also wet, with random splashes on his shirt and pants that I said made him look like he had been in some kind of bidet encounter gone horribly wrong.

“Who brought a Car and Driver?” Henry blurted out in the kitchen. I thought he was expressing mock outrage that someone came to his party in a town car that was idling downstairs. But instead he was referring to a copy of Car and Driver magazine that was sitting on the counter. When I told him the mix-up in my head and how easy it was to make that mistake since we were, after all, in a castle, he said, “It isn’t really a castle. It used to be a hospital. Just think of it this way: Someone died on every spot in this place.” A much better story to tell at the end of a party than at the beginning.

As I said good night, Henry beseeched me to take some nuts to go. “The less popular ones, please!” So I took a to-go cup and made my way out of the castle. As I precariously balanced the cup trying to get through the subway turnstile, Jeff insisted I was going to drop them but I didn’t. As clumsy and off-center as I was, I didn’t lose a single nut. As I sat on the subway, I did that thing that always grosses me out when other people do it: I ate something with my fingers on the dirty subway. But I didn’t care. My appetite had finally returned. And while I may not have been as drunk as Cub, I could have eaten a stick of butter if one had been available. But nuts will do in a pinch.