Hello friends.
I suppose you thought I had darkened your door for the last time. How many mortified mornings after have I caused? We had a good run and even I thought the old grey mare, who is even less than what she used to be, hadn’t so much wandered into the pasture as clogged up the glue factory. And yet here we are.
But it isn’t my fault! Happenstance has brought us here, perhaps once again for the last time, in the form of Brian Babst. At the risk of succumbing to what Dorothy Parker called “The Frankies” (expressions of candor brought on by the lateness of the hour), Babst did me a kindness three years ago and I haven’t forgotten it. So when he asked me to join him quite spontaneously tonight I was both purely delighted and also significantly honor bound.
Ever since I moved to Manhattan in 2001, our mutual friend Matty has tried unsuccessfully to integrate me into the rarefied gay circles within which he breezily orbits, or more accurately, is orbited, since he is the shimmering sun, across which all others transit. Yet stubbornly I am the Pluto in his Kuiper Belt, questionably even a planet among planets, too far from his radiant warmth to sustain it myself.
I am the singular failure of his adult life, almost certainly from a marketing perspective. I enjoy the hunky Ivy Leaguers, with their last names as first names and vague yet shockingly lucrative careers who are always around him. Their college major: business, their minor: Bruce Weber model. Gazing at their bottles of wine I will not drink and can not pronounce, the leather shoes I will never wear nor leverage my life to afford. And I am neither famous enough to waft into their lives on a misty haze of buzz nor fit enough to slink casually across the Fire Island dunes and into their collective consciousness.
But nothing to worry about. Babst invited me to a movie! Just us. There would be no risk of me cornering a panicked Yalie at a party, his shawl collar sweater over bulging muscles paired with tastefully tight pants, his eyes darting away like Bambi’s mother during hunting season. And the movie he chose was Boy Erased, starring Nicole Kidman in the kind of signature character wig that demands award season attention, late stage Russell Crowe no doubt carbo-loading for his own Oscar turn as late stage Orson Welles, and Lucas Hedges hoping his thousand yard stare can stretch another thousand to bypass Timothy Chalamet in gay hearts everywhere. What I’m saying is: I was invested.
Instead, we went to dinner.
From the jump, I have to say everyone was exceedingly nice. And I really did have no intention of writing about the evening. After all, it has been so long and why risk a social extinction level event again? But then Corey, trapped next to me at dinner, sharp as a bread knife and just as serrated, ivy league alma mater unknown, referred to someone as an Elder Gay Twink and honestly, when solid gold is just tossed casually out onto the table in front of you, it would be madness not to pick it up and run with it.
We ate at the Red Cat Chelsea, which I had never heard of and now is closing. The food was sensational and Babst repeatedly tried to get me to try the many fancy and expensive wines, or even indulge in a whiskey sour like a man. But I really only enjoy alcohol that tastes like candy taken from a baby, so I kept my head down and focused on my buffalo mozzarella and long island duck.
We were seated, six of us, at a round in a corner. Ever since reading Barry Paris’ biography of Louise Brooks where Brooks explained that Hearst and Davies always set facing each other in the middle of a long table at San Simeon with all other guests fanning out on either side of them, I endeavor to deploy the same strategy. Although tonight my plan was to stay on an end, as Brooks had done. But as we approached the table, seeing it was round and not a rectangle, I decided the safest course of action was to hurl myself into the tight wedge of the corner and remain there until the end of civilization as we know it.
Babst ended up sitting to my left, in a chair so tightly against the wall, he had to Tetris himself in and out of it. Next to him was David, who once came to my Cinco de Mayo party with Matty and Brian and waxed nostalgic about my long deceased hammock (RIP). This evening began at David’s new apartment, conveniently close and in the familiar swirl of remodeling that is the hallmark of all HGTV programming. Even the locksmith laboring over the door when I arrived practically begged for the impatient disapproval of Hilary Farr in the near distance.
Later at the restaurant he was seated between Babst and a blond man I didn’t really meet but who was also very nice and jacked in a well-appointed button down so smartly fit he incredibly never hulked out of it. I didn’t catch his name, but if they ever need a Biff for a touring company of Death Of A Salesman: The Musical, he and his effortless tussle of blond hair should almost certainly audition immediately.
Then came Andy, who like me, used his time effectively to make a series of outrageous facial expressions to punctuate the conversation as the night went on. In loud restaurants, hearing all the chatter is impossible (Biff confessed later he missed everything) so sometimes you need to fill the gap with quizzical looks from across the way. I am a natural physical comedian, as my many stumbles down the stairs can attest, and after hours each day being heard but not seen, I slip without hesitation into the kind of pantomime that silent film stars were made of. Andy, like a clown fish caught in his own fisherman’s sweater, did the same.
At one point, Corey asked me not to repeat a story he was about to tell in “whatever this is” and honestly, I couldn’t even if I tried. At dinner, in my cheap clothes and unique mien that’s all mine, I always feel more like an anthropologist than a dinner guest. The banter over fashion, design, marketing and high end beauty products might as well have been the clicks and whirs of an indigenous tribe. I took note of these Manhattanites but did not understand.
As the meal wound down, and a selection of three enticing desserts was before us to sample and savor, something struck Andy funny resulting in a gloriously over-the-time spit take of red wine across the entirety of the table. He was capital M mortified, having in his words “Jackson Pollocked all over everything” but I was greatly relieved. Not just for the incredible comedy I was able to wring out of it (i.e. “These desserts are really delicious. And just a hint of wine.”) but because at any and every second, that could have been me.
Just moments earlier, I had made a suggestion to Corey that earned me the kind of reaction usually reserved for a dead body rolling out of the trunk of your car. “This is why no one ever invites me anywhere!” I pleaded to him, in defense. But life is a Cabernet, old chum, and Andy’s excited utterance almost literally washed the memory of it away. Case dismissed.
So much of the dinner conversation kept coming back around to the closing of the Red Cat. The regular patrons at the table couldn’t understand the owner walking away from a successful business he loved, but I can. Even when you enjoy something, like writing here has been for me, sometimes the best course of action is to move on. Everything in its season. It’s the true bitterness of fall now, a cold shoulder turned against the charms of summer. So too, every delicious meal must come to an end, even if you aren’t quite full. But like a fine wine, all you can ever hope for in life is a great finish.
