My Tart Will Go On

This is my fourth night in a row out on the town, but only the second adventure I have written about. Thursday night I went to Matty and Andrew’s apartment for a quiet birthday celebration for Matty to which I was (as usual) the last to arrive. I was insistent that I wouldn’t write about the evening because it was private, even though Matty didn’t seem to mind either way. But since the two highlights of the evening for me were Matty reading my last post about him out loud to the mortified left standing and the dozen cookies I ate, there really wasn’t much left to say. I love them. That is all.

Friday night I went to Therapy after the show with ADDJeff, our producer Katie and Jim the Sound Guy. Jim and I spent most of the evening talking about work while Jeff and Katie frowned at us for being so insular (with good reason on their part). Because we are practically neighbors now, Jim took my same train home so I didn’t have my usual time to write up the adventure. Even still, I talked to no one else and nothing else happened so consider the evening dutifully reported.

But today, Mike went into the city to attend a party with his boyfriend and that left me free to join Ryan White and all his friends at The Ritz. First however, I needed to satisfy my Titanic fever by catching the 6:15pm showing at Kips Bay in IMAX 3D. Even though their screen is what Mike has not so lovely described as “FauxMax” because it is just a regular theater modified slightly that charges the same elevated price, I had a good time anyway. ADD Jeff joined me at the last minute for this trip back in time and it was worth it.

Road Scholar

Stopped for the moment at the traffic light at East 4^th Street, Matty turned a little wistful as he gazed out the car window at the venerable old Bowery Bar across the way. “Do you think people will ever go back there?”

“In a year or so,” I mused, “When some promoter makes a new night there.” What followed can only be described as nonsense as Matty suggested that we could be those club promoters. I was aghast, not forgetting for a second my first failed foray into club promoting in 2001 (not coincidentally down the road from Bowery Bar) that we had just been talking about!  “I’m too old and too disconnected from this community to promote a club night.”  

“You are a pillar of this community!” Matty declared, the seriousness of the statement evaporating faster than the words themselves could leave the air. Sitting next to me in the back seat, ADD Jeff had a good laugh at that. Then Matty added triumphantly, “That’s your blog right there!”

Honestly, I hadn’t given a thought to writing anything tonight. Sometimes I go out just to go out, no matter how wanting my website might be. In fact, my only thought tonight was catching up with Ben Harvey at his Gumbo party at Deity in Brooklyn. And since I spent most of the evening fighting semantically about the show with ADD Jeff and grilling Martin about possible Supreme Court outcomes for the health care mandate, there didn’t seem to be much to write home about. But then Matty and Andrew showed up at Gumbo too and the subsequent ride to Grand Central Terminal delivered all the material I needed.

While Andrew white-knuckled it behind the wheel, stressed about all the late night traffic preventing me from catching my last train, Matty sourced tunes through his iPhone to personally DJ the ride back from Brooklyn. I so rarely get to see them both and I love them so much that it was nice to have this time together, however brief.

But then ADD Jeff was upset about something he heard on the show last weekend. Someone asked me recently what drugs people are doing these days and not being a young person or a drug person, I was at a complete loss. “We’ll ask ADD Jeff when he gets back from the Black Party,” I allegedly (but quite probably) said on the show. Even though I suggested it was the party and not him that was filled with drugs, Jeff feigned outrage, but then seconds later he was explaining what drugs he saw other people doing at the event. So I guess I wasn’t too far off.

“They’re still doing ecstasy.” It was all very clinical the way he said it. Still? That didn’t seem right. It can’t possibly still be 1992. I insisted that it must have left and come back, like cardigans or Madonna. Add Jeff rattled off a bunch of other drugs I had heard of but never done. Apparently GHB has become very hard to come by in New York City. That seems impossible, too. This is the kind of town where anytime of the day or night a governor can get a blow job from a woman who can get a record deal. That’s not the kind of town where they run out of anything, and certainly not moxie or a drug that comes in gallon jugs.Maybe Jeff wasn't anymore knowledgeable about this subject than I was. 

Like a really inappropriate episode of Sesame Street, our conversation was brought you by the letters E, G and K. For those of you who don’t remember the 90s, K (Ketamine) is an animal tranquilizer that was all the rage back when people still knew who Courtney Love was. ADD Jeff the science guy, then started explaining what he had heard about the various forms that Ketamine comes in. If it is liquid then it needs to be double baked. “Like potatoes,” Matty offered brightly from the passenger seat where he had been listening intently. “Like twice baked potatoes.”

Maybe it was the hunger talking but the twice baked potatoes sounded pretty good to me. Much better than the drug that took six steps before you couldn’t walk anymore. “Too much work!” I yelled, “If I wanted to cook, I would have made dinner.” I have no moral problem with people doing drugs. I would do them myself but the circumstances are never right. The only people I ever run into who offer me drugs, I know are also the kind of people that if I had a problem while high, would step over my body and keep going. And besides, all those stories of cooking and baking and sourcing and snorting all sound like a lot of extra work to me. I suppose drugs are for people who are highly motivated and not lazy like me.

This is why I live in the suburbs and I will not be promoting a new club night at Bowery Bar. The discussion about the drugs people do only reinforced for me that I really am too old and too disconnected from this community to get into club promoting, unless it is a club where people mainline twice baked potatoes. I will probably never need to pick E, G or K out of a line-up, but it’s still nice to know how much you can learn in the backseat of a car.

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Read more of Derek's adventures in When Nightlife Falls and Colonnade: A Life In Columns. Both are available now On Amazon.com, and in digital form for The Kindle, The Nook, and in the iBookstore.

Birthday Preppers

Life is really unexpected. You just never know what is going to happen. This is why my new obsession is Doomsday Preppers, the show where ordinary people hoard a decade’s worth of food in their basement in the unlikely event of a water landing. Even today, I was crossing Sixth Avenue at 48^th Street and an SUV was driving the wrong way toward me, right past the cops permanently stationed by their cars outside Fox News. Always ready to channel Albert Finney in The Dresser, a movie I have never seen, I stood in front of her car and simply lifted my hand. She slowed to a stop and gave me a funny look and I showed her the error of her ways by merely gesturing back past her. Seconds later, she was completing a U-Turn and we were both on our merry way. The cops didn’t even bother getting in their cars and chasing her. That’s New York. And if you are going to freak out at every little thing, don’t come here.

I was making a rare Saturday night appearance in the city for back to back birthday celebrations. It is also Mike’s birthday on Sunday but he doesn’t feel like celebrating this year even though now that we have our glorious new coffee station in the kitchen, amazing new bathroom and showstopping fireplace, there is every reason to rejoice! I even upgraded the shelves in the closets so our own doomsday prepping won’t look as sloppy as that girl in Houston who plans to shoot her kittens in the head when we run out of oil.

First stop was The Tenth Rail down on 10^th Avenue and 33^rd Street. The neighborhood is so sketchy, the highlight is the well-traveled drive through McDonald’s next door from which the pernicious glare of the fluorescent lighting is a vision direct from the worst nightmares of the Dowager Countess, minus the gaiety. Perhaps they should rename the place The Seventh Circle, although we were really only there for the Third. As the strangers streamed into the empty bar from the street, each entered with a bewildered look on their face. “I took the M-11 bus!” one woman declared incredulously. I would have been less surprised (or concerned for her safety) if she had said she took an M-16. 

Craze The Titanic

When I bought my house five years ago, I did it because I loved New York City but I wanted some quiet so I could sleep in on the weekends. There is just something not so restful about someone screaming “White Jesus” outside your window every Sunday morning. I don’t know why. But the unintended consequence of moving upstate has been not so much peace and quiet as a flat line where my social life used to be.

I am derisive toward anyone who posts too many photos online of their baby and heaven help them if their baby is a cat named Emily Dickinson or even, as a random example, a camera hog of a pug. But lately I have found myself white knuckling it everywhere I go, desperate to show people the photos of my newly remodeled bathroom I keep on my phone. Yes. It happened. I turned into one of those people I hate. So when ADD Jeff wanted to go out tonight after the show, and I found myself explaining to him that I couldn’t stay out late because I had to get up early to take things to the city dump. Even I could hear the dull thud as the words fell out of my mouth. That was it. I needed to go out.

Tsuris Season

Tonight, I saw a baby in a stroller being pushed out of a restaurant by Santa Claus, but I didn’t have time to stop. Manhattan is a busy place and if you stopped for every crazy thing you saw, you’d never get anywhere. The other day, I was rushing to the train and I passed a homeless man noisily humping the pole of some scaffolding while shouting aggressively at his reflection in the building. I suppose I could have stopped to find out what that was all about but, like Santa and his baby stroller, it is almost better when you don’t get the whole story.

It is Friday and (as usual) the show was a freight train barreling out of control. We had so many calls in the first hour, our producer Amber didn’t even want to answer the phone anymore. Whenever the lights on the phone would flash, she recoiled in horror. It was pretty much like that all night. ADD Jeff was there and the first thing he did when he walked in was whip out a bottle of Stoli Vanilla. I was already worried about all the visitors we would have dropping by and when I saw Jeff plunk the bottle down on the counter, I knew it would be trouble.

One Missed Fall

The easiest way to get me to write about you is to say something interesting, or do something memorable. Or you could be like Matty and just flat out demand it. “I want to be prominent. In bold.” This is a welcome change from some people at Industry tonight who apparently didn’t like that I wrote about them in the past. And who knows what all the new men I met tonight will feel about it. I guess if it is really important, they will tell me. But tonight, Matty wanted to tell me what he thought about what I wrote about myself.

“I read every page,” he declared adamantly of my latest narcissistic page turner When Nightlife Falls. “It was edited! Your life was missing from it. It wasn’t in there.” This was a bit of a surprise, especially given the conversation I had with ADD Jeff earlier as we left the show. He just finished the book too. “I really feel like I know you now as a person, not just as someone on the radio,” he told me. I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between.

Stuck In Park

Thursday night at The Park has been a thing for a while now. Last year, Matty was promoting a night there. This year, it has been Josh Woods’ turn. Certainly over the last few months, the Fox party has been the most consistent night out for me. So I suppose it was no surprise that on my first Thursday out in a while, The Park was on the agenda, even if we only planned to stay for a short bit. Erik didn’t mind going again, but the drinks are kind of pricey ($13 for a tiny glass of ice with a heavy pour of vodka on top). So we made a plan to stop by for the first hour when the drinks are two for one and then head on up to Hell’s Kitchen.

ADD Jeff sent me a text message during the show to see if I was going out tonight. As fate would have it, I was. So when the show ended, he was waiting downstairs on the plaza outside our building with his muscled pal Eddie. Eddie is the kind of walking slab of beef that should either be hanging in a meat locker or punching the beef in one. Together we hopped on the subway and headed down to The Park to begin our evening.

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.

In One Year And Out The Other

I have spent a lot of time at The Park lately, now that it is Matty’s new haunt. He hosts a monthly party which is a nice excuse for me to get out of the house every once in a while and update my semi-annual blog. I feel a lot of pressure to go out just so I can have something to write about, especially as I see a particularly empty month sitting lonely and forlorn in the blog archives. That is the funny thing about the passing of time. You don’t really notice it until it’s already done.

So it’s been another year since Matty’s last birthday. As I recall, I haven’t been around for many of them. Thanks to timing I am usually off at some pride event somewhere on the same weekend that he chooses to celebrate. For the last five years it has been the same routine. Matty gets excited telling me that his party is coming up and I dash his hopes by not being around. It’s not that he doesn’t have a zillion other friends, after all he was able to launch a popular club night right out of his iPhone contacts. That’s all fine for any run of the mill Thursday but when it is a special occasion you want all of your favorite people around.

Last night at The Park, there were so many gay men that I knew there that it would probably be easier to just list the four gay men I know that weren’t there. I invited Matt Kugelman to join me, speaking of people who have plenty of other friends, and we cabbed it down after the show. I have been trying to keep my strongest yenta urges under wraps and play it cool on my feverish desire to marry him off to someone. However, as primer, I casually dropped subtle questions like “so, is there anything wrong with you?” to see if I could get a better idea of what kind of guy to eventually lock him in a small closet with to see what develops. The problem with someone like Kugie is that he is something of a universal donor. He would be the perfect boyfriend for almost anyone, which makes it hard to distinguish who he would actually be good for. You can’t tell if you are reacting to genuine chemistry with him, or feeling the effects of the same magnetism that draws everyone else to him too.

We walked into the upstairs lounge and headed off to get drinks, though I was instantly way laid by the crowd. Everyone I knew was there! Kugelman gentled chided me about my fame and popularity but it is really Matty’s popularity and my proximity. Big difference. John Saldivar had joined up with Roommate for dinner first (aka margaritas) and they were already there, drinks in hand, when we walked in. Young Bradford was the night’s DJ, working twice as hard as usual, assaying both Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan, all while perching frantically in front of a large aquarium. Ben Harvey and Dennis Hensley were talking while Gray walked behind them like Hamlet’s ghost. Every time I turned my head someone else was right there. My former boss’s old assistant from 2001! Corey Johnson! That guy I accidentally slept with last year and his resentful boyfriend! Then suddenly I realized I had lost Matt in the deep end of the gay ocean!

I ventured further into the lounge, shoving through the crush of bodies with my usual mantra “lady with a baby!” Sometimes if I am really in a hurry, I yell “Is that Madonna?” which might have incited a fire in a crowded theater style riot in the early 90s but these days hardly warrants the energy it takes to lift a heavy eye lid. Along the way I found the birthday boy and Hanno, visiting once again from Austria. Also standing with them was long distance runner Andrew, him of the crisp button down plaid shirts and zero body fat. I hugged them all profusely but left just as quickly as I arrived to find Kugie and my coke. Finally he texted me wondering where I was, worried perhaps that I had invited him to a bar just to ditch him the moment someone better came along. I sent him a message back to meet me at the aquarium, and reveled in how much better life is now that we can so easily rendezvous in crowded public places thanks to our modern conveniences. It was a God-send later at the bar when I needed to get Roommate a beer and his favorite wasn’t on the list. A short txt message later and a substitute “Heiny” was on its way.

At the aquarium, we chatted up Bradford, who snapped a photo of us while we stood on what felt like a very rickety futon. Apparently deprived as a child of furniture to jump on, Matt seemed to delight in bouncing on the couch that I was certain might give way underneath us at any moment. Brian Babst was there and I grilled him quickly about the terrible Star Magazine photo swirling around Facebook that morning of his real estate client Rupert Everett. “Just make-up” he sighed of the photo on the set of Martha Stewart’s show that a plastic surgeon “expert” insisted looked like $25,000 of work done badly. I noted that Brian’s shoulders were a solid mass of muscle when I hugged him and put my head lovingly on his neck like I always do. Memorial Day weekend must be nearer than I thought. I suppose it is time to get ourselves into order.

More and more people kept pouring in. Kenneth In The (212) blogger Ken wandered by on his way to meet up with Misadventures In The (213) author Dennis. Chuck finally arrived after a series of frantic “are you sure you are going to be there” text messages. Ben Harvey and ADD Jeff and on and on. My head was spinning from all the familiar faces. A guy I didn’t know and I don’t remember meeting before came up to me and grilled me about my blog. I think he was hoping for a spontaneous mention, but I didn’t even get his name and now he would be impossible to find. Sorry you. Apparently I also met a hot guy named Andrew but didn’t remember it when he tried to add me later on Facebook. After I sent him my standard form letter denying FB friendship and directing him to my fan page he turned belligerent. “We met on Thursday… you’re a douche.” Both grammatically and factually accurate. I can’t argue with logic like that.

Maybe this blog is more trouble than it’s worth. The more people I meet, the harder it is to remember all of their names and keep them all straight. Who did I miss from this blog entry? Who will be upset? Who will be relieved? It’s exhausting. And after nine years of FantasyMan Island and several years of this chronicle, I have to ask when will the remembrance of things past end? Matty is the one a year older but I am the one feeling the miles trying to keep all these cocktail glasses in the air. I was never a party animal and though we have all been dumped into the same gay aquarium, swimming around feverishly gets exhausting after a while. A few laps around the bar and I was ready to go back to my ceramic castle. At what point do you surrender and just float belly up to the surface of the water, waiting for someone to scoop you up and take you away from it all? The big flush is coming! Enjoy the bubbles while you can.

Twice Told Tales

Last night was my second sojourn to Matty’s sensational new party night Thursday at The Park. It also happened to be Roommate’s birthday and after I surprised him earlier at his office with an Oreo cake and presents, I was the surprised one when I spotted him waiting downstairs at The Park. Despite it being his birthday, he had had to work late so he figured he might as well have some fun. We were soon joined by John, whom ADD Jeff had convinced to come out as well. Earlier John and I had been talking about how Facebook had so deftly revealed the myriad friends of friends we had in common, who in turn did not know each other. Well, it was a night of connected connections when Ron showed up a few minutes later. I met Ron last summer on the R Family cruise up to Canada and he came in from Long Island for a planned meet up with his friend Jeff, who it turned out, was friends with and had invited my neighbor Clayton. Soon ADD Jeff appeared to bring us all upstairs and the party really began.

Much of the usual insanely beautiful crew was there. Chris (no slouch himself mind you) was mingling with his breathtakingly hot new boyfriend. Charlie, dark rimmed glasses denoting a more serious tone, passed through briefly before making an early night of it. Joe was revelling in not being the drunkest person at the party, which was already in full raucous and debaucherous swing. Brian was anxious to be home watching Liz Lemon display her trademark angst on the Valentine’s Day episode of 30 Rock and was showing a heretofore unknown soft, gooey interior over his LA-based low carb love muffin. And Matty was encouraging all of us to help make Andrew, the newest addition to the collective, feel welcome. Andrew, tall and trim in the way people used to be before McDonald’s became the shop around the corner and WalMart ate` the world, very politely and quietly got hammered. I found Andrew’s youthful calm endearing and his slight frame said he isn’t quite done growing yet. Maybe the alcohol will help speed things along.

Soon Clayton arrived, followed by Ron’s friend Jeff, and our group was complete. The DJ continued to do that thing I first encountered at the Maritime, where they only play 30 seconds of every hit you have ever heard. “In my day, we had eight minute dance mixes and we liked it!” I heard myself saying, the words echoing in a cavernous Tunnel long since razed into memory. Matty was a little perturbed. “I asked the DJ to play some Cher and Deborah Cox and it’s been more than an hour now. I don’t think he is going to play it!” We feared he might not play it because he didn’t have it, but Matty dismissed that old-fashioned argument in a hand wave through the murky party cloud, exposing our technowonder present. “He can download anything he wants in a second. He just doesn’t want to!” At one point, Ron thought he spotted an Ecstasy tablet on the floor. A guy nearby picked it up and inspected it. “It’s a Centrum” he responded blandly. Later as Ron recounted the story, Roommate panicked for a moment. “I hope it wasn’t a Centrum Silver.” We change with the times, but sometimes the times change with us.

That was never more evident than when I spied my former neighbor Nick Scotti sitting in a quiet nook with his pals. Years ago living on a quaint three block stretch of West Hollywood West called Dorrington Avenue, I had Jenny McCarthy, Oscar winner Linda Hunt, my pal Jeanetta Arnette from Head Of The Class, and hunky Nick Scotti as neighbors. Nick used to walk his dog without a shirt right in front of my house prompting my friend Eric to insist that I call him the moment it happened because he could “be there from anywhere in LA in under five minutes.” I reminded Nick of our old street and his face brightened with recognition. “Wow. Dorrington. I haven’t thought of that in forever.” Nick has since settled back home in NYC, and while over the years we have all travelled more than the 3000 miles from West Hollywood to Chelsea, I am sure no one around him will mind when dog walking weather returns in the next few weeks.

The party was great fun and finally wound down around 2am. Our group decamped around the corner to the Moonstruck diner. Like any good diner should be, the menu was overwhelmingly massive and when people are drunk or have been awake for almost 24 hours, it is tough to get them to make a clearheaded choice. But isn’t that most of the fun of a pre-dawn raid of the local owl wagon? Years ago, Mike and I had another late night awkward meal at that very same table with Patches and his ex-boyfriend Chris. This time was personally less tense, although a few drinks in ADD Jeff produced some graphic bon mots about cum swallowing while the waiter was standing there that made me seriously rethink my rice pudding order (and dramatically increased the tip we ended up leaving that poor man). But that is what happens when you get a disparate group together. Parties big and small are about pulling together the right elements and letting things take their wild and unpredictable course. It amazes me that someone like Matty who is so naturally a gifted party organizer would wait so long to start club promoting. But like a stack of golden pancakes or a platter of fried mozzarella sticks at 3am on a windy winter night, it was worth the wait.

Misbegotten

I met Steven Clark last summer at Ben Harvey's farewell to Manhattan party. Ben was giving up his beautiful apartment for new frontiers in the outer boroughs. Things were tense with Jonathan. And it was my first pride where I wasn’t working outside the city in half a decade. What should have been a time for celebration just felt difficult and strained, as if we had all arrived at the building just at the moment of sheer exhaustion. But I put on my happy face and scaled the heights to his party. While there, standing among the stand up comedians, I met Steven, visiting from Kansas. He recognized my voice instantly as the braying nightmare from inside his rental cars on a million and one business trips around the country. Always one to be flattered by an attractive fan, we became fast friends.

Flash forward and Steven is in town this weekend with his two girlfriends, a last hurrah in the big apple before they all go back to their tamely lurid hot tub fueled drunken shenanigans back home among the cows and corn. The ladies seemed intent on fulfilling a Sex And The City-laced fantasy, replete with stilettos and exhaustively flawless blond hair. We met up, along with ADD Jeff at ELMO, as reliable a gay eatery as there is in Chelsea. The ladies were tickled to note that ELMO had been the site of several scenes in the current edition of the Real World, despite Chelsea’s nodding acquaintance with real world Brooklyn. That one of the waiters at the restaurant was also an MTV reality veteran surprised no one.

Originally, I had hoped that Mikey and his boyfriend Mark would join us during Mikey’s birthday weekend trip to the city. But they took a wrong turn near the city and somehow ended up in Connecticut and our dinner reservation made a quick cut from eight to six. Damian was also supposed to be there, a long promised reunion since I last ran into him at DC Pride two years ago, but he was beset by a sudden friend emergency and that dropped us from six to five. So instead of the long banquet table they arranged for us in the center of the place, I insisted they move us to a quieter and smaller round table near the front to better suit our incredible shrinking dinner party.

Dinner was wonderful and we all made great conversation. I tried to be as witty as possible, to give the ladies the full SATC experience. Also, I had to assume Steven had filled their heads beforehand with glowing reviews of my spontaneous hilarity so I was certain that I had big shoes to fill (my own) no matter how fictitious they may be. I did get off one good line when we were discussing how much younger guys like dating older guys and how unflattering their innocent expressions like “grey hair is sexy” and "I love wrinkles!" are. “Do you know doesn’t like dating older guys?” I asked, “Older guys!” As annoying as the pups are, they can help you forget yourself for a while, which is a nice middle-aged game to play in preparation for full onset dementia later in life. After all, practice forgetting everything you know about yourself is perfect.
I had told John that we would be there and since ELMO is a frequent haunt of his frequent Friday friends, he said he might swing by the table and say hi if we were still there. I had completely forgotten our previous exchange earlier in the day until he was standing over the table with that adorable grin of his and a twinkle in his eye. One of the ladies looked up from her bottle of white wine and declared his striking resemblance to Colin Farrell. This was apparently a problem as he was, as it turns out, just too good looking to actually look at and she preferred he take his intense attractiveness elsewhere. As it was, he didn’t stay long. I am fairly certain that my ravenous encounter with a banana split at the end of the meal hastened his departure. And why not.

After ELMO, we dashed across the street to Duane Reade so one of the ladies could get a gel sole insert for her stilettos since her feet were killing her. I tried to explain that only women in movies and TV shows actually wear those shoes in Manhattan because, between the subway grates and the cobblestones, those shoes are, at minimum, a broken leg waiting to happen. (Note: Certain horse-faced actresses should take heed that prize thoroughbreds with broken legs are often shot and they should watch their steps!)

Then it was on to Barracuda to wrap up our evening. While lingering in the back area two guys tried to use the wing maneuver of talking to the hags to get to the fags. Steven and Jeff and I saw it coming a mile away but I think the ladies were just happy to have someone other than us pay attention to them, compliment their hair and try to motorboat their breasts. As much as I wanted to see how far things got, it was time for us all to go. The ladies had done their gay duty and Steven needed to lead them downtown to some straight parties and hopefully the waiting hungry penises of heterosexual men. And me, I went on to Grand Central Station and its underground passages draped with endless promotional posters for the musical sensation Wicked. “Now Leaving OZ” the green banner above my head waved as I headed for the train. It’s a long way from Kansas to the Emerald City, and back again after the stilettos have clicked their last, I thought. Even though I too make my temporary way in and out of the city, I am glad I get to stay among the magic for a while longer than most.