Irene Done

Nothing like a hurricane bearing down on you to really convince you to get your affairs in order.

It is Thursday night in Manhattan but it is like any other run of the mill Thursday. You would never know that churning hundreds of miles away in the Atlantic Ocean, Irene approaches. New York is a busy place and everything happens in time here, even destructive forces of nature like hurricanes or tourists. Irene won’t arrive until Sunday, a veritable lifetime when counted in New York minutes, so there is still plenty of time to have a cocktail down at a small local bar, which is what I did.

Earlier, I joined the busy online world buzzing like hornets about the weather. Since I live in the suburbs, my concerns are for my roof or that great old tree in my backyard that has lately turned leaning toward my patio into an art form. But for the city dwellers, where this kind of weather event is beyond their control, thoughts turn elsewhere. In this case, the impending interruption of life out on NYC’s decadent gay oasis of choice: Fire Island.

Personally, I have no love for the place. I had lunch there once in 2001 with my old boss and stayed overnight a few years later with Cyd and Dan. My boyfriend of the time Sean and I shared a sandy twin bed and I found the other housemates (one in particular) insufferably fussy. Cyd and Dan are lovely, laid back people but they had ended up in a share with someone so tense that dinner felt as if it was made of a ticking time bomb with only 15 seconds left on the clock. Throw in my dislike of sun, sand and the ocean and you have the makings of the most unpleasant 24 hour period this side of Jack Bauer. I have not been back since.

If it wasn’t guaranteed to confirm for certain religious zealots that God hates fags, I would wish Irene wipe the place off the map. It could use, as I posted on Adam Sank’s Facebook wall earlier, a good hosing off like a “50 MPH enema.” I was less kind on Zachary Barnett’s wall where I followed a string of stringy gays wondering if they should stay or go under his status update heading “Fire Island: Forced Evacuation.” Sounded like a good porn title to me, but a lousy way to spend a weekend vacation out of town. “How dedicated are these homos,” I posted aloud to those very same homos, “to the prospect of getting laid that they would want to ride out a hurricane in one of those claptrap 1970s asbestos palaces that linger outside the meat rack filled with ghosts of popper bottles past like a rash that won’t go away?”

Further evidence of why I have no friends.

But as I took stock in my life tonight in a tiny piano bar on the Upper East Side, collecting friends was as far away from me as that dreaded hurricane. There was only one friend that mattered in that moment: Barton Brooks. Barton is perfect. He is the Ken doll of compassion and charity. He is the person you pretend to be at your high school reunion. He is wonderful.

We met at Brandy’s, a saloon with a solid wood bar and a central piano. Like all places in New York, it is old with a quirky plumbing issue and at least one patron who seems to have lost touch with modern life just about the time The Jeffersons went off the air. This is what is known as character, and Manhattan is busting with it. It oozes, like a sore that never heals.

Like me, Barton is also in a place of evaluating his life but it isn’t related to the weather. Whatever gets you to that point, so long as you arrive at your destination I suppose. As Madonna (and no one ever before her or since) said, “an unexamined life is not worth living.” So here we are: two people examining our lives. We did it over chocolate cake shots and a slice around the corner at Two Boots and as best we could while an opera singer screamed a show tune into a microphone like he was trying to fill Carnegie Hall (and I don’t mean with people, either). I don’t know that we accomplished anything but we had a good time anyway.

Soon enough it was time for me to leave, and not by ferry to Fire Island or even the Hamptons Jitney bus parked so forlorn around the corner from the bar. As I waited in Grand Central Station for my train to open up, I gazed around at the expanse of marble. Was it for the last time? The new Apple Store is under construction on the far mezzanine. I hope it doesn’t destroy the character of the great hall, but knowing Apple it will be cool and amazing and the worst thing about it will be the constant lines to get in, like the hottest nightclub in town, where people consume overpriced accessories and cruise processors instead of people. I wonder if Steve Jobs will ever see it. I hope so.

I hope the hurricane ends up a dud. I hope the worst thing that happens is how bored I am in my house without electricity and all the wonders that the mother’s milk of power provides. I hope Grand Central is spared so future generations can search the ceiling, past the stray Mylar balloons, for their astrological signs. And Apple can sell whatever crazy new thing they shit out after everyone realizes the iPad is just an iPhone you can’t make calls on, like the regular iPhone you can’t make calls on, only twice as big and more expensive.

Spare our city, Irene, in all its terrible glory. Spare it all. But if Fire Island joins Atlantis, so be it.

The Light Of Darkness

It has happened of late that I have fallen into the acquaintance of Ben Roussel. I have also been reading the Autobiography of Mark Twain, so if my syntax shifts wildly in tone for no reason you’ll know why. Ben added me on Facebook some time ago and even though I didn’t know him personally, I did add him to my modest friend archive. It was during a period when, for instance, if the editor of a national gay magazine who I heretofore had never met added me, I would accept their friendship. I believed that by doing so I wasn’t just being dumped into some vast repository of their own ego but instead was building the kind of good will that would lead to articles about me that would further my career. None such articles materialized and it has happened of late that I have started to delete all of those people. But not Ben Roussel.

Some months ago when I escaped the glass terrarium I work in and headed to one of Fab.com’s happy hour parties, I was finally introduced to him in person. Naturally, in my warm and welcoming way, I cornered him on the stool where he had been shackled to pass out raffle tickets and demanded to know why he had the audacity to add me, the quintessence of the perfect stranger, on Facebook. Ben told me that he liked my writing and I seemed like the kind of person he would want to know. Never let it be said that I can’t be flattered instantly out of my most deeply held core beliefs no matter how weak the tea is that’s being served.

Fruit On The Vine

I almost walked up to Sherry Vine tonight and told her, “I thought I smelled Gonorrhea.” Then I remembered that we’ve never met.

Two weeks ago, I ran into Adam Sank out at Therapy when we were there for Mike’s birthday. He did not recognize me. I guess I have the opposite problem. I believe I know people that I have never met. Lynn and Alex from the Amazing Race? Mistook them for listeners outside The Round Up in Dallas and gave them my full “thanks for recognizing me as the movie star I am” treatment. It’s not pretty being me, and not just in the morning or bathed in fluorescent lighting.

But I did know David Young, who is in town, and he joined me for a post show drink at Therapy. I also dragged Erik off down there too to drown his sorrows. Drag queen karaoke is the best place to forget your troubles, mostly because you can’t hear your own thoughts over the caterwauling. Sherry Vine did a few numbers, probably a few lines in the kitchen, and then succumbed to the temptation of playing her Lady Gaga parody video that was last year’s youtube.com sensation. I don’t know about you but I love a greatest hit tour.

After the talent portion of the evening, the music started playing and I noticed that my adorable friend Keo Nozari was DJing. So nice to see him again since RockIt served me with that restraining order last year. Apparently, the Fashion Police have stronger powers of enforcement now under the USA Patriot Act. No big deal. I think the Kuge still likes it there, but I think I have aged out of bars with names that sound like trying-to-pass-for-butch catchphrases. When the former Roxy reopens with “Lady, please” Wednesdays, I will be first in line with my John Blair gold card, a glow stick in a bottle of water, and a mysterious rash inside my Calvin Klein white briefs. The fruit of the loom indeed.

We are in the eye of a “snowicane” as the always cautious weathermen have termed it, and tomorrow will be another blanket of icy powder, even worse they say than the one yesterday. I am done digging out. I just want to wait for the thaw. I guess I feel the same way about the nightlife. Scanning through the bar there wasn’t a single man I wanted to talk to or even look at. Perhaps the grapes are just not tender enough for me. The coat check guy only charged me a dollar for both my bag and my coat, making a big show of fanning out the money in front of me and giving me a knowing look. He probably just wanted a fancy tip but instead of seeing the gesture as a sign of possible blow jobs to come, I was just happy to have the extra dollar. I think my social life is also suffering through the Great Recession.

So then I come back to Sherry Vine, valiantly fighting irrelevance in a bar filled with Grindr gays more interested in what they can put in their own ass than what is coming out of Sherry’s mouth. Even though, in some cases, it might be the same thing. Those stage gigs inside a bar are hard work and a sense of calm washed over me as I thought how much better it is that it is her up there instead of me. A drag queen lip synced to a version of Man of La Mancha sung by a woman. It was so meta, I wondered if Salvador Dali was off in a corner painting us. It reminded me of the gay boys mouthing along to Beyonce’s “If I Were A Boy” on a dance floor. Yes, sweetie, we all wonder what that would be like.

After a few minutes talking about our various troubles, David made a suggestion. “If this is going to get heavy, we should get a drink first.”

“No one says heavy anymore, David.”

He turned to me. “Then what do people say?”

“How should I know?” I shrugged. All I know is the gays are skinnier than ever and are serving up ties and V-neck sweaters like Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, and no one is saying “serving up” anymore either. Sherry Vine has three million hits on You Tube. Maybe she knows the answer. I’ll add her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter and imagine tomorrow when I am snowbound that I am Don Quixote but singing my own parody of the Song of Solomon. I am here to spoil you Sherry Vine, for you have tender grapes. And possibly gonorrhea.