It never occurred to me that this post would end up being about Gray. After all, I hardly know him. And in most of my blog entries, he is a secondary figure, mostly lurking in the shadows. I have made fleeting references here and there but he has never been the subject. Not even a featured player really. If anything, a dress extra. We aren’t even Facebook friends! But suddenly the episode has turned out all about him, even in his own fleeting way.
Last night started out as usual. My annual Spring ritual of returning to Bowery Bar on the first decent Tuesday evening of the year. I try to make it downtown at least twice a year. Once in the Spring and finally on what appears to be the last good Indian Summer night of the Fall. The latter is much harder to time. As I have written before, Beige, like the gay men who attend, is a fair weather friend. You don’t want to rely on it for anything important. It is just there to be fun and pretty and forgotten quickly when things turn dark.
I wanted to spend the evening with Matt Kugelman since Bowery Bar is where we met last year. I was out with Clayton and we rescued poor innocent Matt from standing on one of those sidewalk gratings out front. This began a quick but frankly awesome friendship. And he was there, already drunk when I arrived, with his friend Chip. But they didn’t last long. Moments later, I turned around and they were gone. Later I got some text messages from Matt about a raunchy burp and tequila. Enough said!
Fortunately, I ran into Chris and Cub, who were standing with that hot bartender Aaron who loves my show. One of the few gay men in NYC that has heard it and he is hot too! What a bonus. I first met Chris and Cub at Ben Harvey’s alliterative birthday brunch and spoke more with Chris than with Cub. This time around, Cub and I got into deep far-reaching conversations about the role of academia in the ongoing collapse of the American Empire. He thought they should change from majors to interests to better match the world at large while I wondered if they could even change fast enough with our rapidly evolving times. And I wondered if Americans were adept enough to adapt to a world changing so quickly around them now that they have no skills. Kind of deep for a bar that serves up nearly as many cocktails on a Tuesday night as it does new cases of syphilis.
Well all of that didn’t last long because they had to run out of there, dodging some crazy drunk mess like a creditor. That left me standing alone in the bar once again. Earlier I had spotted Gray and walking in right behind him, Matty. I knew they were still in the bar somewhere. But where? I sent Matty some text messages. No response. A few laps and I was about to throw in the towel. Finally, I found them, hiding in the SE corner of the bar, down where I never go because that outside bar doesn’t stock peach schnapps so I can never get a sex on the beach there.
Matty and Gray were huddled in a deep conversation of their own, too deep for me to want to wade into. So I hung back with trim marathon runner Andrew. His eyes looked especially blue but he also seemed a little weary of the whole bar thing. Beige can do that to you. He was standing with a guy I have met before but didn’t remember the name of. The guy said I was cute but then got annoyed that I lived upstate, basically implying that I was cruelly waving goods in front of people like they were available only to snatch them out of grasp seconds later. It turns out that he was quite drunk, like all the men that flirt with me are, and as soon as Matty and Gray finished their huddle, they dispatched him quickly to the nearest exit, and one assumes rehab facility.
We all wandered a bit and ended up hanging out with Jared who does the Sexy Back Thursdays @ The Park party with Matty. I had never met him before, but Matty took a snazzy photo of him in front of the Bowery Bar sign. I talked a bit with Andrew and give him my theory about why I thought Bowery Bar was still a success after all these years. “It’s the tables,” I told him. “They leave them out and it makes it impossible to get around. But that also makes everyone easy to see but hard to attain. A challenge. So the place always feels packed and the guys are always just a little out of your reach.” He liked my theory and I have to say, it was pretty good. Better than my academic musings with Cub where I, as a lowly college dropout, was way out of my league. My major in college? Sleeping in and skipping my morning classes.
Andrew wasn’t drinking and was feeling a lot of pressure to be drunk like everyone else. Bowery Bar is a peer pressure kind of place, as Cub pointed out earlier referencing his own flip flops in a sea of trendy Converse shoes. I always seem to be swimming against the tide on points like this, even if Babst has accused me in the past about caring more about fitting in than I like to let on. As for sobriety however, I have to admit, I was on Andrew’s side on this one. Being around drunk gays is no fun if you are sober. They are so annoying and messy and obvious. Which oddly enough brings me back to Gray.
I love the movie “Defending Your Life” and in it Buck Henry has a short scene as Albert Brooks’ fill-in attorney: Dick Stanley. “He’s a good man. Quiet but effective.” That’s Gray. He plays it all very close to the vest. He is like the polar opposite of me. My emotions are like weather patterns moving across a Doppler radar map. If severe thunderstorms are on the horizon, you know it! But Gray gives you nothing. He is probably an excellent poker player. When he wants to give you blank, that’s what you get. He is the master of the expressionless expression. And what a contrast to Matty and his whirling dervish of vitality. Gray fascinates me because he is like a neatly wrapped present that you can’t quite pull the bow off of. You want to know what is inside but you can’t get past the beautifully constructed exterior.
And then he was gone. A lovely soft kiss good bye and then a blur into the hazy crowd of gay chattering. Matty was dragging Andrew out of there too, though he was more than willing to make a run for it on his own. I piled into a cab and headed uptown to my waiting car in the parking garage around the corner from my office. My long drives back to the suburbs always give me time to reflect. It made me wish for a moment that I was an international man of mystery like Gray. But then I realized, in my twice yearly appearances at Bowery Bar in my wrong shoes and nine dollar shirts, I already am. So maybe in one small way, Gray and I have something in common. And I don’t mind that at all.
Showing posts with label Bartender Aaron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bartender Aaron. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Blogged And Tagged
This Sunday marks the finale of another season of my beloved Amazing Race. Even now as I blog from a taxi speeding across a deserted Manhattan in the predawn hours on my way to JFK, I can imagine that I am on the race. As it was, my night out on the town was in its own way a series of challenges, each task completed with the same level of happy satisfaction one would imagine I would employ on CBS primetime. The final challenge being a simple choice: Blogged or Tagged. In this Detour, contestants choose between blogging their adventure out on the town or taking a series of photos to be uploaded and tagged on Facebook. As expected, I chose blogging while Matty’s team went for tagging.
It all started innocently enough at Vlada with Original Jonathan. Initially we were going to have a drink and a snack at Vynl, but that hot slab of a bartender Aaron wasn’t working so we switched to old reliable Vlada around the corner. Jonathan is at something of a crossroads in his life and career in Manhattan and we were long overdue for some one-on-one time to discuss it. In the meantime, some guy named Mark recognized me from who can even say how many years ago. I am sure he knew me because he said, “I thought it was you but then wasn’t sure because you weren’t in shorts.” I was correctly identified but Jonathan was not so lucky, planting a cheek kiss on a guy named Chance, who as it turns out, was not his former co-worker Spencer.
Our drink and discussion at an end, we headed for the coat check, to retrieve our jackets and our next clue. It was there that I ran into Joe, who was just on his way in, but upon seeing me, realized it was already time to leave… with me! Jonathan went back to his apartment and Joe and I hopped into a cab to head down to the Village for a small party at Chris’ apartment, the scene of my notorious Halloween blog entry. Matty would be waiting there for us with his charming Austrian boyfriend Hanno. This time instead of hot shirtless men, the party was jammed with cleavage-heaving young women… and adorable Ryan Newman.
Ryan was there with his new boyfriend who, like me, is from Westchester. Although I own. They must be very happy together because the moment I arrived, Ryan flew into his arms like a long separated lover and was never more than a fingertip away the rest of the evening. Matty, ever the publicist, bragged on Ryan’s Britney Spears dance moves and prodded me to encourage an encore. However, the new boyfriend, in full Footloose-era John Lithgow fashion had banned the dancing. This only encouraged my worst instincts and I relentlessly goaded Ryan to dance, in or out of his underwear, at the soonest possible moment.
Despite my warm small talk about the cookies he had made, the new boyfriend was unbowed in his banned stance. However, before we made our hasty retreat to the Maritime Hotel for our next challenge, I am quite certain that I spied Ryan busting a move or two in the corner. Perhaps he was ginned up by the excessively controlled Vanity Fair cover photo posing that I deftly avoided by ducking under a plate of half eaten chocolate cupcakes, though Matty happily flung himself in despite his less-desirable placement on the third fold next to the perfume ad.
I had thought we would end up at Corey Craig’s CD release party further across town at the Chelsea Hotel, but instead we landed at the new hot gay party in the winterized cabanas off the upper patio of the lovely Maritime Hotel. A birthday party was being thrown for a woman named Zoe, who by all accounts is the woman of the moment in the gay community. The party was a weird mix of young gays in purposefully hetero gear (a self-ripped sleeveless t-shirt… really?), even younger gays in collar and tie and 90s leftovers who don’t realize they are in their 30s now and wearing ANF days after the company posted a steep double digit decline in sales on Black Friday (the final nail in their pop culture coffin) while still clinging to an ecstasy fueled Palladium fantasy that even for them is but a dim memory. For everyone else at the party, that look evokes an era near the end of the last century best described as “middle school.”
Also there seemed to be a lot of vests out tonight. I know I am not exactly the cutting edge of fashion. Earlier while comparing Polo shirts at Chris’ party, a co-worker of Matty’s gave my Ralph Lauren shirt a quizzical look and then smiled a smooth knowing smile. “Ah. Factory. No wonder I didn’t recognize it.” That being said, these boys in their vests just looked like out of work valets. I had to resist the urge to hand them my car keys. I guess it is all part of this ADD generation. Everything is so sped up, they don’t even have time for sleeves! Even the DJ got into the act and spun 28 seconds of all my favorite songs. It was like walking through a low rent carnival game row that didn’t want to pay music royalties. It made me long for the days of exhaustive ten to fifteen minute dance mixes that seemed all too short while dancing under the watchful spin of Junior. I am sure the thirty-something in the Abercrombie tee sipping on a cosmo thought the exact same thing.
Conor was there in a gently worn hoodie that undoubtedly had been tirelessly and expensively distressed to appear so casually at ends on a chilly winter night. He and Matty spotted each other and sparred at a distance though it didn’t have any of the venom I expected. Whatever intense animus there once was between them has apparently since been replaced by the kind of playful sniping that usually ended with Krystal and Alexis plunging into a fountain during sweeps. The ever winning smile of Brian Babst was on hand as well, ready the second he spotted me with lines from last night’s 30 Rock, all perfectly memorized. “I watch each episode twice,” he confided. “Once the night of when I am drunk and again in the morning when I am sober.” It was a tactic that clearly was paying off.
The evening ended as suddenly as it began. Joe was fondling his coat check ticket while lamenting all the photos Matty was taking, and when I returned from the bathroom, he was gone. In a flash, Zoe, the birthday lady in red, was gone from her own party too and it was like the air was let out of the balloon. In the end, some friend of Matty tried to coax us to join them at 3am at Brandon Voss' apartment, but we just stood in stunned horror as they (Conor included) swirled out of the nightclub into the street like the dancers from Fame, screeching and mobbing taxis in a mad clamour to reach the next destination. Matty, Hanno and I slipped away quietly uptown toward Chelsea, where I left them happily on the corner on their way home. For them the adventure was coming to an end, but for me it was just beginning. An hour later, bag in hand, I was in that cab on my way to the airport. For me, the race continues.
It all started innocently enough at Vlada with Original Jonathan. Initially we were going to have a drink and a snack at Vynl, but that hot slab of a bartender Aaron wasn’t working so we switched to old reliable Vlada around the corner. Jonathan is at something of a crossroads in his life and career in Manhattan and we were long overdue for some one-on-one time to discuss it. In the meantime, some guy named Mark recognized me from who can even say how many years ago. I am sure he knew me because he said, “I thought it was you but then wasn’t sure because you weren’t in shorts.” I was correctly identified but Jonathan was not so lucky, planting a cheek kiss on a guy named Chance, who as it turns out, was not his former co-worker Spencer.
Our drink and discussion at an end, we headed for the coat check, to retrieve our jackets and our next clue. It was there that I ran into Joe, who was just on his way in, but upon seeing me, realized it was already time to leave… with me! Jonathan went back to his apartment and Joe and I hopped into a cab to head down to the Village for a small party at Chris’ apartment, the scene of my notorious Halloween blog entry. Matty would be waiting there for us with his charming Austrian boyfriend Hanno. This time instead of hot shirtless men, the party was jammed with cleavage-heaving young women… and adorable Ryan Newman.
Ryan was there with his new boyfriend who, like me, is from Westchester. Although I own. They must be very happy together because the moment I arrived, Ryan flew into his arms like a long separated lover and was never more than a fingertip away the rest of the evening. Matty, ever the publicist, bragged on Ryan’s Britney Spears dance moves and prodded me to encourage an encore. However, the new boyfriend, in full Footloose-era John Lithgow fashion had banned the dancing. This only encouraged my worst instincts and I relentlessly goaded Ryan to dance, in or out of his underwear, at the soonest possible moment.
Despite my warm small talk about the cookies he had made, the new boyfriend was unbowed in his banned stance. However, before we made our hasty retreat to the Maritime Hotel for our next challenge, I am quite certain that I spied Ryan busting a move or two in the corner. Perhaps he was ginned up by the excessively controlled Vanity Fair cover photo posing that I deftly avoided by ducking under a plate of half eaten chocolate cupcakes, though Matty happily flung himself in despite his less-desirable placement on the third fold next to the perfume ad.
I had thought we would end up at Corey Craig’s CD release party further across town at the Chelsea Hotel, but instead we landed at the new hot gay party in the winterized cabanas off the upper patio of the lovely Maritime Hotel. A birthday party was being thrown for a woman named Zoe, who by all accounts is the woman of the moment in the gay community. The party was a weird mix of young gays in purposefully hetero gear (a self-ripped sleeveless t-shirt… really?), even younger gays in collar and tie and 90s leftovers who don’t realize they are in their 30s now and wearing ANF days after the company posted a steep double digit decline in sales on Black Friday (the final nail in their pop culture coffin) while still clinging to an ecstasy fueled Palladium fantasy that even for them is but a dim memory. For everyone else at the party, that look evokes an era near the end of the last century best described as “middle school.”
Also there seemed to be a lot of vests out tonight. I know I am not exactly the cutting edge of fashion. Earlier while comparing Polo shirts at Chris’ party, a co-worker of Matty’s gave my Ralph Lauren shirt a quizzical look and then smiled a smooth knowing smile. “Ah. Factory. No wonder I didn’t recognize it.” That being said, these boys in their vests just looked like out of work valets. I had to resist the urge to hand them my car keys. I guess it is all part of this ADD generation. Everything is so sped up, they don’t even have time for sleeves! Even the DJ got into the act and spun 28 seconds of all my favorite songs. It was like walking through a low rent carnival game row that didn’t want to pay music royalties. It made me long for the days of exhaustive ten to fifteen minute dance mixes that seemed all too short while dancing under the watchful spin of Junior. I am sure the thirty-something in the Abercrombie tee sipping on a cosmo thought the exact same thing.
Conor was there in a gently worn hoodie that undoubtedly had been tirelessly and expensively distressed to appear so casually at ends on a chilly winter night. He and Matty spotted each other and sparred at a distance though it didn’t have any of the venom I expected. Whatever intense animus there once was between them has apparently since been replaced by the kind of playful sniping that usually ended with Krystal and Alexis plunging into a fountain during sweeps. The ever winning smile of Brian Babst was on hand as well, ready the second he spotted me with lines from last night’s 30 Rock, all perfectly memorized. “I watch each episode twice,” he confided. “Once the night of when I am drunk and again in the morning when I am sober.” It was a tactic that clearly was paying off.
The evening ended as suddenly as it began. Joe was fondling his coat check ticket while lamenting all the photos Matty was taking, and when I returned from the bathroom, he was gone. In a flash, Zoe, the birthday lady in red, was gone from her own party too and it was like the air was let out of the balloon. In the end, some friend of Matty tried to coax us to join them at 3am at Brandon Voss' apartment, but we just stood in stunned horror as they (Conor included) swirled out of the nightclub into the street like the dancers from Fame, screeching and mobbing taxis in a mad clamour to reach the next destination. Matty, Hanno and I slipped away quietly uptown toward Chelsea, where I left them happily on the corner on their way home. For them the adventure was coming to an end, but for me it was just beginning. An hour later, bag in hand, I was in that cab on my way to the airport. For me, the race continues.
Friday, October 10, 2008
My Vynl Offer
I am so tired of having the same conversation over and over with my friends. Tonight after the show, I soldiered down to local eatery Vynl to swill a few cocktails with Hottie Zach and flirt pointlessly with sexy bartender Aaron. It had all the makings of a perfect evening, combining three of my favorite activities. But as it always does lately, talked turned to the infamous J.
Zach is not just cream cheese pretty on the outside, his soft gooey center is equally hot and delicious. I would just have much preferred discussing his impending trip to Morocco (a long held fantasy of mine) or the carelessly hunky demeanor of Aaron (a decidedly briefer though no less intense fantasy) than the dead ended runaway mine car ride that was my association with J. But like all of my well-meaning NY friends, he is anxious for me to move, not just on, but up. It is a desire I do not share.
Perhaps I am just totally and completely out of my mind. This is a distinct possibility. But after twenty years of dating, and meeting quite literally tens of thousands of gay men on numerous continents, finally last November, I found someone that I felt such an intense connection with that I was willing to cast aside all preconceived notions, emotional insecurities and boundaries. For almost a year, I have unpeeled like an onion, growing more nakedly raw and smaller by the day, until now there is nothing left but the involuntary tears such a task is bound to draw. And to what end? The umpteenth conversation about how important it is to move on?
I am not a very good driver, dresser or investor, but my instincts about people are uncanny. And in my life, I have done very well letting the natural flow of things guide me to my next destination. With only minor hiccups here and there, I have alighted from an obscure trailer in rural Virginia to a national radio show in New York City with as thin a resume as Sarah Palin and a mere fraction of her ambition. Never have I been so wrong about a person as I have been with J. Never. And in my heart, I still refuse to believe I was wrong. And yet there is no denying the sorry state of affairs now.
Flirting with Aaron felt good. I can see now why people with no self esteem sleep around a lot, and always desperate to bed the hottest person they can. I have never been that guy and I haven't turned into him now. True I was always quite anxious in my twenties to have a boyfriend and live the settled down dream but more recently I realized what a hollow ambition that was. Then I met J and the echo flushed out, and I filled instead with the rush of promise. It feels like love, truly for the first time, but maybe it's just a midlife crisis. I never really felt a powerful love before but then again I've never had a midlife crisis before either. Maybe I just don't know the difference.
As I walked up the hill tonight to my house, the sky was a sea of stars. It was so magnificent and each time when I look up past my roof and the trees to the twinkling night, I am filled with awe that I own a small piece of this magic. I scanned the sky anxious to find my Friendly Star, but such things don't exist. I see the magic all around me but I feel now like a fool. Someone who believed in the reality of a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, only to have the harsh fluorescents of life clicked on suddenly revealing the sad flimsy truth. What is there to move on and up to, now that I have seen the magician's secrets revealed? What does it matter now that the lights are all on and everyone has gone home?
This weekend Jeff and Bond are coming up from Boston. More harmless flirting. And Sunday, Howard is taking me and his cadre of hot porn boys to the Hustlaball. Certainly one of them will be sexually satisfying, though more likely I will flirt around a while like I did with Aaron tonight and then lose interest in the pointlessness of it all. It is all so empty, like the vast hunger you feel hours after you finish a huge meal. So much greater and more painful a hunger than if you had never gorged at all.
Zach is not just cream cheese pretty on the outside, his soft gooey center is equally hot and delicious. I would just have much preferred discussing his impending trip to Morocco (a long held fantasy of mine) or the carelessly hunky demeanor of Aaron (a decidedly briefer though no less intense fantasy) than the dead ended runaway mine car ride that was my association with J. But like all of my well-meaning NY friends, he is anxious for me to move, not just on, but up. It is a desire I do not share.
Perhaps I am just totally and completely out of my mind. This is a distinct possibility. But after twenty years of dating, and meeting quite literally tens of thousands of gay men on numerous continents, finally last November, I found someone that I felt such an intense connection with that I was willing to cast aside all preconceived notions, emotional insecurities and boundaries. For almost a year, I have unpeeled like an onion, growing more nakedly raw and smaller by the day, until now there is nothing left but the involuntary tears such a task is bound to draw. And to what end? The umpteenth conversation about how important it is to move on?
I am not a very good driver, dresser or investor, but my instincts about people are uncanny. And in my life, I have done very well letting the natural flow of things guide me to my next destination. With only minor hiccups here and there, I have alighted from an obscure trailer in rural Virginia to a national radio show in New York City with as thin a resume as Sarah Palin and a mere fraction of her ambition. Never have I been so wrong about a person as I have been with J. Never. And in my heart, I still refuse to believe I was wrong. And yet there is no denying the sorry state of affairs now.
Flirting with Aaron felt good. I can see now why people with no self esteem sleep around a lot, and always desperate to bed the hottest person they can. I have never been that guy and I haven't turned into him now. True I was always quite anxious in my twenties to have a boyfriend and live the settled down dream but more recently I realized what a hollow ambition that was. Then I met J and the echo flushed out, and I filled instead with the rush of promise. It feels like love, truly for the first time, but maybe it's just a midlife crisis. I never really felt a powerful love before but then again I've never had a midlife crisis before either. Maybe I just don't know the difference.
As I walked up the hill tonight to my house, the sky was a sea of stars. It was so magnificent and each time when I look up past my roof and the trees to the twinkling night, I am filled with awe that I own a small piece of this magic. I scanned the sky anxious to find my Friendly Star, but such things don't exist. I see the magic all around me but I feel now like a fool. Someone who believed in the reality of a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, only to have the harsh fluorescents of life clicked on suddenly revealing the sad flimsy truth. What is there to move on and up to, now that I have seen the magician's secrets revealed? What does it matter now that the lights are all on and everyone has gone home?
This weekend Jeff and Bond are coming up from Boston. More harmless flirting. And Sunday, Howard is taking me and his cadre of hot porn boys to the Hustlaball. Certainly one of them will be sexually satisfying, though more likely I will flirt around a while like I did with Aaron tonight and then lose interest in the pointlessness of it all. It is all so empty, like the vast hunger you feel hours after you finish a huge meal. So much greater and more painful a hunger than if you had never gorged at all.
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