The Vast Haze Of Disco

To every generation a dance floor is born.

Matty pointed up at the spray of antlers (painted white and tangled together) that hung overhead. "Remember when they used to have disco balls up there?" I died a little inside. "They don’t have discos anymore." Matty is too young to have studied at Studio 54 or dined out of Danceteria. His baited questions were less about the subtle changes in nightclub decor over the decades and more a naked bid for blog attention. "I haven’t been on a dance floor since before mobile phones had cameras," he lied after a group photo flashed by an iPhone.  But I indulged. "No one calls them mobile phones, either."

Ben There, Done That

There I was, shivering as the icy wind kicked up off the East River. It’s night in DUMBO and I am in line outside the Galapagos Art Space. I have been here so many times that I can’t possibly recall them all, but I do know that I have never waited in this long of a line before.

"Here we go again. Out at another gay bar."

Apparently the two guys standing behind me were straight (in Brooklyn it can be very hard to tell) and even stranger, one of them was clearly reading my mind. But while they hurriedly texted their friend Rachel, hoping she was already inside, I waited impatiently as the time dwindled away. With the new hours of my show and the rigidity of the Metro North train schedule, I don’t have time to sit idly by on Grindr chatting with Mr. Easy-On-The-Eyes-Even-Though-Mine-Are-Rolling-From-Annoyance. For this latest adventure, I had literally fifteen minutes and the thought of spending all of them in line to get into a club was not my idea of fun. 

My Submission To DouchebagsOfGrindr.com

The occasion was the third anniversary of Ben Harvey’s smash hit GUMBO party. Fittingly, this was my third time seeing Ben this week and my second night in a row out on the town with him. Last night, I was his ad hoc plus one for the Out 100 party at Milk Studios down in the Meatpacking District. If you are keeping kosher, you know Milk and Meatpacking should not mix and in this case you are right. The crowd was lively but the venue was too small.

Guy Society

There is never anything I want to do more on a Friday night after the show than go home. But my world has been shattered since the death of James last week and it has created a certain fever pitch of impetuosity on my part. I thought about the last time I saw him, sweating like a whore in church at XL a few months ago. And maybe it was the magical thinking that if I just went out to every bar in town, eventually I would see his hulking frame lumbering through the space like an elephant moving slowly through the jungle, a catastrophe of casual destruction in his wake.  Like the months after 9/11 when I would gaze down Seventh Avenue at Times Square hoping to catch a glimpse of the twin towers, I think I will forever be looking over my shoulder with a sense of maybe.

In my grief, I sent a flurry of messages to my local friends that I had been remiss in seeing these past few weeks. I guess the arrival of spring had made me anxious to wring every second of delight out of my house that I can and my friendships, long on nightlife support, finally faded away. Ryan White and I planned to get together this week and then never did, but MattKugelman and I shared a delightful late meal at Vinyl on Monday. My friend Erik and I made plans to venture down to The Park on Thursday but fearing the zit on my nose would get worse, I pawned him off to a Friday party in SoHo.

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.

-------------------------------------

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.

Callous In Wonderland

There are always hot guys around. This is the world I live in. Well, it is the world I work in, which sometimes feels like real life, even when it isn’t. I exist on a plane with blurry players dancing on the blurry lines between fantasy and reality. Who can say what is real and what isn’t?

The whole show tonight was the subject at hand. We spent an hour talking to the two finalists and the winner of the current season of Project Runway. But I was less interested in talking to Seth Aaron about his leggings than I was confronting him about my lack of an invitation to Laura Bennett’s finale viewing party. After all, I thought Laura and I made a connection when she joined us in studio recently to plug her delightfully breezy parenting guide “Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?” In my head, I imagined I would be her new gay boyfriend and even though I know less than nothing about fashion, we would pal around over spiked coffee and she would try to marry me off to her gay manny. But I emailed her more than a week ago to no reply and then I see pictures from her party posted by the gay bloggers she did invite. Suddenly the reality is that I am Stella Dallas, outside looking in.

We rounded out the show with our usual Friday Night Dance Party, our excuse to not talk much in the last hour of the show while a famous DJ plays their favorite tunes. Tracy Young the sexy lady who spins at all the hot gay boy events was in studio for this round, looking as adorable as ever. Her first song was her mix of “Tardy For The Party,” the freshman musical effort of one Kim Zolciak, who puts the real in The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Kim called into the show and was exhaustingly vague about their relationship, while Tracy just sat there politely minding her own business. Now I know why reality TV requires so much editing. Some stories demand scissors and tape to make sense of.

Moments before Tracy bounced into our lives, adorable singer and actor Chris Salvatore popped into the studio. Ever since his film Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat hit the home video market, the gay community has memorized every detail of his naked body in freely distributed screen caps. Yes, we got him to reluctantly take his shirt off in the studio. It was very Coco from Fame without the creepy campiness. But he really wanted to discuss his music, especially his appropriately titled single “Dirty Love.” While he was leaving, he asked for my phone number so he and his manager (my friend Ryan) could meet up with me after the show.

I admit it. I thought he was attractive. After my silly flirtation with Drew Cutler a few weeks ago, I should have thought better of another in-studio showmance, but flirting is fun and it’s even more fun when the flirt comes back to you. So I met up with Chris and Ryan after the show at the apartment of some friend of theirs that is apparently so popular (aka whorish) that it appears on foursquare.com as a destination. (Normally a line like that would be me trying to be clever, but in this case it is in fact true.) My plan was to just spend a few flirty minutes with him before heading off to Brooklyn for a special Friday night edition of Ben Harvey’s GUMBO.

There were about eight gay men in the apartment and each one was more attractive than the last. They kept exploding out of nooks and corners, arms bulging from tight t-shirts, winning smiles shimmering in the night. I have to assume they all share a very popular house on Fire Island in the summertime, although I honestly didn’t want to know more. No sooner had I tried to remember some (any) of their names than a titsy blond woman wandered into the scene demanding acknowledgement that she wasn’t a fag hag because fag hags have no hope of ever getting laid and then blurted out, “You know what I hate about the gay community?”

“Everything?” was one response. “Gay men?” was the one with universal agreement among the men.

These of course were our reasons for hating the gay community. She hated it because when she went out to a gay club, she had the least chance of getting laid. She said this of course while a gay man was running his hand over her left breast and I pointed out to her that she already had gotten more action at the party than any of the gay men standing there. Let’s just say between her ridiculous stance against the gays (if all you want is to get laid, hang out with straight men you idiot) and her monologues delivered at full screech (“I just don’t understand lesbians. The whole thing doesn’t make sense. I am hungry for cock in my stomach!”), my dinner was ready to leave before I was, and I was beyond ready to go.

After Chris was prodded into singing a bit of one of his tunes a cappella in the bedroom, the three of us decamped to The Ritz. I had planned to ditch them at the door on my way to a quick turnaround in Brooklyn, but then Chris had nuzzled up to me while we were walking over after he found out I was single. As I tried to leave, he grabbed me a bit on the arm, “You aren’t leaving now, are you? You’ll come in for one drink, right?” Cut to me standing there with Ryan watching Chris do a shot out of an ice sculpture shaped like a man’s ass. “I thought it was a vagina!” he yelled with a smile, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. A bit later, I was leaving to try to make the 1am train when I ran into Rob on his way in with his notorious roommate Erik Bottcher, who I had never really met (or have I?) and who is connected to me on Facebook through about 120 of the hottest men you have ever seen.

Tardy Erik, for whom the party was just getting started, grinned at me and it was wicked, “Oh you aren’t leaving right now, are you? You can join us for a minute right?” I can’t say no to a handsome man and back into the breach I went. It was nice to see Rob again since we used to work together and he keeps trying to get together with me and I never make it happen. We swirled around a bit downstairs, perplexed by the bartender who was half wearing a shirt. I watched Erik and Rob do shots out of test tubes served by a weary drag queen. A not-so attractive man followed Rob out of the bathroom and tried to make something happen between them but the reality was that was never, ever going to happen.

Naturally, Rob and Erik wanted to go upstairs and moments later I was back where I had started. Erik knew all of Chris and Ryan’s hot friends from that tiny apartment located on the corner of Manhunt and used condoms. Of course they did. Hot men are like migrating birds. Their way in life is easier when they all group together and head in the same direction. Suddenly it was Chris and Rob side by side doing shots, Chris out of an ice penis and Rob’s lips pressed against that frozen ass from before. It was time for me to go, again. For real this time.

The first time I said good bye to Chris, I dirty danced with him for a few minutes before walking out the door, but this time, I gave him just a quick hug and a kiss good night. The slow dance had felt hot and passionate, like the real thing. But what is the real thing anyway? Earlier on the show, he said people liked his performance in Eating Out but he was essentially just playing himself. He is an actor and creating a moment and making it seem true is what he does for a living. Besides, didn’t I think I had the real thing before only to have it explode into a horrible ball of hatred that left only mutually assured destruction? Perhaps showmance is real enough for now. After all, it always feels good and there is never any bitter after taste.

Kim was so maddeningly vague but when you are a real person in a Real world, there is probably a lot to sort out. I know the feeling. What do any of us know for certain about anything? My mother used to say that my grandmother Laura “never believed in anything she couldn’t put her fist through” and maybe that is the right idea. So much of life is show and unlike a movie where they turn up the lights or a play where the actors bow, the show of life doesn’t have the kind of definitive delineation that makes separating truth from illusion easy. Without the comfort of a proscenium arch, none of it is particularly real and reality is just what we make of it. If pressing up against Chris and running my hand through his hair and down his chest felt real then I guess it was real. Or at least, real enough for tonight.

The Blue Folder

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.