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.

Under The Wither

Is it a function of getting older that people just annoy you all the time, or were they always annoying and as the rest of your senses dull it just becomes more acutely obvious? It’s like when you get older and you go to a bar and suddenly the music is always too loud. You would think that a person who has a hard time hearing would never think anything is too loud, but the fact remains that it is. It is probably because we have stopped listening to the music and started trying to have a real conversation just at the moment when our bodies no longer allow us to do so. I guess people are like the club. Just at the moment you want to get serious about knowing them, the noise they generate around themselves is overwhelming.

When my mother turned forty, she said, “I never thought I’d live this long” as she blew out the candles. My sister and I still being teenagers at the time, it seemed strange to think at the time that she would embark on that most important journey of parenthood with no real expectation of seeing it through to the end. But now that I am blowing out similar numbers of candles, I see what she meant. It all went by so fast but at the same time, we’ve been here a long time and we are still here, with a lot more time to go. It is like running a marathon where you ran your heart out for the first ten miles only to discover as you are gasping for air that there are another sixteen miles to go. Everyone is standing around on the sidelines cheering, but all you want to do is sit down for a minute.

The Boiling Point

It was a busy Friday, which is a problem for someone like me who doesn’t especially love to be busy. On the other hand, it is nice to feel wanted. Woke up at the crack of Noon as usual, poured myself a cup of ambition and headed into the city. First stop: Studio 2 to interview self-proclaimed “Hollywood trophy wife” Candy Spelling. Delicious Candy has been in a tasty battle with her daughter Tori for years and now Candy has a book of her own,“sTORIes From Candyland,” which has all the cardboard depth of the board game you loved with none of the plot twists. A loose thread of shallow Hollywood adventures, heart-clogging recipes and mind-boggling home inventories that attempt to bring some ordered understanding to a decidedly disordered mind are wrapped around anecdotes proclaiming the normalcy of her life amid hoarded mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Candy herself was very, for lack of a better word, sweet. It is clear that the key to success for her is gliding as effortlessly through life as an ice skater sailing through the vacuum of space. She looked good too. So many Hollywood wives are pulled overly tight or try to maintain the appearance of a youth that is but a dim memory. But Candy looks respectable, aging if not gracefully, than ever as slowly as her vast wealth will allow. I did manage to illicit a human emotion out of her when, in our anticipated discussion of her daughter, I brought up the Time Magazine piece on Tori during her terrific turn in “The House of Yes” where she was quite believably a haggard donut shop girl out of her element. Time Magazine, in the midst of a flat out frame-it-and-put-it-on-the-wall rave about Tori couldn’t resist tearing her down to a size zero by referring to her as the “shovel-faced” daughter of Aaron Spelling. Candy’s eyes actually welled up when she described what it was like to be a mother when someone says that about their daughter.

The real story worth crying about was waiting for us after the interview down at a diner in Chelsea when we ran off to see the devil on two sticks himself. Our old board op Ben Dover was waiting there for us on crutches. It was very Vanessa Redgrave in Julia and his story was filled with almost as much intrigue. A few weeks ago crossing the street, a car slammed into him, landing him on the hood like an ornament before sliding off into the street, his leg broken. While he told us this terrible story, I methodically made my way through a banana split the size of my own head. Ben told Romaine later that he had never seen anything like it before, but Romaine casually waved him off. “He eats like that all the time,” she deadpanned, failing to mention that restrictive diet I have been on for two months that allowed me to shed fifteen pounds at the drop of a hat by eating nothing that resembled food.

I ditched Romaine and Hop Along Cassidy and walked up to the world headquarters of Fabulis.com, aka a very nice apartment in Chelsea with a view of the Statue of Liberty, so you were instantly aware you were in the nosebleed section of wealth. Walking in, I knew I could only stay for a half an hour and still get back to the studio in time to do the night’s show and I stuck to my schedule. I amused Young Bradford and the few assembled guests who arrived early by announcing myself as “Number Five,” my local NYC ranking that day on the preview site (or as I like to call it Friendster 2010). I sipped my way through a quick cocktail while chatting with Richard Socarides, lately quite the busy TV pundit. It was nice to dish Obama Administration policy and performance with someone who had actually worked in a White House before. I also spent some time coveting the Capresso machine, so very sad that our Krups fancy coffee machine at home crapped out on us after less than six months. You’d think they won the war!

After the show, I headed downtown, way downtown, for Chris’s birthday party. Chris wanted to celebrate at The Boiler Room, which I hadn’t been to since the last birthday party I attended there. I suppose it was just last summer but it feels like a whole lifetime ago. And it was. The bar was jam packed but that didn’t stop two of the fattest men I have ever seen in a gay bar attempt a round of pool, waving their cues menacingly at all the skinny East Village gays who in their minds had no doubt shunned them one too many times. Passive aggressive is my least favorite gay flavor.

The short-lived pool game was obnoxious but the friends were lovely. I met lots of new guys in the group but I remember none of their names. Why bother? So-and-so was the boyfriend of this one and this guy was the college roommate of that one. I was too busy in my own head making one of those wall maps with string and newspaper clippings that crazy people are always doing in TV shows and movies to show you that they are insane. Guilty as charged, crazy!

My roommate was there and even though grungy east side boys are right in his wheelhouse, he didn’t have a very good time. He didn’t know anyone there and even I only really knew the birthday boy and his boyfriend Cub, so I was no help in introducing him around. Although he did have an amusing obnoxious encounter at the bar while waiting to get a drink. One of the skinny grunge gays turned to another skinny grunge gay and threw his arm up in the air. “Brooklyn?!” came the haughty squeal, “They are so pretentious there!” Takes one to know one.

Charlie showed up and Mike brightened considerably. He had a question about the way Tribal Council is run on Survivor and Charlie, being a former contestant was able to answer. Not only did he know, but he was very anxious to delve into about the nerdiest conversation you ever heard about how Tribal Council works. Mike was happy to get the scoop but Charlie was in heaven. “If you ever want to know more, call me! I love talking about this stuff!” Charlie assured him as we were leaving and I know he meant it.

I ran into Martin on the way out and hadn’t seen him in a while, so that was nice. In fact the whole evening was nice. Of course, then we got to the subway which was closed going the way we wanted and as usual that was a whole ordeal so we just hopped into a cab. “I always say I should come downtown more often,” my roommate opined, “But then I get here and I remember why I never come down here. It’s a pain in the ass.” And so pretentious! The cab whisked us off to Grand Central Station with an ease that no doubt would have made Candy Spelling feel right at home.

Maybe it was the four cups of coffee or the cocktails or the banana split talking, but I was in a good mood. I was so upbeat and loving with Ben Harvey at the bar, it might have scared him, but I don’t care. Who cares? It was a good day. And while I may not have a 56,000 square foot house with two wrapping rooms in it, I am not rambling around in a giant mansion wondering why my daughter never calls and telling my butlers how down to earth and normal I am. My personality is no asset but at least I am not on crutches. So while I can normally be counted on to meltdown in a major way, I won’t be reaching my boiling point tonight. I’m happy for a change and I don’t care who knows it.

The Gilt Age

My laziness is legendary. So you can imagine my delight when Joe invited me to his birthday party at a bar mere steps from my office. Even closer than my beloved haunt Vlada, The Gilt Bar at the New York Palace is dangerously close to SIRIUS and conveniently almost on the way to the train at Grand Central. The invite implored attendees to wear shirts and “the shirt should have sleeves.” Now, unless it’s a tank top or a muscle tee, all shirts have sleeves. I assumed he meant a shirt with buttons, but that isn’t what he said. And after I looked like a carb-induced monster in the button-down shirt I threw on before I left for work, I opted at the last minute for a well-worn baseball tee instead. After all, a three-quarter sleeve is better than no sleeve at all.

The New York Palace is a turn of the century (turn of that other century?!) gilt gem on Madison Avenue that for a moment as I walked up to it, I mistook for legendary Manhattan eatery Le Cirque. Well it might as well have been because it was just as insanely fancy inside, though without the delicately spun circus animals out front. However, inside I was not shunned by the wait staff as I tumbled in with my giant backpack and ski parka, a welcome relief from the usual New York attitude that attends such places. I found Joe and the usual crowd of suspects, all in crisp button-down shirts, and most in ties and/or vests lounging around the oval-shaped bar.

Charlie was there looking exactly as he always does in a crisp v-neck sweater and button down shirt, as predictably and flawlessly turned out as a figure at Madame Tussauds. Joe was leaned against the bar trying to order another glass of wine, while familiar faces (Gray, Mario, Greg, etc.) lingered in the background like dress extras. Joe had visited The Gilt Bar once before and loved it so much that he endeavored to have his next birthday party there. Some few short months later, there we all were, enveloped in our corner by the unnecessary abstract honeycomb structure that dominates the Northeast corner of the room, enjoying expensive cocktails among the high priced call girls waiting somewhat impatiently for an upturned smile in a downward economy.

I chatted for a few minutes with Joe’s friend Justin, who was very polite and blond. As an interior designer he had much to say about the hotel extension in the next room, where the original horseshoe townhouse structure had been expanded to include a modern high rise hotel. To me it just looked like the lobby of some awful Steve Wynn creation in Vegas. All that was missing, we agreed, were some slot machines and fat women in stretch pants to make the authentic look complete. Justin was hoping to piggyback on Joe’s next smoke break outside, but Joe was so intently involved in his pursuit of another glass of Merlot that Justin’s desire seemed like a far away dream.

Mike arrived and I joined him on the other side of the bar next to Martin, who I met over the summer at Ben Harvey’s rooftop party. Martin wanted me to alert all ten of the readers of my blog to his abnormally large penis, explaining that “Martin” and “penis” are two of the three most commonly searched words online, though he failed to reveal the third. Martin is a lawyer, but don’t hold that against him, he is really a fun-loving guy. He also has a stare that feels like flirting, but I think I have determined definitively now in our second meeting that it is just a signature stare.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of lawyers there tonight. Charlie introduced me to Greg, referring to him as the NYHGL (New York’s Hottest Gay Lawyer). When I quizzed Charlie, who is also a lawyer, if he had given up the title himself, Gray suggested that Charlie was in fact the NYHGLSC (New York’s Hottest Gay Lawyer Survivor Contestant). That seemed like a long and complicated answer to me, but when you work in a profession that bills by the tenth of the hour, the longer and more complicated the answer the better. Especially in this economy.

As I was leaving, Joe implored me to blog about the evening and insisted that I reference his female friends too. “I promise,” I purred.”Even the one who looks just like Jenna Maroney from 30 Rock.” This caused the other female posse members to roar. “Oh no! She hates that!” Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I wrote something in my blog that upset someone. On a completely unrelated note: Ben Harvey and Matthew Kelleher were also in attendance.