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.

Rockit Splashdown

The doorman doesn’t like me. Again. I had told Matt Kugelman this earlier when he suggested Rockit, but he assured me that there was a new doorman now. It turns out the new doorman doesn’t like me anymore than the old one did. “Uhhhh” he sighed miserably to the security guard holding the rope in place, “they are… okay.” His okay was not at all okay, but instead dripping with nastiness. As in, if I were stranded on a deserted island for a decade, I guess, if I was facing certain death and there was oxygen in his dick, it would be…. just okay.

While we were waiting, a friend of the doorman strolled up in a mesh t-shirt and camo cargo shorts. Not what I would call a style icon, unless you consider the International Male catalog the height of fashion. Moments later, the doorman was chiding me for wearing cargo shorts. “I don’t normally like cargo shorts. Can you wear something else next time?” Really? Because I am pretty sure a pair of ratty cargo shorts just rolled all up in this shit five seconds ago. Even as the words were coming out of his mouth, he knew what a hypocritical douche he came off as. Whatever, Matt really had to pee or I would have made the kind of “don’t you know who I am” scene that would have ended with me being happily banned from what is, frankly, a subpar bar experience. We only keep going because it is close to my office and Matt’s apartment and we are lazy drunks.

This is my fourth or fifth adventure at Rockit and it is still a mystery to me why this is supposed to be a hot place. Yes they have open bar from ten to eleven, but it’s almost turpentine what they serve. The crowd is nice but hardly crazy attractive. Right now, in the throes of summer everyone who is anyone is out on Fire Island, or the Hamptons or Provincetown. You would think they would be grateful to have ANYONE in their bar. Even a broken down mid-century radio show host like myself. The doormen act like its Studio 54 circa 1979. Honey, it isn’t even Studio 54 now.

Originally I planned to go to a birthday party tonight but didn’t get the location until 9:45pm. With only fifteen minutes left to the show and facing the end of a long week, I was already thinking about just heading home. Once I heard that the party was at Sugarland (which a quick Google search informed me was in Brooklyn), I knew I was going to pass. Not that the 30+ minute trip out on two subways wouldn’t have been fun, but the prospect of trying to find my way back to Manhattan after Midnight to catch the train home seemed frankly just this side of impossible. So, it was back to the old standby: Matt Kugelman and Rockit.

Once inside, we enjoyed our mutual friend Keo Nozari spinning tunes upstairs and I even ran into my adorable pal Rob Banning, who was just making a quick circle through the place before jetting away. A steady stream of admirers paraded up to Matt, undaunted by my presence. Unfortunately, the only steady stream I was enjoying came from all of the drinks being splashed on me. Must have been the open bar because these drunks tonight were messy. And when a drink is free, you don’t mind spilling some of it along the way. It seemed I couldn’t turn around in that place without getting a half glass of vodka tonic sloshed on me. I was trying to text with Ryan Raz up in Boston, but I started to worry that my iPhone wasn’t waterproof. Is there some kind of windshield wiper app for the iPhone I can download?

Neither of us wanted to make a late night of it, so we cut out pretty early. A couple of drinks was plenty and once again the doorman’s attitude did not put me in a party mood. As we left, his back was to us and I was glad. There he was, not particularly good looking, in his preppy button down shirt, open enough for open heart surgery, tucked into a painful pinch in high-waisted ticking stripe shorts. Yes, shorts! Even though his were ill-fitting and atrocious, my cargo shorts were cause for alarm. Oh enough. I can’t hear myself think over the sound of my own eyes rolling into the back of my head. Besides, I know I have no fashion sense. What is his excuse?

I love you Keo, but I won't be back.

People You May Know

Facebook has a box (recently co-opted by MySpace and others) called People You May Know, which shows the profiles of others connected to you through multiple friends on the service. This would be useful if people only connected to their nearest and dearest but since generally these seem to be the sites of endlessly intensive popularity contests, that is not the case. However, the party I attended down at Le Lupanar tonight was like the living embodiment of People You May Know.

I was invited by adorable Rob Banning, who works with me by way of the Martha Stewart cult. Rob endured a particularly amusing and exhausting trip with me to the Olive Garden some weeks back with a very drunken Michelle Collins and her equally drunk gay who was at that intoxicating level of inebriation where he could no longer tell how incredibly loud he was when he talked. Despite (are perhaps because of) that, we have developed a fast friendship. Rob was also at the Cabanas last Friday though I failed to blog about him. Rob has a gorgeous amount of style, a tasteful retro 80s preppiness without the trashy flash, all quaint bowties and catalog-ready long woolen scarves.

Tonight Rob greeted me at the door in a sleek red cardigan and that winning Sphinx smile of his that gives away nothing. The party was a sea of dark colors, save for Rob and me in my red tank shirt from Otter Fashion. For just a moment I didn’t feel so alone. The party was the whitest cream cheesy smooth collection of J. Crew boys I had ever seen, mixed with a smattering of Asians, a few chic young women and three impossibly handsome black men (aka argyle sweater, Club Monaco pullover, and tight green Polo). If it hadn’t been so dimly lit and filled with Beyonce songs, I would have sworn I was at a Harvard MBA mixer. Everyone had the kind of feckless smooth skin usually reserved for after photos in a Proactive infomercial. I’ve never felt so “ethnic” before in my life, awash in my glaring bohemia. That I met at least three men named Blake should come as no surprise to anyone.

Almost immediately, I ran into Hooper from work. Hooper, no stranger himself to this post-post gay narrow tie and vest set, always manages to be a relaxing figure for me in these environs. Maybe because we spend occasional quiet time in the flat unforgiving light of the office, when I make the arduous journey across the building from the sloppy “creative” side to the otherworldly quiet corporate side that is for most of the on-air personalities at SIRIUS as unknown to them personally as the land of Oz. I spent some time with Hooper upstairs before he decided to see what the heretofore unseen basement had to offer.

I decided to wait upstairs, still expecting to see Terry Goldman, who I had invited to join me at the party. Terry never made it, but while waiting, a parade of familiar faces came through the door. It turned out, there were people I did know, mixed in with the people I may know. Corey Johnson was first, and like most of the guests, also in a suit. As usual, he was flitting around bridging the gap between the moneyed A gays who hovered around the edges and the pretty boys who were up and coming in the centers of the rooms. Conor bounded in from the rainy night, embracing me in his warm loveliness. Moments later, almost as if on cue, Matty arrived with Hanno. Upon seeing Matty I knew the night would be fun.

After Matty and Hanno ditched their coats, we pushed through the crowd of familiar faces, recognized from a million Facebook Fire Island photo galleries and fundraiser party pix and headed for the basement. Hooper had since gone upstairs to throw himself on the mercy of a white U-shaped couch. But Chris was there, last seen in his apartment throwing a party of Shay, and we all had a round of drinks together. The basement was just like the upstairs but slightly less crowded and slightly hotter with a more accessible bar and longer bathroom line.

I had a nice chat with Chris and the usual laughs with Matty, but I was anxious the whole time. Something about the party had me on edge and I had a hard time shaking it. Maybe it was the waiting for Terry, or the juggling of Conor and Matty so they were never within drink throwing distance. Whatever it was, something felt not right, and then it went haywire because I think a guy started hitting on me. It’s hard to say.

After our first round of drinks, we all headed back upstairs, and while standing near the edge of the bar, a guy came up to me and started talking. We had met briefly at the front door when he first arrived, and in the jumble of last names as first names that wafted through the entryway like a stiff winter breeze as usual I did not immediately retain his name. (Finley, is that you?) He was handsome, intense of eye, looking without seeing in that way that denotes a still functional yet high level of intoxication. I made a reference to Douglas Sirk that I am quite certain he didn’t get. Then, in discussing his neighborhood, he said “It’s Chinatown” in a sly way that made me think he was quoting Robert Towne’s screenplay but moments later he continued his discussion of the neighborhood in a way that made me think he might not even have seen the movie.

We talked a bit about New York City, and how nice it is when it first snows and the city is covered in that white blanket that calms everything and covers all the grime…for fifteen minutes. That’s the trouble with Manhattan, I told him, nothing good here lasts. You have to enjoy it in the time you have it because you never know when it might be gone. We were rueful about it for a moment, but later as I walked to the venerable Grand Central on my way home; I looked up at the Chrysler Building and smiled. Chrysler itself may be gone soon enough, but the building remains. Nothing in New York City is permanent, but some things are the nearest thing to forever that we have. And in that moment, looking up at the glistening white lights in the hazy night sky, I savored it. Maybe things went right after all.