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.

Forever, For Now

Nothing really stays the same. And this is frustrating, though hardly a surprise in a city like NYC. Manhattan is changing constantly, sometimes right before your very eyes. I really hate change. I like life to be a long stretch of moments frozen in time, like tiny raindrops caught in one of those cool moments in the Matrix where the camera is moving but the action is still.

In 2003, Sean and I joined Scollay and Mickey in Florence and one day we were sailing through the Uffizi museum. It was near closing time and Sean and I happened upon Venus on the half shell, as she is more casually known. And there was a small bench for the oldsters to sit and gaze up. So we just sat there and in the last few minutes the museum was open, we just sat somewhat quietly and beheld the Venus, unobstructed by other tourists and writ large on the facing wall. The experience lasted for just a few moments but in the endless loop of my mind, I am forever there, witnessing the birth of Venus.

Tom was on the show tonight and he is so handsome and brilliant and marvelous, it always puts me in an introspective, just-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life kind of mood. For me, Tom is like Geena Davis at the end of Thelma & Louise. “Let’s just keep going,” he seems to call out to me and just spending a few minutes with him makes me want to slam the gas pedal down in that Thunderbird and take flight.

After the show, we met up with Erik and the three of us trudged downtown to The Park. Erik was with me there last week, but Tom had never been before. He loved the space, but thought the whole thing was too dimly lit. “How are you supposed to see who you want to go home with?” he asked, perplexed, and then more seriously, “How are they supposed to see if they want to go home with you?” I had to agree with Tom that the lighting was especially dim, though punctuated frequently by the sudden glow of ultra bright iPhone screens as text messages were checked and sent. I suggested that anyone using a new iPad in there would have the unpleasant effect of switching on a searchlight.

Erik, who last week was dressed like a Dockers ad for some kind of casual Friday celebration that never seems to end, heeded my advice and went more relaxed this time with a nice polo shirt. Why anyone would take fashion advice from me is a mystery but he was so buttoned-down last week, it made me nervous, like at any moment we might be audited or asked to give a PowerPoint presentation. Erik told me that he too felt better dressing more casually, so at least in this instance, it wasn’t a total disaster.

I like to spend a fair amount of my time out at gay bars inspecting what everyone else is wearing. This is a good way to spot trends and check to see if people are still wearing any of the same things you own. I am slow to retire items from my wardrobe and it helps to decide what to toss when I look around a room of attractive gay men and see that none of them own anything like what I have in my closet. But tonight, the crowd was strange, and I don’t just mean the two guys with the Flock of Seagulls hair and what appeared to be homemade capes and caftans fashioned hastily from bed linens.

There just wasn’t anything even approaching a fashion through line to hang your spring wardrobe on. Tattoo muscle arms in a 2xist tank top, scrawny hippie in a simple wife beater, polo shirts and jeans, button down shirts tucked into pressed shorts, even some guys huddled together in the back in suits. Maybe this is finally the fashion trickle down of the bad economy. Without money left for new things, they are just throwing together whatever is left, like when you are hungry and you make dinner out of whatever the last three cans are in the pantry. This makes life for a fashion victim like me completely without hope.

Perhaps we can all learn a bit from Venus. When you have the clams, you buy whatever you want. But when you are down to your last clam, just come as you are. My mind wanders back to the Uffizi. It was drizzling there in Florence, just as it is now in Manhattan. But the Hudson is a poor substitute for the charms of the reflected glory of the Arno. Erik agreed with me that the crowd was not as attractive tonight as it had been last week at The Park. Oh well. I guess nothing is perfect even in its moment nearest to perfection and nothing lasts forever. We can keep the memories we cherish the most suspended in time, but the rest of life swirls away from the wheels of time into a dusty cloud of eternity.

And the Thunderbird just keeps going.