The Americanization of Richard

By this point, The Park is like an old friend. I haven’t seen it in a while, but coming back was like I never left. It was the place, downstairs by the fire, that Romaine and I first met a decade ago and talked for hours, assured by the end that we could do a radio show together. Years later, near the front bar, I had spotted Erik Rhodes, sheepish after he had been discovered, no doubt feeling guilty after blowing off the show. The subterranean coat check is where I first spotted Daniel, the hot Brit who would make frequent appearances in my writing but to whom I have still never spoken. And upstairs months later, it was Conor McGill who finally helped solve the mystery of his identity, throwing everyone else under the old age bus for not knowing it themselves.

This afternoon it was a different Brit who was the subject of conversation and center of attention. Fresh meat has a tendency to do that, especially when the beef is firm and tender and the winter nights long and lonely. Parked at The Park, sealing in my own juices under the intense heat lamp that Brian Babst called home, I quietly roasted in a wool sweater cleverly disguising long underwear below. Not that anyone there would ever know the difference. I take winter very seriously, but not much else.

In this particular moment, Brian was elsewhere and I was explaining to his friend Omar Torres about my blog and how I write about my nights out on the town and the not-so-ordinary people I meet there. "My fifteen seconds of fame!" he declared excitedly, and that is how long it will be because the subject of tonight's essay is not Omar, or Brian, or any of the other ghosts of bars past. It is Richard, newly delivered to New York City from London.

Omar and Brian enjoy their fifteen seconds of fame while it lasts.

"What a terrible idea!" I told Richard when I heard of his recent arrival. He smiled a winsome grin. "No one has said that to me yet." I didn't mean the city. I meant the weather. January is the worst month in New York, if you don’t count August and about six or seven others. "I wanted to move here now," he explained, "So I had time to get settled and by the time summer rolls around, I’ll be ready." He is a smart cookie, that Richard. Also he has big arms and a good job, so I predict smooth sailing, even now that he is firmly planted on dry land.

Without prompting or request, I gave Richard some of my most valuable advice for living in the city. It started with a story from when I first arrived in 2001. Also known as the year he turned twelve. Oh? Did I not mention that he was born in the 80s? "In November 1989. Slipped in under the wire!" Being exactly twenty years older than he was, I felt it was my obligation, in a strictly paternal way, to tell him everything I knew about the city.

I told about losing my good leather coat on the divine Robbie Hammond's bed at a fabulous party he threw. My coat was exchanged for an inferior leather coat someone else had brought and given how ill-fitting the leftover one was, I don't think it was an honest mistake. I frantically tore Robbie’s bedroom apart for a coat I knew in my heart was gone, a coat that wasn't even mine in the first place, and haven't been invited back since. My bad manners aside, Brian confirmed my advice to always have a couple of cute but cheap coats you won’t mind losing along the way.

"Don't lose your accent" was another sage piece of advice I gave him. "You'll see all sorts of people on TV who came here decades ago and they never lose that accent. It is the secret to their success. And Americans worship class. We think anyone with a British accent is classy. Don’t lose it." Richard insisted he had no plans to lose it but is worried about it slipping on its own as fags became cigarettes and queues turned into lines. "My grandmother doesn't want me to sound like an American." Unfortunately, as I learned from my incomprehensible Scottish friend Jim Hepburn whose mother chided him for talking like an American newscaster, back home they only hear what is gone and we only hear whatever is left.

I have a lot of nerve giving advice. This is the first gay social event I have been to in the city in months. No wonder I persist with perfection as Roy Cohn's definition of a homosexual from Angels In America: Someone who knows no one and who no one knows. I was a host for the event today but my name was misspelled, where you could find it. Ben Roussel, in a crazy fabulous fur hat, his shirt tight like Saran Wrap, fruitlessly toured the bar, never able to accurately determine which VIP table was mine. This culminated in an awkward encounter at table seven where I insisted Brian and Richard could get a drink only to be rebuffed by some queens who had no business being there either.

Aside from the event organizer (the ever handsome and tall Zachary Barnett) and the assorted characters I have mentioned (as well as Ben Dixon and another Ben that I do not know but have seen so many times, I almost feel like we were roommates once), the only other person I knew at the event was someone I met once several years ago at Brian Gianelli's going away party.

"That's Ryan Hahn," I said, gesturing in his direction. "I only met him once but we are friends on Facebook." Knowing my reluctance to digitally befriend anyone, this is me really saying something. But Brian was not impressed. "Are you pointing? In a bar?" His line delivery would have made the Dowager Countess proud as he slipped away from me, drenched in shame. As I told Richard when we met, I am a social dead end. He is wise to stick with Brian Babst who today proved once again to be someone who knows everyone and who everyone knows and who knows not to point at people in public. 

Some man tries to welcome Richard while Ben, never my roommate, looks on warily.

I hope Richard enjoys being in America and more importantly, being in New York. Today Ryan reminded me of the advice I gave to him the first time I met him. "Live in LA in your 20's when you are young and cute and can live well on not much money, but move to New York in your 30's where you can be interesting and afford to live there like a human being." But Richard is starting with New York and I suspect will skip LA altogether, his IKEA shopping spree aside. His quick success will enable him to be young and cute and interesting and afford to live here like a human being all at the same time. 

And that, my friends, is a design for living worth following. 

Stuck In Park

Thursday night at The Park has been a thing for a while now. Last year, Matty was promoting a night there. This year, it has been Josh Woods’ turn. Certainly over the last few months, the Fox party has been the most consistent night out for me. So I suppose it was no surprise that on my first Thursday out in a while, The Park was on the agenda, even if we only planned to stay for a short bit. Erik didn’t mind going again, but the drinks are kind of pricey ($13 for a tiny glass of ice with a heavy pour of vodka on top). So we made a plan to stop by for the first hour when the drinks are two for one and then head on up to Hell’s Kitchen.

ADD Jeff sent me a text message during the show to see if I was going out tonight. As fate would have it, I was. So when the show ended, he was waiting downstairs on the plaza outside our building with his muscled pal Eddie. Eddie is the kind of walking slab of beef that should either be hanging in a meat locker or punching the beef in one. Together we hopped on the subway and headed down to The Park to begin our evening.

The Feminine Mistake

A gay bar is a funny place. Well, not funny in the sense that you are genuinely laughing but it certainly brings out a humorous element. If our own nightclubs can seem surreal to us, I can only imagine what straight people must think. And by straight people, I mean straight men because straight women are often well acquainted with our gay antics. This is not always a good thing.

Personally, I don’t fully understand the appeal of a gay bar to a straight woman. On some level, I understand the basic motivation. It is a safe space where women can be their true selves, like the West Hollywood supermarket Pavilions. Straight women casually eat their way through that store unnoticed as muscle-bound homos pretend to buy health food and cruise each other in tank tops, dolphin shorts and track pants without any underwear under them. I suppose my irritation is in the notion that we aren’t offended by the desire of women to join us out at the bars. To them, the whole thing is cute, it is a lark, it’s Candy Land. But for us it is serious business. The produce section is nice and all but our local gay lounges are quite literally where the rubber meets the hole.

The Big Queasy

I had the whole thing planned out in my head. My LA friend Brian (aka BOC) was in town and just this morning, I had communicated on Facebook with NY-based Brian Babst and it was working out that both of them would be at The Park tonight. This was kismet. I would write about our fabulous evening out on the town. I even had an amazing title: The Life Of Brians. It was all so perfect. Though, as always, my life once again didn’t work out the way I had planned.

BOC and I have known each other for seventeen years, but since I moved to New York in 2001, we have rarely seen each other. The late rise of social networking has made it easy for us to reconnect and talk more which has been great. I have always liked Brian a lot. And over the years we have worked together and played together and experienced life so there was no reason for me not to be excited to see him. We planned a quick bite at Vinyl before heading down to The Park where his friend Rodney was meeting him and my friend Erik was meeting me (and presumably Babst would be waiting).

While at Vinyl enjoying my usual Thai ice tea and Cobb Salad, I bit into something that, in the moment, I thought tasted moldy. In my excitement to catch up with Brian, I ignored the thought and kept going. But ten minutes later, doubled over with cramps in the Elvis bathroom, I realized that my first instinct was correct. But so what?! We haven’t seen each other in years. People are waiting for me. I haven’t updated my blog in two weeks. I need to go. And so down to The Park we went.

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.

Bad Manners

"I should have told you at the beginning of this conversation that I have no people skills."

I am aware when I write about my encounters out on the town, it gives people a thrill to see me say things like this. I promise you that the person hearing it first hand is not thrilled. Case in point: Thursday night at The Park, Matty's monthly soiree of boys, booze and bouncing around. Happening at the tail end of March, this particular event took on all the trappings of a Fire Island pre-party, right down to the hunky gemologist, stunned by his misfortune to be in conversation with me.

Wonderful Brian Babst introduced me to Seth and for a moment, I did my best to engage him in small talk about his favorite subject: himself. Unfortunately, my lack of knowledge about or interest in diamonds, jewelry, abs and the Ascension party on Fire Island turned me rapidly into a pumpkin before his very non-believing eyes. Suddenly, his head was swiveling around like an office chair in an earthquake, desperate to find someone (anyone!) else that he knew so that he could return to his safety zone, waxing poetic about his lock necklace and who accidentally O.D.ed last summer swigging on a sports bottle full of GHB.

All this was later in the evening, when most of the men in suits had faded away and what was left was cruisy, drunk and ready to rekindle old flames from Pines past. Already the muscles are bulging from beneath strained t-shirts like snow crocuses making their first budding ventures out of the frost. Spring is here I hear, and a Summer of thongs and regrets (and regretting seeing some in thongs) is just around the corner. And tonight, in between the Wall Streeters and the hunky casual, a sea of plaid shirts that caught the attention first of Dave Rubin ("Is that what we are doing now?") and then moments later Brian himself ("Brother, can you spare some gingham?"). It's Depression Chic, I assured them, happy to for once be, if not ahead of the curve, at least balancing precariously on it.

I didn't need to meet anyone new, and at this point really, new men are just cannon fodder for my blog anyway. Sorry Seth. I am sure your well-formed shoulders can handle the burden of it all. However, I did bring someone new this time. Delicious Matt Kugelman delighted me by coming along with his friend Chip and the three of us had a gay old time. Matt knows his way around a hot Manhattan gay party so I think he was surprised by how few people he knew there. Fortunately, his winning smile and equally bulging t-shirt signaled that he would fit right in and it wouldn't take him long to meet anyone he wanted to meet.

Having them there with me was a little like taking a date to your high school reunion. I knew so many people, and far more than I actually know in real life. Charlie found us first, while we were still downstairs, drawn over by the siren song of my unmistakable laugh. Gray and Greg were upstairs, looking sharp as always. Chris Stadler was there, though I didn't even get to say hi, it was so crowded. Ben Harvey was a thin slice of blond heaven, a drunk Patsy to Dave Rubin's smashed Edina. Matty was running around taking a hundred and one photos and he positively melted like chocolate on your tongue when I asked him about Austria. Matty took a couple of good snaps of me with Young Bradford who was sad I was spending this weekend in Florida working instead of helping to keep Matty entertained out in the country with them. He introduced me to another guy also named Bradford. "How dare you!" I said to this new interloping Bradford, to which our Bradford whole-heartedly agreed, chiming in himself with a "Yes! How dare you!"Once again, I did everything I could to win over a stranger.

Matt and Chip didn't stay long, having to run off to Bianca's show further uptown. I hope they had fun. Matt sure seemed to enjoy dancing around to the music, although not as much as Corey Johnson, who twirled like a Drag Race contestant lipsyncing for his life. Needing to escape before I did any real damage, I looked for Joe and his cute friend Adam to say good-bye. Adam showered me with flirty attention the last time I saw him, but this time, he was chasing someone else. Naturally, being a self-centered monster, this hurt my feelings. So, I tugged on his suspenders a while, lifted him up a bit to kiss him on the neck and ran my fingers along the back of his ear until he asked me for my number. "Ask Joe for it!" I said as I kissed him good night, knowing full well that Joe doesn't have my number either.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to you because unlike Seth, I told you at the beginning of this conversation that I don't have any people skills. And I still don't.

Park And Fly

On any given Thursday, there are few places in the world more exciting than New York City. I woke up this morning expecting that the most exciting thing to happen all day would be attending Matty’s inaugural party as club promoter: Sexy Back Thursdays at The Park. But then Sam jumped up from her desk next to me yelling “A plane just crashed outside our office!” and the day briefly took an entirely different turn.

A US Airways flight glided down in the Hudson river a few blocks from my office and quite literally outside the window of my old River Place apartment off the West Side Highway. All of the passengers and crew lived which allowed everyone to start with the gallows humor immediately without fear of much reproach. My favorite comeback being: “If we stop flying, the geese have won.” As it was, the landing and rescue were so quick and uneventful I have to assume that some of the NYC-based passengers merely stepped off the rescue boat, hailed a cab outside the Circle Line Tour and headed back to their respective apartments. After all, they didn’t have much time to change out of their wet shoes and head downtown to Matty’s fabulous new party, and New Yorkers are, if nothing else, a resilient bunch.

I do love The Park. It reminds me of my childhood fantasy of opening a kitschy indoor restaurant designed to look outdoors. I would call it Picnic and everyone would eat fried chicken and hot dogs at wooden picnic tables with red checkerboard tablecloths under a bright kleig light sun. The Park, with its indoor/outdoor motif and heavy doses of camp (what’s with all those Hitchcockian stuffed birds around the back bar mirror?), serves up heaping helpings of broken Asian doll along with expensive cocktails and high-end entrees. It is the restaurant of my childhood dreams if I had grown up in the West Village instead of Utah.

Suffice it to say, Matty’s party was a huge success. And why not? All the usual suspects were there. Gray in black. Mike without Ryan. Charlie in a v-neck sweater. JD and Clayton canoodling while Terry looked on at his handiwork approvingly. Even Brian Babst appeared at the front bar, already armed with lines from tonight’s 30 Rock. He insisted he wasn’t staying long but more than an hour later, I found him upstairs in the Penthouse crush looking determined. Meanwhile, Matty swirled around us all, a social Sonja Henie, skating effortlessly through the scene, smiling for the camera. Chris and Josh were skating too, though their routine was off and I think the judges noticed.

And in the center of it all: me. Poorly dressed as usual, long underwear hidden under my free American Idol shirt, surrounded by Gossip Gays in tiny preppy suits and nerd glasses. They made me want to shove them down the concrete stairs, turning the base of the steps into just a pile of mangled cashmere sweaters and shattered spines. I was inappropriate as usual, pushing my way through the crowd with zero regard for anyone’s safety, including my own. Even creating a short cut by walking across a pair of couches until I nearly stepped on a handsome stranger and his fag hag. “That’s not good for the furniture” I said to him as I climbed back down. He smiled back in a way that said he was charmed now, but sober and in daylight, he would not be so thrilled with me. Story of my life.

Maybe it was the cold but Los Angeles was a hot topic of conversation at Matty’s soiree. Brian deadpanned a story to me about gays in LA stocking up on tonic water like the end times are coming because “it doesn’t have any calories.” JD lamented the shallowness of the LA boys and worried aloud that “the plastics” had followed him to The Park. He seemed amused when I told him that my attitude problem practically got me run out of West Hollywood on a rail. The locals insisted that perhaps I would fit in better in New York, though when I arrived in Manhattan, all anyone ever asked for the first two years was if I was from LA. Perhaps I belong somewhere in between.

Later at the coat check as I bundled up inside my ski parka (an angry lesbian fashion shot fired across a sea of fitted wool coats) a different handsome man came down the stairs and smiled at me. “You look warm,” he cooed, but my only thought was making my train. I muttered “I certainly hope so!” as I pushed past him. After all, why look so out of place if I can’t at least prevent frostbite on my way home. And all apologizes to him and Kathleen Turner but body heat is not how I plan to ride out the winter.

Oh what a night, as the songwriter wrote. The coldest night of the year, of many years even. A plane crash down the street. Only in New York, kids. Only in New York. But as I said before, we New Yorkers are a resilient bunch. I probably didn’t do much to bring sexy back to Thursdays, The Park or the parka for that matter, but at least I was there. And, more importantly, despite my continued surly attitude, I did have a good time.