Post Natal Trip

Yesterday was my birthday and with my roommate's encouragement, I hastily arranged some happy hour fun at Therapy Bar in midtown. I had a nice turnout, a good cross-section of people I know and mostly never get to see. As any gay party invariably does, it divided quickly into two groups: those asking who my hot friend was and the hot friend in question. Granted, there is always a fair amount of overlap in those situations (hot people asking about other hot people), which is commonly known as a hook-up. Although I don’t think there were any successful hook-ups at my birthday this year. You know me, always keeping the sexual temperature somewhere near a faint simmer.

Me and Adam Sank. Turning up the sexual heat!

Birthday parties are the worst kinds of parties because most of the time you go but the only person you know is the object of the party. And the same is true for everyone else there. So mostly you all spend the evening standing around not talking to the one person you came to talk to and milling around among a cluster of other people with the same mixture of irritation and disappointment on their faces.  Not fun.

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. 

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.

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.