Pills, Shrooms, Gay Sex and Other Signs of Life
This cynicism of mine would most likely disappear if you promoters would drop your straws and start giving me drink tickets.
I arrived late at night two months ago from Seattle, and although I forgot to sleep that night, the next night I was at a farewell party for Bruce LaBruce. We were at 443, which with its new lighting and sound system is the gay bar in the East Village. It was a good turnout, but I was too groggy to appreciate the socially hypercharged atmosphere.
Look at me: all indifference, quite content to chainsmoke in solitude, staring down the sea of damaged faces, passively accepting phone numbers I'd never dial from older men who want to take my picture, accepting beers from men trying to win me over with gay small talk, isn't the new Madonna remix great, but they're not even talking to me, their eyes have already latched onto my cock. I wade through the jabbering hurricane of caned-up beautiful people, carefully sidestepping the models obliged to be outrageous, wrestling on the floor in their forced attempt to resuscitate old dramas, avoiding eye contact I don't want to make. People jostle, last year's Basement Jaxx bangs on. In the eye of it all LaBruce stands with his back turned, talking to someone much more glamorous than I am, while my friend taps his willfully oblivious shoulder.
He quickly turns and says, "I've seen naked pictures of you." I am given five seconds in which (remember, we're operating in coke time) to scour my vacant mind for a suitably toxic rebuttal, to play Lou to his Andy, but, having neglected to sleep these past few tumultuous days, and feeling a bit brain-dead from my hourlong personal consultation with a little brown bottle earlier in the day, and wondering exactly when and where these naked pictures were taken of me, I have nothing to say and his back is turned to me...but it's okay.
Twenty minutes later, having arrived an hour late, LaBruce leaves. All claws aside, he's great: no one else crashes their own party.
The rest of the week is slightly blurry, but I end up at the Tunnel on Saturday. Alone, because my friend came down fast with an illness. At midnight, because I'm bored, trying to start a new trend: fashionably early. Dealers outside Twilo swarmed me, "Hey, orange hat, you want ecstasy?" If by ecstasy you mean a $25 seizure pill, no.
I'd stayed up all the night before taking adderols and working on an outfit that seemed good at the time: a crypto-militaristic thing. Then I'm at the entrance to the Tunnel, prejudiced from the start; having to stand in line, listening to ravers make bad raver conversation, each banal word a blaring reminder of why I think they should be forced to wear muzzles. Those Kurfew kids are cute until they start speaking, and it's all downhill from there.
I take a pill, look around. Party people: none. Music: sampled-diva-dependent baby-house. I was probably fronting. Scouring the club for a non-sketch zone, I find none. Searching for Seattle tweakers I had plans to meet so we could say this sucks let's go to Twilo; none.
I sat on a rail. Chicken sat on the rail next to me, staring for many minutes, until I turned to him. Extremely nervous, he reflexively reached out to shake my hand, which I gave him, while asking him for water, which he thrust at me. He gathered the strength to ask, "You know where to get any pills?"
My something starts to kick in while everyone else's everything else starts kicking in, yet still I pace the crowd restless and unsatisfied. This music is too New Jersey. I take my shirt off and stand up against the speaker. I'm an organic installation piece. Half the time my eyes are closed because every time I open them, the people walking by just glare. A large man gets in my face, trying to express some unfriendly sentiment he has for me, but the K or whatever he's on is depriving him of the cognitive ability to form the words to express it. He grows aggressively incoherent, more and more like one of the Hells Angels in Gimme Shelter. A friendly partygoer steers him away. Scared out of my complacency, like a guilty cat caught pissing on the rosebed, I relocate.
In a bad space, I wandered. Everything I do is wrong. Fiending for a cigarette I ask everyone, but all I get is dismissive rejections. I get pushed out of a dance circle I didn't know I'd stumbled into. I sit in front of a speaker behind the stage and am told to leave. Everywhere I go I'm unwelcome. Searching for friendly faces, I get only fuck-yous.
Sat on the floor in the garbage. Is this my fate, to be the Leonard Cohen at the rave? Feet jostled me as they sauntered by with scorn. Girls and boys danced at me in ecstatic mockery. I wondered why I was here, longed to run back to Seattle and junk. Over the last three hours my self-image deteriorated from Bob Dylan to Mr. Jones, pathetic journalist with eyeballs in lint-filled pockets and crooked nose on dirty ground. Even peaking, walking the streets seems preferable to staying here and being hated.
I'm about to leave, sad, defeated, up against a wall watching boys dance (which admittedly is rude; it's like watching people fucking), when a boy who looks like a ravier Jonathan Taylor Thomas stands next to me, shades on, looking straight ahead. No words are spoken, but words are irrelevant here in the telepathic zone, so I ask him with my eyes what I should do.
He gives me my answer. Here I was, bringing all my baggage into their scene, full of opinion and ready to judge. Who am I to walk into their space and declare it dead? I don't have the right. He tells me this and I concede.
I take out my notes and throw them to the floor. My pen, too. The boy pushes some hidden button that changes his sunglasses to just plain glasses. I drop my hat, my scarf. The only thing left is my jacket, which I drop. There we're standing, all my possessions huddled against the wall. Look to the boy for what I should do next, he's disappeared onto the dancefloor.
Finally ready, I start quietly dancing. Now I don't dance often, but when I do dance, it's mental dancing, it's fucked-up dancing. I let the floods of serotonin dance for me. It's conceptual dancing, mathematical dancing, and if people smirk, I just compartmentalize them and freeze them out. All the night's tensions were channeled into it. The music started getting better, more hardcore, more complex. And while I danced, first by myself, then with increasing numbers of other people, I began reintegrating parts of my costume, once I'd felt I'd earned them. Finally I was dancing in full costume. I got sweaty. Boys would dance in front of me and I'd do this weird puppeteering thing, which I can't really explain but it's like I control their movement. They would eye me and I'd look back, but it was all that corner-of-your-eye stuff. I've never been able to figure out how to convert that abstract coy flirtation into tangible physical pleasure. Give me brutish liquor sex, just let's fuck and it's over.
They played the trance version of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt, a track I always seem to hear when I'm peaking. My ears are still ringing. Permanent damage.
Conversation overheard while standing in line for Beige: "I dreamed I was in heaven and heaven was Twilo and God was Junior Sanchez and it was Saturday night and we were doing bumps of K and the K was good and then we were doing bumps of coke but then we got thrown out."
I stopped into the Boiler Room for about 15 seconds, scanning it to see if it was as sad as I remembered it. No, sadder. Not even Rufus Wainwright was there. Go home to Wowee Zowee in the headphones.
Friday night at Twilo: As regards the good gentlemen vending "Buddhas," my advice for the discerning consumer is to save your $25 and simply meditate. Still, I swallowed. Newsflash: immediate Prozac usage prevents permanent brain damage. Alas, I took my SSRI many hours too late to prevent serotonin slippage, and a portion of my potential future happiness evaporated into the void of the future.
Carl Cox, who they say is the world's highest-paid DJ, though I doubt he still makes more than Norman Cook, thudded and made everyone happy. I wasn't up for dancing myself. I was upstairs in the VIP room, sitting on the floor, reading A Scanner Darkly.
Index fourth-anniversary party: free liquor flowed freely. I drank two vodka tonics and sucked on three lollipops simultaneously. Index cover troupe Fischerspooner performed, did sort of a Sprockets-type thing, sort of like Udo Kier in My Own Private Idaho, but we just couldn't figure out the appeal. Ultimately I decided it was all a joke.
Dennis Cooper reading: My boyfriend and I ate some mushrooms I was given in Boston while Steve Malkmus read from "Tenderness of the Wolves." Judging by the taste, I don't think they were portobello. After smoking for a couple hours in our new apartment to break it in, we made our way to a deep West Village loft for the party. It was a bit formal, but luckily we were hallucinating.
We parted the sea of Prada and made it to the bar where I downed free champagne as fast as they could pour it for me. Cooper held court for an incessant queue of fans and sycophants. We stood in front of John Waters and tastelessly made out and he seemed interested. Bret Easton Ellis spoke kindly of an article I did last year on Glamorama.
Alas, the champagne soon ran dry and we were reduced to rum, at which point we taxied home to christen our new apartment with frantic gay sex. I'm told that a sobbing Nan Goldin was carried in after we left, which is for the better: the last thing a psilocybinized mind needs is an hysterical legend.
Lust at Limelight: This was actually an all right party. The chapel downstairs plays glammy rock and pop, where you can get drunk and dance to Bowie if you want. I got married here, as "Jumping Jack Flash" came on, my boyfriend and I held a private little rock 'n' roll ceremony.
Upstairs in the rock room, you can get more drunk and watch the go-go dancers writhe to the burned-out strains of Aerosmith, or get it on in the booths to Iggy. Mechanical pterodactyls adhere to the wall. This room seems to attract Johnny Thunders types and the women who love them.
The main room hosted some live bands, including Squeezebox veterans the Toilet Boys; they shot sparks out of their guitars and spit whiskey onto the neck of a guitar, which was on fire, causing a large flame. They played raw not-kidding-around metal; it takes one back to the great 80s when Winger reigned supreme. Afterward it was industrial, and the dancefloor emptied except for a handful of goths. My advice to the Lust promoters is unify your esthetic, go all-out and do something spectacularly hardcore with the main room.
Hardcore at Manitoba: We went to the opening hosted by Mistress Formica, who was really nice. The place was packed with Squeezebox castaways. The Dopes played, but I kind of used up my appetite for anonymous punk growing up in Olympia. We had a few drinks and I was just happy to hear the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict."
Drama at Limelight: Boring gay men dance with their shirts off. Their chests have lots of muscles, as though they visit a gym frequently. They read HX religiously. We took pills for some reason but the music didn't move me. Except when I was peaking and danced up on the stage, but there was no feeling there, no energy, I felt like a retarded robot whose energy was running out but felt the need for one last spasm...