june 16 2000
when i see people walking around new york that are obviously not from new york, i wonder what it is that makes them stand out. sometimes it's things they say, like the time the young man walking down 42nd street in front of me looked into the universal newsstand and said simply, "god-damn that's a lot of magazines." the young man in question was of a midwestern origin, which i divined because what he actually said was more along the lines of "gol'-dayum ass a lawda maguh zeeyins." or the time the small australian child kept tugging at her parents' sleeves and pointing across the street and saying "can we go to sizzler?" again, i knew she was australian because what she actually said was "kin way gaow to seezlah?" thanks to television, i know a good deal about other cultures and their attendant issues--cordiality, sensitivity, and so on--so i walked up and handed the girl an enormous can of foster's lager. when her parents protested that she was only eight, i showed them my machete just to let them know i understood where they were coming from, apparently, my open-arms policy was misconstrued, i spent the rest of the day down at the justice building trying to explain to the judge that when an entire continent springs from a penal colony, you're going to have to expect some crossed wires. fucking australians.
but intolerance and jingoism notwithstanding, it strikes me that there are aspects of new york that can pose a bit of a difficulty for someone not as accustomed to treading the backs of the less fortunate as we natives. i should note here that i'm not a native, and am in fact from the tranquil cornfields of the midwest, but since i'm an opportunistic and suspicious bastard by nature, the denizens of the naked city have embraced me as one of their own. sometimes they embrace me a little too closely, and i wake up in port authority wearing clown makeup and children's pajamas with that little flap on the ass. there was a point here somewhere, i promise.
ah. the point is, though, that there are certain experiences that are quintessentially new york ("new york" here, of course, being used as an adjective). not quintessentially new york like twilight skyline views or a hot-chocolate-and-heavy-petting-hansom-cab-ride through central park, but quintessentially new york like running naked across the floor of the stock exchange or being mistaken for a transsexual hooker--neither which, i hasten to add, has happened to me. however, last night (thursday night, for those of you who have received your play along with proven-brand vicarious living decoder ring), i was privileged enough to find myself at the intersection of two seperate and distinct such experiences.
the first, to be completely blunt, was an s&m restaurant. it was a lot like going to tgi friday's, with few instrumental differences. these differences are: 1) the food is actually quite decent, 2) all dining takes place in a stone dungeon, 3) the waitresses wear corsets and push-up latex bodices instead of red-and-white-striped shirts and suspenders with lots of annoyingly-sloganed buttons, 4) instead of drinks like the "mudslide" and the "electric blue super drunkass parfait," the cocktail menu boasts such libations as the "coprophiliac" (which is, a bit unsurprisingly, a martini with chocolate liqueur), and 5) instead of being serenaded with a chorus of "happy birthday," you will be chained to a post and have candle wax dripped onto your shirtless torso. suffice it to say, a good time was had by all. especially pj, who was rendered speechless with every time our mistress told one of us to shut up. he was sad to leave; i mean, so was i, but he especially was. a brief episode to illustrate this: for $20, you can order from a small selection of humiliations, including verbal abuse and foot worship. i told pj that i had heard that if a male in any dining party was willing to take it up the ass from the mistress' strap-on, that the whole table would eat for free. i'm just glad that i made it up, because i don't mind telling you that the gleam in his eye made me a little uncomfortable. besides, there was no time for bill-leveraging sodomy, because we had to meet my friend c. and go off to the second experience. which was...
the record release party for armand van helden's new album. avh is a big house dj, and while i don't listen to much house, he's done some hip-hop work in the past and it does kind of inform his whole sensibility. plus, the party was at centro-fly, which used to be the venerable concert venue tramps but is now a totally-beautiful-people hottentot-to-def night spot. so, i ask you, who am i to turn down a coveted spot on the guest list? (that was rhetorical, lest you answer something like "a self-aggrandizing moron, that's who.") so pj and i walked up and met c. near her house and cabbed over to the spot and skated right on in with our jet-set selves. i hadn't been inside since it opened as centro-fly (late last year), and it struck me as a weird confluence of clockwork orange and opium den. overall, not a bad effect, so we got drinks and secured spots in the sunken-bench side quasi-vip area and just basked in the beautifulness of it all. c. and i have been spending time together again for the first time since we broke up in november (what's that you're gasping? why, yes, there is a personal life behind all this bombast), and things have been good. comfortable, relatively free of sexual tension. relatively. but the dancefloor filled up with a quickness, rendering our temporary seats permanent, and we all sat and talked and sweated and danced as much as our close quarters would allow and laughed a fair bit too. eet was nice.
damn it, i really have to stop ending these things with sincerity.
to recap: waking up in port authority in clown makeup and children's pajamas. electric blue super drunkass parfait. thank you.
p.
and yo. my full-on venture kneejerk.net is up and running, though not nearly full. go and getcha read on. for me.
props to darkcounter.com
and sitemeter