From Kameko:

What more could a bloggin’ guy ask for? Kameko, you made my day!

The West Side Club

Saturday night I met up with the Blogstalker and Sparky for a little East Village bar-hopping. I don’t know what happened to me, but I started to feel really lost. They seem to know multitudes of things about the city, and alternative art and culture, and Kiki and Herb and avant-garde Internet personalities and drag queens and 1970s porn and fabulousness. They seem to be so in-the-know. I felt like they were having their own witty and urbane conversation and that I was just watching. We were sitting at the Fat Cock, and I felt non-witty and non-urbane and about 17 years old. They were making various references that I couldn’t follow. My eyes closed and I began to drift off, partly because of alcohol and a lack of sleep, but also because I had no conversational reference points to hold onto.

I started to sulk. And then I just felt myself drifting further and further away and I closed my eyes and started to fall asleep. But, good guys that they are, they realized what was going on and they made valiant attempts to snap me out of it. Blogstalker even lifted me up off the ground and carried me around, all 125 pounds of me, which was, well, oddly arousing. Or maybe not so oddly. Anyway, it made me feel better.

Afterwards, Sparky went home, and Blogstalker and I went to a sex club.

A few days earlier we’d been chatting online, and he’d convinced me that this was something I needed to try, since I’d never done it before. He said he’d take me to the West Side Club on Saturday night. So we did the aforementioned bar-hopping and then decided it was time. Sparky declined to join us, so the two of us walked over there alone, stopping at a deli so the Stalker could get some coffee.

We walked into the lobby of this building, through a door, up a flight of stairs. There was a line of men waiting to get in. It was eerily quiet, like a doctor’s office. Finally it was our turn. Blogstalker went up to the window, paid, and went in. I had to buy a temporary membership. Temporary members aren’t allowed to get their own rooms, so I had to get a locker. I paid and then walked through the door.

The lights were dim. Blogstalker was nowhere. I felt all alone and started to feel kind of nervous. But I went to my locker and changed out of my clothes and put on the white towel they gave me, kind of excited about what lay ahead.

Blogstalker managed to find me again, and, both of us betoweled, he gave me a quick tour of the two floors. There were rows and rows of little rooms, some doors open, some doors closed. A typical room had a man waiting for someone to come along so he could invite him in. There was also a room that showed porn. A sauna. A steam room. Showers. Blogstalker had a room of his own, so we parted ways.

The corridors were filled with men walking around in white towels. Men of all shapes and sizes and ages and ethnicities. I’d look at guys with big chests and then I’d catch a view of myself in the mirror and realize how unmuscled I am. Usually when I look at my body in a mirror I think I look pretty decent, but if I were someone else, and I saw all these buff men, and then saw me, I wouldn’t want to have sex with me.

I felt like I was in a crypt of walking zombies. It was so surreal. The lighting was dim and there were no windows and I had no idea what time it was. Just like in a casino, you know? I wandered the halls, admiring some bodies, trying to make eye contact with anyone, anyone. But I was unsuccessful. When I’d get tired of wandering, I’d sit in the porn room or go into the steam room, and then walk out of the steam room and wipe off my fogged-up glasses with the corner of my towel and then wander around again. I’d peek into open rooms and look at the guys. I was afraid to linger too long in front of any one doorway for fear of rejection. Finally I did manage to linger in front of one and made eye contact with the guy inside. He looked at me and calmly shook his head “no.” I walked on, chastened.

I started to feel tired, just another walking zombie. This was becoming less and less appealing. I didn’t even feel like having sex with anyone anymore. It was like an auction block, heartless, cold, judging, mechanical, like so many other aspects of gay urban life. I suddenly wanted to crawl underneath the covers with a sweet, caring boyfriend, and smooch him, and look into his eyes, and smile, and fall asleep in his arms. I was feeling more and more disgusted by where I was. This wasn’t for me.

I’d paid for four hours and I wondered how much time had passed, so I went back to my locker and looked at my watch. It was 4:30 in the morning. Only two hours had gone by! Cripes. I found the Blogstalker and told him I’d probably be leaving soon. I wandered around again, and then finally I couldn’t take it any more. It was time for me to go.

I went back to my locker, changed back into my clothes, waited on the line to get out. The guy at the window gave me the drawer where I’d put my keys and my wallet and my temporary membership card. I looked at the card. It said it was good for four more visits over the next month.

Will I go back? I don’t know. I think maybe I’d rather spend twenty bucks on a cheap Broadway ticket. If I want to feel humiliated and shameful and gross and out of my element again, I can probably find a way to do that for free.

The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife

The greatest thing about living here is that you can be sitting in your office at 5:30 in the afternoon, getting ready to leave work, and suddenly say to yourself, “Hmm… I have no plans tonight. I think I’ll see a Broadway play.” That’s what I did yesterday. I tooled around on Playbill.com and came across The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, a play that my mom saw last year and said was hilarious. So I took the subway to Times Square, walked over to the theater and got a cheap ticket. It’s not a huge theater, so even though the seat was in the rear mezzanine it was totally decent.

I enjoyed it for the most part. Linda Lavin played the lead, and she was a real treat, although I swear she sounded exactly like Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage” — a nasal, reedy, drawn-out voice. The play was kind of sitcommy, and a couple of the characters were total clichés, but at the same time it was able to transcend those barriers and present something original. Having seen it, I might need to take a second look at Herman Hesse’s Siddharta, which I was required to read during the summer before I started college and which comes up during the play.

It was such a refreshing evening, much better than going home and boiling some pasta and turning on the computer. All this theater is right here, and I always forget! Like I wrote the other day, I’ve decided to do this more often, to the extent that I can afford it. If I can keep finding tickets for twenty bucks, it should be doable. Lately I’ve realized that I’ve been repressing my interest in theater for the last few years. Why? A few reasons, all interrelated. One, a little internalized homophobia, strangely enough. Two, when I got to college, I didn’t feel like I fit in with the die-hard drama people. I was probably scared of their openness. Three, I fear that if I start pursuing the interest again, it will once again take over my life and make me irrational and impractical and dreamy and flighty and unrealistic, like I was when I was a teenager. We fear what we desire.

When I was a kid, I thought Manhattan and the theater district were synonymous. From the time I was six or seven, my parents took me to lots of Broadway shows, beginning with Annie and Peter Pan, and growing up in the 1980s I got to see many others. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who saw the spectacularly awful Carrie, based on the Stephen King novel, which ran for 16 previews and closed after only five regular performances.

My (lately repressed) love of theater is really due to the influence of my mom. She’s loved the theater her entire life; when she was a teenager in the sixties, she’d take the bus into Manhattan from Queens and see whatever she could. She has a huge collection of Playbills that would probably give Mermaniac an orgasm if he saw it.

Anyway… I hope last night was just the first of many more trips to the theater. I’m reconnecting with a part of myself I neglect far too often. This is a good thing. And who knows where it will take me?