Are you here for the party?

I surface at the Union Square stop, disoriented as always about which way to turn. I want to head east and south. I check for the compass points: a Starbucks where I have used the bathroom without making a purchase, Zen Palate (good soup), the noisy clot of druggies to be avoided and that startlingly nervous and cryptic electric sign that perhaps tracks the rise of the national debt or the cost of a condo in this city.

The streets of the East Village have some serious dermatitis disguised by the sidewalking ornamentation of some very pretty young men and women on this hot Sunday night. Let it be hot, I think, so that I might be ready for the subterranean stifling to come.

I reach Avenue B at midnight, a good hour for this event whose doors open at 10PM. C, having returned to the Wretched Little City for work on July 3rd would be asleep by now having laced his goodbye with the bet that if I slept in the early evening, I would never rouse myself for this, let alone use the subway. I have, in fact, done both, and now I, like a pirate come ashore in a wicked place, will have beer and music and men before I sleep again.

The doorman asks if I am here for the party, and applies the black ink of a circular yin/yang stamp to the tender white skin of my inside right wrist. I thread my way through the tables and by the take-out station where bags of steamy Chinese fare are handed over to a fleet of speedy Mexican boys. I wonder if any of them know what is going on in the basement.

At the bottom of the stairs is a doodular sort of handsome and grinning dude in camouflage pants and a fauxhawk. He holds The List, and calls me “Dude!” with éclat, before and after asking me if I am here for the party. He has the voice of a Junior Leaguer at the entry table of a show house opening in the Hamptons. He grasps the same wrist and exposes its soft underside to his table lamp before applying a black star next to the yin/yang. I am constellated and launched for the night.

No one ever wants to come early to this kind of party, and I find the bartenders chatting amongst themselves while slowly slicing citrus and sipping their best vodka. Upstairs and outside, small groups weigh the hour and the matter of the $25.00 entrance fee against the possibility of who can know what form of sex or romance that might wedge itself up against them, giggling and self-medicating in the tumult. They let the crosswalk lights change repeatedly while they gnaw on their phones and pace like prisoners until the boldest make their move, dragging their coteries along like parents by kids onto a roller coaster.

Within an hour, they will have all taken the plunge. But, for the moment, the rooms are full enough with just the first few dancers, and the men who are fearless, and the older men who are careless or tone-deaf to the proprieties of arrival, and those other men, the ones who are friends of the organizers and staff. They do not pay for the wrist stampede, and they drink for free, making an earlier arrival advantageous.

My clothing is visually inconsequential but quite practical. Dark and embattled cotton to absorb new stains without question and then to be dutifully washed on high heat to dispel the residue but not the memory of trespass. The tee shirt will come off soon and be stuffed into a low-rising belt loop. After a weekend in flipflops, I am resenting the thick Canadian grey socks and black boots, but the socks will hold my paper money to confound the pickpockets, and the boots will confound the drunken and lurching mistread of the more nervous young men in their senselessly pastel popped collared first communion veils and their putty and patched pocketed cargo short tutus.

I decide to piss before the line builds. I leave the room that holds the bar (a room that has an oddly un-Chinese air about it, with its several sturdy varnished groaning boards and benches that conjure Rathskeller rather than opium den which is the next and primary room’s motif).

The transition between the two rooms is a short passegiata of grey stone walls and cement floor that are plainly cellariaque and without artifice as if the hired decorator of many years back had said to herself “This hallway ain’t in the budget and I’m not bothering with it.” I like to touch the stones as I pass through here because they are cool and damp. Were I here privately, I would press my forehead to them to allow the leeching out of the day’s intemperature.