2005-03-31 - 5:08 a.m.
Last night, I decided to go to Mickeys instead of the Same Old Nonsense, and I got myself blitzed! Can you imagine? There seems to be this odd war waging between the owners of Mickeys and the bar down two doors down. You know the one, dear Big Blue Blog-a-roo: It’s that rather pathetic Margarita bar which serves dreadful looking Mexican food.
That spot down the street from Mickeys has had more incarnations that Shiva and Krishna combined. For a while, that particular storefront served as the pretentious Southwestern restaurant which was where Johnny Glamore’s night club was on Saturday nights. I was rather fond of the Southwestern place because they served a surprisingly delicious BBQ chicken and ribs combo that was prefaced by a bowl full of bright blue tortilla chips. And, when the place was a Southwestern restaurant, I once chatted up this exquisite young waiter who was about to head out to Rio for a vacation.
“I love Rio! The men there are so young and beautiful and free! They will have sex with you at the drop of a hat!” the waiter enthused, waving his “Brazil on 40 Bucks A Day” tour book.
“Yes, well, Brazil is also the place where if you’re a homeless teenager, the cops drag you off into an alley and shoot you,” I replied. The waiter fell silent. “Here’s your dinner.” Was the only other thing he grunted to me for the rest of the evening.
Before turning into the well attended Margarita palace it is today, the restaurant had a brief outing as a sort of Male Hooters, which I heartily endorsed. I guess you could say that it’s still a Male Hooters, but the cuisine has changed from hamburgers to cheesey Mexican, a cuisine I loathe. I do not have much use for the restaurant now, as crowded with hot boys as it inevitably is, but they have a “two drinks for the price of one” policy that is so lucrative, all the bars up and down the street have been forced to offer similar bargains in order to keep their customers from defecting to the Margarita Bar. The exception, of course, is The Abbey, where they have men stationed by the bar holding axes so they can chop off your arm and your leg whenever you order one of the noxious Appletinis.
But to make a long story short, which is something I am sure you are all in favor of dear blog-a-licious blog, nowadays when you go to Mickeys, they are almost giving away booze. So when I order one gin and tonic, they give me a second automatically. And since I have made an effort to be kind to the ex-boyfriend of the porn star who works as a bartender there, I have to confess that he mixes em strong and gives me an occasional freebie (drink, that is). So it is not an uncommon thing for me to be four sails to the wind by nine o’clock whenever I go out there. Add to that the fact that Mickeys has a coterie of dancing go go boys in briefs and I fear that I must tell you that I make a damned fool out of myself. It is a fortunate thing, I think, that whenever I enter a bar, or, in fact, any gay situation, I become almost totally invisible, so no one pays any attention to me – except, perhaps for the strippers, who smile and leer at me whenever I slide a buck into their underwear in exchange for the chance to finger their asses.
It is odd: I have to admit that I have never really thought of myself as being the kind of perv who goes to strip bars and shoves dollar bills in stripper’s g-strings, but it is turning out that is precisely what I am. Is that revolting? Is that pathetic? I am not even sure what the allure of doing this is. It isn’t the simple desire to “cop a feel,” for, as you know, I am not all that sexually desperate as all that. I do all right.
I think it is more a matter of seeing how far I can go with my dollar. How far can I go to possess that man dancing on the box before he gently pushes away from me? How much liberty will he give me? For, as I have discovered, different strippers let you get away with different stuff, depending on their sleaziness, their low self esteem, whether they are truly gay or not, and whether they REALLY need more dollars. Last night, one tow headed blonde stripper almost shrieked when I put my hand on his ass.
“Okay! Okay! That’s enough!” he moaned, pushing away from me. About 15 minutes later, I came back up to him and he gulped and said, “Uhh, all right, you can rub it if you want.” So perhaps he was worried that he had been too uptight and that I was going to complain about him. By contrast, there was also at this club another stripper, a pint sized brunette boy, who was dancing in a sarang with a huge erection bouncing up and down inside it. I slipped my hand under his sarong and massaged his erection for about three minutes while he grabbed my shoulder and pushed down on me, his eyes closed. After he was done with his shift, he jumped off of the box and sat down next to me. I got to fondle him some more and he kept giving me hugs, as he whispered, “I like it when you touch me.” With him, I felt complicit in something more than simply my exploiting him. He was, in fact, getting off on it, too. And all for a dollar.
While drunkenly watching and pawing the strippers last night at Mickeys, I noticed the most intriguing thing. For while these boys had the most amazing, crackerjack young bodies – all curves and tight muscles and round pert butts – they all had the most hideous and ugly-looking faces. I am serious! They had these gorgeous, toned, and smooth bodies, oiled with Baby Oil or Cocoa Butter or something to make their skin supple. And yet, on each boy, their noses were beaky, their teeth were chipped and yellow, their eyes wandered in different directions. It was as if the guys had worked on every bit of their body that they could have – but couldn’t really do anything about the poor hands they’d been dealt in terms of their faces.
What is it that Howard Stern calls female strippers with a similar problem? Butterfaces, that’s what. And these boys were all, frankly, butt-his-faces. Their faces were the faces of hideous beasts. They looked like horses! In the play EQUUS, there is a scene in which a handsome, naked young man is seen – but he has a horse’s head for a head. These strippers were like that. They had perfect bodies, but monstrous heads of hideous ugliness. And they could dance around with their round, orb-like butts and bulging muscles all they wanted – it would not make up for the fact that God had given them double helpings of the Hot Body Bucket, but had passed them up on the pretty face department.
At the bar, I found myself standing next to an older gay couple – in their 50s, I’d say. Both of them were fairly plump. One was almost bald, except for a smattering of graying Jean Luc Picard side-skull fringe, which didn’t cover the tonsure-like bald spot atop his crown. The other fellow was dressed in a heavy golf shirt and baggy shorts, looking so “uncool” and non-LA it was almost breathtaking. You could tell from a glance that they were Provincial Gay Men, not at all from Hell A, and you also noticed that everyone else around them knew this as well. The bartenders were secretly spitting in their drinks and the dancing boys on the boxes were pulling faces and waggling their tongues every time the Provincial Gay Dorks turned their backs. Oh I am just kidding about that, of course.
I somehow found myself chatting with the couple, though. And they were really very nice, albeit queeny, and of that generation which you usually equate with piano bars or restaurants that serve chicken with odd glazes on top.
“Oh, we’re down from Bakersfield for the day!” lisped the plumper one of the pair. “We come down every Tuesday to watch the taping of WILL AND GRACE and then we come here to see the naked boys! Wooo hooo!” The plump gentleman whipped out a dollar bill and waved it at one of the horse-faced boys, waggling his tongue up and down.
“Oh, yeee-es,” added the balder gay man, his voice curving upwards like Charles Nelson Reilly in an episode of Match Game 75. “We dooooo love our Tuesdays out, don’t we, Julian!” The two men giggled and cackled. “Ohhhh! Nathan! Look at that boy there! I think he LIKES me! I’ll be right back!” And Julian waddled over to the dancing horse-faced boy and slipped a dollar bill into his briefs. Meanwhile, Nathan turned to the young Asian boy who was seated on his other side, and drunkenly started to massage the boy’s shoulders, while the boy himself closed his eyes and pressed back against the older man.
At this, I was assailed with a combination of emotions both contradictory and complex. Was I pleased at the display of two older men from the Provinces, out for the night, having a good time? Or was I disgusted by the behavior of a pair of bourgeois old goofs from nelly fagdom’s disreputable flyover middle class? Was I seeing my future, in a few short years? Or was I realizing that I am incapable of achieving the beige pleasures of even such a somewhat horrifying future? After all, it turns out that I am essentially incapable of forging a lasting connection with anyone, even an old troll. Shall I become a hideous middle aged goat pathetically shoving dollar bills into strippers’ g-strings? Or am I ALREADY one of those? Oh dear.
Well, as you can see, these are the deeply shallow thoughts that entertain me. And it’s just as well, for when I think about the real world, I just want to shriek. Between you and me, things are looking kind of dreary right now. I have been reading the tea leaves at work, and it’s clear that we are winding down to a fatal few days. I must confess that part of me is taking an almost cerebral interest in the whole phenomenon. How are they going to do it? Will it be a letter? Will I be called into my boss’s office to be given the final word from her? Will someone important from upstairs come downstairs to deliver the kibosh? Will it be some freaky deak from Human Resources? I really have no idea how things are done. But it sure should be fascinating, however it happens. And, of course, where shall I go afterwards? I am getting a nice payout in terms of severance, but will they try cheat me out of it? They could do it so easily. After all, I’m only relying on their largesse and their kindness to expect the payout.
We are also worried about my grandmother, who is currently in the hospital recuperating from surgery to her elderly colon. They’ve done this cancer surgery, and I am told it went well, but by all accounts grandmother is going to require some chemotherapy. It is frustrating for me, because people are telling me things, but I do not know whom to believe. I am hearing the story from my grandfather, who has been told the prognosis in upbeat language from the doctor. And that “optimistic” prognosis has been lightened even more in the translation from my grandfather to my mother and then to me. My mother made it seem as though my grandmother is having some delightful vacation, where colon surgery like a diet spa, and chemotherapy is no worse than having a mint julup at Costa del Sol.
For some reason, and I never have understood why this is, people in my family do not ever tell me the whole story of things. It’s like there has always been this long conspiracy to “protect” me from stuff. Thus I am always the last person to hear about any family disaster – and when I do, it’s always presented as this horrible big “fait accompli” which I am supposed to just say “oh” to. I have never totally understood why my family does this. It’s not as though it makes me LESS neurotic to be protected, either! Quite the contrary. I would say I become all the more focused and worried about stupid minor things when my relatives take it upon themselves to “protect” me from learning truthful things. It is irritating.
But, of course, this has nothing to do with my poor grandmother, who is quite understandably, terrified beyond all reason. I talked to her on the phone yesterday, and she sounded exceedingly frail and weak. You see, she’s had a life that is noticeably free of any medical problems whatsoever, so she is taking this suddenly physical malady remarkably hard. It is a terrible thing to realize that the body inevitably lets one down. It’s part of our contract with life, really, though: Some day, our pretty bodies shall fall apart and we’ll have to either deal with it or just die.
Speaking of death – this whole Terri Schiavo thing is just starting to irritate me. Can I just say, why won’t they just shut the hell up? What with this Terri Schiavo nonsense, and the ailing Pope, and that ridiculous woman who talked that killer who shot the judge into surrendering, and the Easter holiday, the country has fallen pray to what seems like a Perfect Storm of awful, sanctimonious, piety. Oh my lord – have you heard it all? It’s detestable! It’s like the Red States going amok with their endless moral shriekings and howlings.
Seriously, it’s not enough that the Right Wing took control over the country’s politics in the last election. Now they have to spend every moment pushing their hideous agendas in our faces. You’d think that basic good manners would reinforce the concept that it is not polite to gloat about being victorious -- and that the way to show that you are truly worthy of ruling is to be magnanimous towards those who have been defeated.
And, yet, that is simply not how the Social Conservatives are behaving. It’s seriously the most disturbing thing in the world. The Scolders of the Right truly think that Bush’s being elected is a mandate for all sorts of horrid things, such as meddling with the relationships of consensual adults, and outlawing one’s right to end one’s life with respect and dignity. We are truly seeing a sort of peculiarly fascistic imposition of beliefs on the minority here.
But right now it is all about Terri Schiavo. I am truly disgusted by the news coverage of all this. The media’s pandering to the Right is nothing short of stomach turning! I have never been so revolted. I think that part of it is that the mainstream (and cable) media are desperately trying to prove that, yes, they are also the networks of the Red States, so they are pandering to them with just the sort of stories that they wrongfully thing they would be interested in. It’s just so irritating and sanctimonious and disgusting.
Anyway, I have ranted enough for one day and I must go and gussie myself up so I can get fired on Friday. We shall talk again very soon!
