It begins with a bus ride. Megabus. MEGABUS. Four and a half hours of sitting still in near silence sounds to me like a purgatorial punishment, unless of course, you have your electric guitar and an unquenchable thirst for practicing. Time flies when you are annoying the Asian tourists sitting in front of you by repeating scale patterns for hours on end. I arrive at 10:45 PM. They did not love me long time. I am greeted by a tall, beautiful, stylish blonde wearing coal eye shadow and a brown leather jacket. Her name is Stephanie and she is the reason why I am on this trip. I may explain more about that in another blog, but on with the chlorophyll. She helps me grab some of my luggage and we head to her car where I meet her roomate, Avish, think Asis Ansari meets Robert Downey Jr., and her friend Bryan, equal parts Paul Rudd and Matthew Mcconaughey. We begin what will be one of the most interesting nights of my life.
The first club we go to was called "Nine". A burly, fourty-something man stands guard at the door to what looks like John Wayne Gacey's basement, checks our ID's and we descend into a darkened rectangular dance floor pulsing with rotating club lights decorated with a small bar on the right and a DJ room in the back (which had about as many people as were on the dance floor). I have never been to any bar or club in NY before, so at some point between watching an obese pirate girl doing splits on the floor or the not-sure-of-sexual-preference black guy with a bull ring and a turquoise mohawk grinding himself on one of the stripper poles, scantily clad in a one-piece spandex suit, I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. This is a sharp contrast from the usual Bud Light drinking, football watching bars adorning the Southern Maryland area. It seems inhibitions are something people use as toilet paper here in the big city. Like soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, Avish began sending wave after wave of drinks our way and party time had been initiated.
After an hour or so, we relocated to a place called R-Bar. After Avish schmoozed us past the leather clad, feather wearing "hostess" into the place for half price, no amount of psychological training could have prepared me for what I was about to see.
It went something like this:
A sheek bar, decked out in red and black, looking like something from a scene in the Matrix,
a World War II-based softcore porn playing on all the TV's, middle aged women covered in brightly-colored feather boas, one wearing nothing but star-shaped pasties (she could have used a few weeks of Zumba if she was going to go shirtless...just sayin), an Annie Lennox look-alike contorting herself atop the bar wearing nothing but a thong and a leather strap for a top (I'm pretty sure she actually does Zumba), a man in a beautifully self-made costume who looked like a male Queen Amidala from Star Wars Episode I - his name was King Vulcanus and was the host of this crazy feather-themed bar party.
See!? Male Queen Amidala, right?
....oh yeah, and men walking around in what looked like jewel studded jock straps (and nothing else). At some point in the night, I noticed a homeless man sleeping next to the bar, all wrapped up in blankets. I thought to myself, "oh wow, what a sweet thing to do; to house a homeless man overnight on a cold New York night like this. But holy crap it must be hard to sleep with this window shattering house music blasting all night." As I'm watching this homeless man lay there with a smile on his face, dreaming of who knows what, I witness two women in high heels step on him and begin stomping all over his chest and groin. I immediately go to the bar tender and inform him that evil women are stomping on the sleeping homeless man. He says "It's ok, he wants them to"....Hu...mu....na? Then I noticed, it wasn't blankets he was wrapped up in, it was a carpet, and next to him was a sign that read STAND ON ME. He was a fetishist, and apparently his thing was being walked on. "Well, that's new." So was my first night ever in New York City, the land of the free and the home of the strange. But I honestly think strange is better than inhibited and miserable, so more power to them.
I made sure to hold on to Stephanie's arm very tightly for the rest of the night, but despite the weirdness, it's still a beautiful place.
