So, I go to this party at an art gallery called White Flag. It’s about nine o’clock and the place is fairly empty and there’s no one there I know, since it’s close to my house I figure I’ll go to the party at my place for a minute and then go back later. There’s a hot tub at this party, so I figure I’ll grab some trunks and a towel and come back at get my 20 bucks worth. I get back just as Andy, Len & Sarah are getting there, so at least I’ll know somebody. Of course I go straight to the hot tub, which makes keeping up with the people there that I know impossible. I don’t know any of my fellow hot tubbers, so in spite of my shyness I just go up to the cutest chick and say, “You look really familiar.” Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this girl before. She looks familiar cause she looks a lot like Fetish Diva Midori whom I had a well documented obsession with. Anyway, she gives me this serious look and says “You look really familiar too.” I ask her if she goes to Wesley Fordyce’s parties. It’s a safe bet since pretty much everyone there goes to Wesley’s parties. She says, “Oh, that’s where I know you from.” (I will later find out that she moved to Hungary right around the time I met Wesley, so this is highly unlikely.) Her name is Lynnette and she’s an artist. She’s wearing a red t-shirt with Gerald Ford’s face ironed on it. She introduces me to her friend Melanie who’s wearing a beret and a matching t-shirt with Saddam Hussein’s face on it. They explain that they’re doing a dead celebrity triptych and they ask me to be James Brown. I say yes and they give me a red t-shirt with James Brown’s face on it. So now I’m in a hot tub with a James Brown t-shirt on, so me and this really drunk guy starts doing the Eddie Murphy “James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub Party” sketch from Saturday Night Live.
Above the hot tub they’re projecting a movie, The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster and it’s fucking with me a little bit cause this was one of my dad’s favorite movies and he and my mom are literally the only people who’ve ever mentioned it to me.
random access memory: Once when I was a little kid, my Dad came to pick me up from my mom’s for the weekend and he was drunk off his ass. When my mom saw him and asked him how he thought he was going to drive in his condition, he used Burt Lancaster’s catch phrase form the movie and said, “I’m going to swim home.” And then for some ungodly reason my mom let me get into a car with him and luckily we weren’t killed.
So Jenna Bauer shows with chocolate for all the people in the hot tub. The drunk guy whose name I didn’t catch asks if I want some chocolate and in keeping with the Eddie Murphy theme of the evening, I ask, “sexual chocolate?” “Sexy Chocolate!” “Sexy Chocolate!” Yeah, I’m an idiot.
I get out of the hot tub just before midnight, and lacking someone to kiss, I start text messaging Happy New Year to people. I manage to miss Byron Kerman’s performance which had been the whole reason for me being there, but saw people playing in the remnants of his aluminum can installation, kicking cans at each other, so jump in to the pile of cans and start Russian kick dancing for as long as my knees can stand it.
Caryn calls me shortly after midnight and I go outside to talk to her. Just as I’m walking out the door two fire trucks with sirens blazing pull up outside the gallery and about six firemen run in with pick axes. Everyone outside is looking at each other dumbfounded, and some guy looks at me as says, “Dude, I just came out of there. What the fuck just happened?” Apparently the smoke machines set off a fire alarm.
So I’m outside looking at the fireworks from downtown in front of two fire trucks and a small crowd of people in what looks like the last scene from Die Hard or something. I decided right then and there this was probably the strangest New Years Eve of my life, and this was before I went to the 1AM yoga class at Marbles.
What a great story.
The Swimmer was one of the most abstract movies I have ever seen.
My friend Judith was at Marbles for six hours on New Year’s Day.