Episode 37: Day Without A Gay
Episode 37: Day Without A Gay
Mimi Schmir, one of the writers from "Grey's Anatomy"
So in the spirit of the holiday season, I found out that Wednesday was “Day Without A Gay.” I found this out while I was standing at the Troubadour nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, where I still live, though I do have these crazy moments when I think about pulling out a mid-life crisis card and moving to Hawaii. (I am seriously considering whether or not I could learn to surf. Or at the very least, whether a super hot, super young, though legal, surf instructor could teach me to do so.)
In any case, I had gone with this soon-to-be-divorced friend of mine to this fund-raiser thingy that was going to raise money for at risk kids and teach them to make videos. Now I am all for putting art back in the schools, and twice a year I take Mr. Handsome to make sandwiches for the women’s shelter, so I figured this event was right up my alley. The holidays can be a very lonely time in L.A. (well, anywhere, I imagine) and I was glad that in this era of economic deprivation people were still willing to give money to at risk youth of whom there are sadly, plenty in this neck of the proverbial woods. (Stuff like this makes me so relieved that Roo and Mr. Handsome are still young enough to be basically well adjusted, despite the obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious fuck-ups of their well intentioned, though messed up parents.)
It took a while to get to the club, since we had to leave our West Side comfort zone and actually venture east. We drove in the station wagon that used to belong to my friend’s wife. He gave his ex the fancy Beemer and took over the ripped up “family” car as his own.
When we got there, we pulled up to the Valet (Los Angeles, need I remind you) and there was the ubiquitous purple velvet rope in front of the old, wooden door. This club has been around forever, and lots of really famous singers have played there and subsequently vomited up their beer. Those days are long gone for me (I was never much of a beer vomit-er to begin with) but I found it kind of interesting looking at the young folk (that would be those cute guys under the age of thirty) and realizing that like-it-or-not, that would never again be me. I do have friends who still fancy themselves quite the club-goers, but I’m pretty sure they don’t look at themselves in the mirror before they put those leather pants on. (Rejuvaderm can only do so much, and even then, only tiny quantities are recommended.)
Once we’re inside, (and it’s dark in there, which makes me think that’s why my club going friends still go) my friend runs in to another guy we know. This guy’s had a few, so he’s touching the top of my friend’s fuzzy head, where the Mohawk shaved hair has started to grow back in. My friend (who’s also on the wagon) gets some kind of diet soda and not to be impolite, I get seltzer water with a beat up lime. Then we kind of stand around in the sawdust at the bar and make polite conversation about how hungry we are and whether or not the potato chips and pretzels that we see sitting in those small fake wooden plastic bowels have been purchased within the last fifty years. (I’m pretty sure bar food has a fairly significant half life, the idea being that most people eating it are so pickled by the time it enters their digestive systems that they are immune to being poisoned.)
The bar is populated by the usual collection of kids and plastic surgery devotees, another not-so-welcome reminder that any time I even think about going under the knife (I’m talking specifically about the face and boobs) that I better have another think coming. I mean, I know staying young is as much a state of mind as it is a state of body, but I also know that I never want to be that mom that all the other moms say stuff behind her back about, stuff like, “Didn’t you know she had her kids when she was over forty?!” (Which in my case is true, at least for one of them, but since when is that a crime?) Anyway, age be damned, because as evidenced by this one redhead I bumped in to, it’s important to note that even silicone doesn’t always defy gravity.
After a little while in the bar, my friend, who was tired of having his head rubbed both by people he knew and random strangers, suggested we go stand by the stage and wait for the music to begin. I mean, even with the divorce and all, he wasn’t that in to being pawed as though he was everyone’s property. (That’s something that happens when you split up. Kind of like when you’re pregnant and all of a sudden, for no discernable reason, your stomach is fair game.) I mean, he’s cute and all, and I know he enjoys a certain amount of attention, but he has kids at home and even though he always says he wants to sleep with a bunch of random prostitutes (he says this mostly, for obvious reasons, to annoy me) he really just wants someone in his corner. Don’t we all?
So here is where I admit that even though charity is a nice excuse, there was another reason I was here. KD Lang (she of the velvet pipes) was the headliner at this fundraising event, and even though she was preceded on the stage by cute little Mandy Moore, it was really KD that the crowd had come to see. There were probably a fair number of lesbians there, I don’t know, but I do know that my friend wasn’t getting as much attention as he’s used to. “I’m usually more of a chick magnet,” he muttered to me at one point and I tried to assure him that the chicks ignoring him didn’t imply anything about his age. Mandy played a bunch of her new songs with the band (a couple of cute guys who I could totally imagine going for in college) and she was very in to the whole thing and by and large it was enjoyable. I mean, she’s trying to change her image (something I totally understand), she doesn’t want to be the sweet young people pleaser any more and even though I’m practically twice her age I get it. (I should point out here that it was a Tuesday night, and going to clubs on Tuesdays, or any other weekday for that matter, it not my usual m.o. I mean I still have to get up for carpool.)
After Mandy finishes, a couple of roadie-like dudes clear the stage (also very cute, I might add) and then KD suddenly appears. She’s wearing these pants and a vest and is really solid in a reassuring way. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was a man. Now, I’d like to point out here that unlike a lot of my friends, I didn’t have much of a “gay phase” when I was in college. I may have thought about it here and there, but frankly, I always had a guy in bed taking up the room. One of my best friends, whose mom was actually this famous Sapphic poet (makes sense, I think) fell in love with this woman named Lily and moved her mattress onto Lily’s dorm room floor. They were together all through college but the last I heard, she had moved to Detroit, Michigan and married a man. I’d always assumed if I was a lesbian I’d be more of the lipstick kind, but it became quickly clear after the appearance of KD on the stage that I’d changed my mind.
“Wow,” my friend said in my ear, all surprised like — “She really looks like a dude, doesn’t she?” “Well, I guess,” I say, but what I’m really thinking is she has this amazing face that is kind of open and honest, like the kind of expression you find on a child. “She still married?” he says (a little too loudly, in my opinion) but the truth is, I’m wondering the same thing. I remember hearing a long time ago that she had married some woman in Canada but now I don’t see any ring on her finger. “Maybe she’s divorced,” I muse, wondering, even as I say it, what, in the case of a lesbian, that would actually mean.
And then she starts to sing. She has an otherworldly voice. I know you’ve heard that before, but I’m here to tell you it’s true. My friend’s jaw kind of drops and he stares at her with that look that guys get sometimes even though it’s usually after sex, and I have to laugh because she’s pretty butch and normally that wouldn’t be his way. But she’s singing that Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah,” and at that moment I’m pretty sure every woman in that room was going gay and every man was ready to have sex with her even if she was as burly as a bear. It was a transcendent moment, one of those experiences you have way more of when you’re in your twenties, or at least think you do, because the truth is you’re really not old enough to appreciate transcendence until you’ve had the dull, monotony of life happen too.
That’s when my friend leans over to me. (By the way, I may have forgot to mention that his name is Burger, because all he eats is meat and it has to be really rare). “You know, tomorrow is Day Without A Gay,” Burger tells me. “Day without a what?” I ask him, whispering, trying not to interrupt the magic. “Gays are supposed to stay home and not do anything, so people see what the world would be like without them,” he says. (I maybe should have mentioned that his wife left him for another woman, and he is still recovering.) “Well, a day without KD would be a day without music,” I say a little too loudly. “If she’s divorced I hope her partner knows.” And she’s in between songs and I guess kind of hears me ‘cause she kind of smiles and says, “Hallelujah,” and for a minute I feel like we’re on the same page of life and she totally gets what I mean.
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