This Is Halloween

This weekend's incriminating photographs:


Me and Dave


Me and Kili masquerading.


Justin and Olivia


Dave and Jessica and Matty

At Opaline: Astro and Charlie (actin' a fool).

Night of the Ruined Condiment

Tuesday night Lisa Carver and Dame Darcey ruined ketchup for me forever. Let me explain:

By 6:45 I was on my third Stella. I should have been trying to think of a way to explain to Lisa why I wouldn’t be interviewing her for the Voice, but instead I was getting drunk and being distracted by cute boys with bad posture.

Jack (my date) and I were at KGB Bar for Lisa’s reading, which turned out to be a sort of variety show/performance art extravaganza. Instead of reading from her book like normal authors, Lisa has people act out certain scenes in each city she visits. One skit involved a potato peeler and Darcey (who later sang murder ballads and sea shanties) squirting an entire economy-sized bottle of ketchup onto the girl playing Lisa. I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m not exactly sure how that scene figures into the plot. The whole thing culminated with some girl peeing on a pizza.

We got to see the whole thing again later at Galapagos, plus some other musicians, magicians, and weirdos. There were girls hula hooping continuously throughout the whole party, and it gave me an idea: I’m going to teach myself how to strip while hula hooping. Jack said that if I can learn to do it by November 16th, I can be the entertainment at his birthday party.

Lisa kept coming up to us and asking why we weren’t making out yet, and I felt like a little kid who’s in trouble at school. My response would have been the same if asked why I’d squirted glue some girl’s desk. “I don’t know,” I said sheepishly, avoiding eye contact.

Then she turned on Jack: “What’s it feel like to have a 23 year old?” she asked. Jack’s 28. He’s also very quiet, which might mean he’s shy, but also might not.

Then Grant Stoddard came up and started talking to Lisa. I wanted to grab him and pick his brain and make him tell me how he had managed, when he was 23, to get not only a regular column, but also a job as an editor at Nerve. Of course, I also wanted to jump on him and stick my tongue in his mouth and my hand down his trousers. I ended up not doing either.

“There’s so much sexual tension!” Lisa said. “So many people are going to do it tonight. They haven’t done it yet. And they haven’t done it yet.” She pointed at her agent and one of the boys with bad posture, and then pointed at me and Jack. This woman is my hero. I’ve read about her manipulating her own and other people’s sex lives and now here she was, brazenly attempting to manipulate mine, and all I could do was giggle and gulp down Jack and Cokes.

Everyone was still covered in drying ketchup. It was sticky and smelly, like a barbecue that no one had cleaned up after. I was both in love with and disgusted by everyone around me. It wasn’t until I saw the agent and the bad posture boy drunkenly groping and two scruffy Williamsburg alt-fags kissing sweetly that I finally planted one on Jack. I told Lisa what I did on my way out, and she seemed very pleased.

When I got home, I threw away all the ketchup in my apartment.

Messages

Last night, after leaving Duvet, I left two messages for two different people.

The first was for Blue: “So, I just wanted to clarify: when I asked if you would like to do dinner sometime, I meant just you and me. Like, a date. If you’re interested, call me. If not, call me anyway, but pretend I never left this message.”

The second was for Ryland: “This is an official booty call. I would like to make out with you sometime this weekend. Call me.”

I wasn’t drunk, so I can’t even blame it on that. I was feeling reckless and bored and I needed to put a message in a bottle and throw it at someone’s window. I needed attention, I needed stimulation. Action, I feel, is always better than inaction. So rather than waiting around for them to make a move and trying to interpret signals that probably aren’t even there, I lit those little Molotov cocktails and pitched them right at the boys who, by all rights, should be vying for my attention. If I had known where either of them lived I might have been tempted to go banging on their doors.

This is the sort of bold, desperate behavior that I find incredibly romantic. The type of guy who goes out of his way and oversteps the bounds of rational, polite courtship is the type of guy for me. I want to live my life like in a romantic comedy, where intense emotions illicit extreme actions. Such benignly obsessive attempts at seduction should constitute pivotal moments in a person’s love life. Instead they’re just blips on the radar, and cringe worthy moments we try to forget or excuse with inebriation.

Of course, I haven’t heard from either Ryland or Blue. I’m sure they’re both freaked out or embarrassed for me or something and have chosen, predictably, to ignore the fact I ever called them. I’m erasing their numbers from my phone immediately.

Blue

In case you didn’t know, the way to my heart is through my weird, geeky obsessions. Case in point: I sort of fell for a guy at 5 a.m. in a diner when he started singing an old Stevie Nicks song to me.

Blue is from South Carolina. I find it kind of remarkable that his name isn’t short for something awful like Bluford. He has an accent and he thinks that maybe God made some people gay so that they could adopt all the orphans in the world. On the phone, he calls people “Brotha.”

Dave says he thinks Blue likes me and I can see how people might get that impression. Whenever I see Blue I feel like he’s flirting with me. But he flirts with everyone, or at least makes them think he’s flirting with them. Everyone he meets, he gets their phone number. He’s troublingly charming, and everyone I know who knows him seems to have a crush on him.

It’s also troubling when he says things like this regarding his sexuality: “I don’t know what I am. I’m bi.”

I don’t mind bisexual guys. Actually, I prefer them. But Blue does not strike me as the wild, sexually ambiguous type. He has all the markings of a fresh out of the closet, guilt-ridden Christian boy, and who wants to deal with that?

Then, on Friday night, we were at a diner, debating whether or not to split a chocolate egg cream (neither of us had ever had one) and “Leather and Lace” came on the radio. I sighed like a little girl. Loving a song is like having your heart broken a lot. Every time you hear it its like little layers of your heart get peeled away and it hurts a little, but also feels amazing.

“Is this your song?” Blue asked. “I love this song. You sing the Stevie part and I’ll sing the Don Henley part.”

I didn’t get home until 6:30 in the morning, but I smiled the whole way there.

JT LeRoy

If you haven't read New York Magazine's story on JT LeRoy, go do it now!

Who Is The Real JT LeRoy?

I'm not sure what to think. I'm fascinated. I've read everything ever published under the name "JT LeRoy" and I've loved most of it. I've read about the various conspiracy theories. I've heard that people think he might be Dennis Cooper or Lou Reed or even a group of the celebrities and literati he surrounds himself with. Whoever JT LeRoy really is, they are a PR genius. The mystery is almost definitely more interesting than the truth could possibly be. It adds a disturbing twist to an already twisted and disturbing story. His next novel is gonna sell bazillions!