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.