Half Empty (20 page)

The dungeon master is leaning against his restraining device, a St. Andrew’s Cross: a simple wooden structure of two large X’s, attached at the top like a sawhorse. He is eating some deli sushi from a clear plastic clamshell, but when he’s done, look out! This
is clearly the dinner break. A sexy angel and a sexy devil have to put down their takeout containers to have their sexy photo taken. Their mouths are still full, but at least they stop chewing for the picture.

The booths are all still open for business, but the space has been spruced up with an evening look, hung with large black-and-white-striped inflatable shapes: crescents, teardrops, and gourd-like biomorphic things. Three-dimensional and illuminated from the inside, they are beautiful and Venetian and playful and elegant, and they do indeed depend like brilliant jewels in the darkened air of the rafters. But at only seven in number, they might as well be a pair of cuff links decorating a stadium. There would need to be, at minimum, five times as many for them to even register. Similarly the acrobats, a woman flanked by two shirtless men in jeans, are as inconsequential as strips of flypaper. They move with the slowness of eucalyptus-drunk koalas, striking the occasional artful pose. One guy hangs by his ankles for about thirty seconds, while the other man seems to have given up before he has even begun and is just sitting twenty feet in the air. Perched above us for all to see, they act like a windsock, forecasting the conditions down on the floor. Tonight’s weather: boring.

On the main stage, Violet Blue is performing a slinky dance in a black dress and feather boa to an all-brass version of the old Peggy Lee hit “Why Don’t You Do Right?” She strips down to the boa and panties and garters, briefly flashing her small and natural-looking breasts. I understand why she has to limit her routine to these Olde-Timey, hoochy-koochy moves, disallowed as she is to be naked in public. But I don’t get why people who have seen Violet Blue perform the most unbridled sexual deeds are settling for this Vegas-style all-you-can-eat-salad-bar floor show. Perhaps the thrill lies in the very incongruity of Violet Blue herself.
She doesn’t exude even the faintest whiff of sluttiness,
especially
as she gyrates the twin kidney beans of her tiny ass.

Tera Patrick, the undisputed star of the whole thing, also strips for the crowd. Occasionally she will stop and cock a hand to her ear in an “I can’t hear you” gesture. The crowd—about seventy people—cheers. Her fake breasts are mathematically perfect circles. They mesmerize the men in some preverbal way, like newborns who see the archetypal configuration of facial features in an electrical outlet.

The emcee appears onstage: “Now comes the time in the evening that we call Lesbian First Kiss. Is there a girl in the audience who’s never kissed another girl?”

Ah yes, the “lesbian kiss,” one of the building blocks of straight porn. Three women from the audience volunteer. One is a Yale scholar in bioethics, another is a botanist studying the rapidly disappearing Belizean rain forest, and amazingly enough, the third works for an NGO trying to bring potable water to sub-Saharan Africa. Just kidding. There is Goth Girl in torn black hose, Belly Dancer in a gold brocade bra and harem pants, and Platinum Blonde in revealing white satin. Their kisses are gestural and disingenuous, all open-mouthed fluttering of tongue against tongue.

Just behind the stage is the VIP area, replete with such extra-ritzy accoutrements as folding chairs and inflatable loungers. A mandala of cheese slices has been picked over and is curling up at the edges. On a little platform, a pasha ties up Belly Dancer. Her descent into turpitude has been quick; from first lesbian kiss to seraglio prisoner in just ten minutes. He is a tentative and unpracticed despot. The process is taking too long, the methodical steps and knots requiring such a docile and unmoving victim, that it renders the entire need for restraint moot. It is as gripping as watching someone make pierogies. Standing
beside me is a Viking, his Nordic-marauder realness belied by Coke-bottle glasses. Outfitted in a helmet with plastic horns and a brown cape made from his plush fur bedspread, the years since his
Star Wars
–themed bar mitzvah melt away as he takes in the proceedings with a face of innocent delight. Today, he is truly a man.

People paid an extra forty dollars to get back here, where approximately nothing extra is going on. Walking back into the general area, I see a man looking as longingly as Moses must have gazed at the Promised Land he was forbidden from entering. I quickly disabuse him, telling him he’s missing nothing, that it would be like blowing all his frequent-flier miles on a first-class upgrade to Grand Rapids, but he is having none of it.
Somewhere, somebody
is having a sexy, fun time that he cannot see. I know just how he feels.

Midnight. What should be the height of the ball. A
Moulin Rouge
spoof up onstage is an amateurish, unsynchronized cancan. At the dungeon, a sleepy torturer desultorily flicks his horsetail whip on the back of his victim, shooing away imaginary flies. She is tied up like a piñata. A man at the side of the stage is talking to her and joking and then tickles her under the chin repeatedly. Tied up as she is, she is powerless to stop him—which is, I guess, kind of the point of a dungeon—but her official tormentor will not brook any unsolicited harassment.

“Dude, leave her alone, I’m serious,” he says.

One summer, while in college, I worked on a chart review of schizophrenics, amassing data on first onset of disease, nature of each episode, adherence to medication protocols, etc. What never failed to astonish me was how the patients, people who
had supposedly been cut loose from the moorings of rational human behavior, were all getting messages transmitted from the radio or television directly into their brains, or their metal fillings were telling them to stand outside the Israeli embassy in their underpants. They all started to look like conventional strivers in some homogeneous psychotic suburb. Voices in the refrigerator? Get in line.

Things seem similarly canned and derivative here at the ball. I see the same white pleather nurse’s outfit over and over again. What
is
this fascination with nurses? I owe my very life to nurses, for sure, but has no one ever been woken up out of sleep in the hospital only to then be given a sleeping pill? Or had their IV tubing back up with blood? Or had a catheter put in—and then, dear God in heaven above—taken out? A Joe Pesci type stands in motorcycle boots and leather codpiece. One of the few men here in costume, he looks mildly confused, as though he’d been chloroformed, stripped, and dropped off. Holding his bundled street clothes under one arm, his car keys glinting in his fist, kind of ruins the effect, but God love him for trying. It’s hard to ignite a sense of collective passion in a crowd where the nearest person is twelve feet away and where only a quarter of the people are dressed up. Even the sexiest of getups is powerless when outnumbered three-to-one by a boner-quashing sea of Dockers, or the bespectacled Bill Gates minus the billions in his molded white plastic George Lucas stormtrooper costume. People seem bored. They barely register the sword-swallower doing his bit to inject some neo-vaudevillian sideshow sordor into the proceedings, and they perk right down with the act that follows him: a troupe lip-synching the numbers from
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, a film released before most of the performers were born. Moreover, the material’s mid-’70s tolerance and polymorphous
perversity are actually a little gay for this crowd. “Wasn’t that great? You can see it a thousand times, and even on the thousand and first, it’s still just great,” the emcee praises backhandedly.

Thomas Dolby takes the stage at close to 1:00
AM
dressed in WWI flying-ace gear—goggles, headphones, double-breasted olive-drab trench coat. He is putting on a hell of a show, but for a skeleton crew of twenty people. Here’s what I do not see in all my time at Pier 94: vomit, major drunkenness of any kind, a fight, a couple going at it, anything resembling an erection, clothed or naked. At 1:30, a doughy, shirtless boy in khakis is being worked over by two dominatrices up on a small stage, but their torments are of the gnat-like schoolyard “got’cher nose” variety. The place lacks that up-too-late spirit of abandon, the grand erotic gesture that one will doubtless regret in the morning but which one does anyway.

If I stay any longer, I will be the only one left and they’ll probably make me help clean up. I catch a cab on Twelfth Avenue and head home.

I have always tried to be the kind of New Yorker who can simultaneously decry the hideous corporate annexation of the city without getting misty-eyed over a time when an underage runaway girl could abase herself for a bunch of leering patrons in a Times Square peep show. I’ll admit that it saddened me when I first heard that New York had to import something like the ball to get its groove back. Had we collectively become such a bunch of super-egotistical milquetoasts that we were looking to Northern Californians to be our wizards of id? We seem to be at an age, both personal and historical, where sex can only answer for so much. As unimpeachably true as a statement like “Make love, not war” may be, it also feels quaint, the reductive naïveté
of a bygone world. Even Perry Mann, who founded the ball back in 1979, has taken a break from having sex for the last two years and, although born Jewish, has become a regular churchgoer, too. “I’ve had threesomes, foursomes, orgies, and I’ve stepped back. It’s interesting. I look at people and things in a different light.”

Many are the tears of grief—there are those who might even say the majority—that fall for no one but the one who is shedding them. A literary agent I knew, his AIDS-related symptoms escalating daily, decided to retire from the business and make a graceful exit before his final reckoning. He called up his clients to tell them he was, in essence, dying, and one of his writers, his eardrums barely done trembling from the sound waves of this news, responded with an immediate and lachrymose, “But who’s going to represent
me?
” Would that this was even fractionally as aberrant as it is appalling. At the memorial service of
another
literary agent, a giantess in her field, one of her stars—a mystifyingly, wildly successful children’s book author with a penchant for neo-feminist retellings of fairy tales and a cloying, breathless prose style, given to phrases like, “
O, but how she did run like the wind!
” and “
stealing out into the darkling night with naught but a loaf of wheaten bread and a flagon of ginger beer
”—found it charming to tell the assembled crowd that her six-year-old granddaughter, upon hearing of the death, responded with a wailed, “But she was going to be
my
agent!” I kept these cautionary tales in mind when I made my way to Beth Israel Medical Center to visit Del.

Del had been my therapist. His efforts in my behalf were Herculean; he earned every dollar I ever paid him. I had been a chilly
and resistant analysand from the start, although I stayed with him for ten years. I once admitted to a woman at a dinner party that I had never once cried in therapy.

“Never?” she asked, astonished. “Your therapist is no good.”

“No, my therapist is very good, but I’m better,” I joked.

That I was ever able to extricate myself from my day job and become a writer was largely thanks to Del. The debt I owed him was unpayable. Even so, when I finally quit, the thought that I might never see him again was only mildly troubling. The very notion of post-treatment contact struck me as inappropriate. Having grown up surrounded by psychiatrists, I lack that general curiosity people seem to have about shrinks, or their own shrinks, at least. From a very young age, I can recall being out in public, and seeing my father stop suddenly, or if we were sitting at a table, subtly turn his back to the restaurant and face us, an attempt to not be seen by a patient. Sometimes it was unavoidable and an efficient hello might be exchanged, but we knew, my siblings and I—notwithstanding the eager smiles and eyes that raked over us like searchlights—that we would not be introduced. These were not social interactions, and any questions we might have had would emphatically not be entertained, although I can’t recall having any. Chalk it up to time and place, the 1960s and early ’70s in Canada, where a British reserve still overlaid society. Things were different in New York, I have been told. The membrane between shrink and patient was more permeable. That still seems to be the case. Once, at a birthday party for a friend, her former psychiatrist got up and sang a Joni Mitchell song to all assembled. Putting aside the romantic declaration of the lyrics, “I want to knit you a sweater, Wanna
write you a love letter!
” (appalled italics my own), it just seemed improper.

I could never really get with the looser program. There were aspects of my relationship with Del that played out in the usual
transferential manner—the craving for his approval, the briefest flashes of displaced anger on my part—but that classic desire for intimacy didn’t really come up for me. I didn’t hunger for details of Del. I was never moved to Google him (or as we used to call it back in 1989 when I started treatment, “look him up in the phone book”). I gleaned things about him over the years without trying: he was from Omaha; he had a Jewish father and had been raised in a Jewish household, but had seen fit to formally convert in adulthood (I translated the Hebrew of a rabbinical document he showed me); he had been a practicing Buddhist for years. I even found myself marching behind him one year during Gay Pride (that was not a bombshell; I had gone looking for a gay therapist from the beginning). He looked back and smiled. There was no internal flutter, like when as a child I would see a beloved teacher beyond the confines of the classroom. I didn’t even take the opportunity to see who he was marching with. The moment seemed nothing more than ripe for a joke. “It’s my shrink,” I said to my friends. “Quick! Knock me to the ground and pee on me!”

Not long before we decided to terminate—no doubt exhausted by years’ worth of pulling teeth and scoping around for some last-ditch tactic to crack me wider than I’d theretofore allowed—Del started to employ that old reporter’s trick of disclosing things about himself in hopes that I might finally, monkey-like, proffer confessions of my own. With a defiant regularity, he began co-opting our conversations. He extolled the benefits of acupressure and how it cured a bowel obstruction he’d had
(ick)
. He mentioned a recent trip to Cuba and how beautiful the men were, although “We figured they were mostly hustlers,” he added (I did not inquire who the “we” was). Once, when I was leaving, he even told me that my blue shirt was doing “wonderful” things for my eyes. All to no avail. Finally, he stopped me one
day mid-rant about being broke. “David, I’m between a rock and hard place here. I hear and understand your anxiety about money, but we have something like seven sessions left and we have to at least talk about your leaving.”