that no one seemed to care about the quality of any of this, any measurable greatness. We were tiny people, but our tininess was at times formidable.
I rarely read my own work during these events and lost confidence in what I did bring to the microphone as soon as I rose to whatever stage was available that night.
Fifth reader: “I’m going to read … it’s this new poem. I think I’ve. It’s.”
I didn’t go far. Often jobless or between jobs, I assisted Chris in his slow accrual of art when I could, moved expensive things between his lavish homes, until finally that became too much as the steady stream of these objects, what I had thought I loved, rendered art a gray, administrative task, one devoid of feeling. After a friend introduced me to another “patron of the arts” in need of someone to help him write a collection of stories, I took up ghostwriting in addition to temp office work. I wrote for other people: the unpublished collection of short fiction; grants; ad copy; two science-fiction stories (both about mutant abortions) for an anonymous client, a pervy right-winger from Oklahoma, whose only encouragement was to “get more graphic re the details re the MUTANT ABORTION,” which I did, happily, all these alien guts bursting from women and men (in the much more complicated second story the narrative required that a cruel man be impregnated by a gentle, kind alien female, his rejection of their child being some kind of nonsensical statement on baby life as an issue of universal importance, and not strictly a “women’s issue”); and about thirty exactly eight-hundred-word introductions to policy papers for an NGO in Lower Manhattan. All of it amounted to an anti-poetry that made poetry better when I heard it.
We, and by we I mean everyone I knew then, poets and artists, nightlife people, itinerant fags and whoever else wandered between clubs at night in search of a social and chemical fix, used to dance at 59 Montrose Street in Bushwick where there was an illegal nightclub called the Spectrum on its first floor, in what looked like an old dance studio. I never knew what it was or had been. I only knew that someone named Gage, who was from San Francisco, ran it as a “platform” for queer performance and dance. Was that the word they used, platform? I can’t remember, but that was the word people often used to describe these alternative spaces, at least in the thinky, jargon-littered prose of the occasional writing that emerged about this side of New York, usually in arriviste art publications: a platform, to balance upon. What did we call it? Mostly, it was for dancing. It had no word.
From the nondescript entrance of the building, which you couldn’t queue in front of in case the police came by to break up the illegal bar, you followed a long hallway that opened at its midpoint into what passed for a bathroom, or at least the remnants of a bathroom, semi-flooded with piss and mud, a room that stank of those two fluids as they combined into a shit-colored estuary on the tile floor, with two ceramic artifacts to urinate into on either end of this quite literal water closet, both broken and perhaps once workable toilets, and then on to the larger room, where people danced. Rank with the strong smell of human musk, sweat, spilled beer, two of the room’s walls were mirrored, and covered with finger- and hand-prints from all the dancers who had been pressed up against the glass at some point in the middle of the night or who, suspended in a turbulent and self-reflexive high over some subjective vacuum, had pressed their faces to the glass and had, in that same high, traced their features with their fingers on the mirror in an attempt to reorient themselves upon the permanent axis of their faces. The glass was always condensed with sweat. Scratched, scuffed, it was a recombinant mirror where the stains of others overlaid one’s reflection.
You could smoke inside so everyone loved it, a rare place to do so under Bloomberg’s anti-smoking sanctions, and by everyone I mean radical faeries, non-gender-conforming performers, women and men of color, trans people, some artists, a few writers, loners, the ignored, poor, thrifty, otherwise-didn’t-fit, all of them cute or beautiful or strange, mostly strange, which itself represented a category of the beautiful more important than any other I knew then, and while the Spectrum was only open every other Saturday or so in the early days, in 2011 and 2012, that is, it ran the clock from ten p.m. to the afternoon the next day. I’d dance, get drunk, occasionally take ecstasy offered by strangers, do whatever with strangers, “whatever” being, for a long time, this operative performance of any number of listless actions, sexual or otherwise, which I would mostly forget because “whatever” usually occurred on the extreme end of some befogged blackout, the wobbly edges of any capable vision of “whatever” usually involving the confused closeness of bodies, mine and others’. There was nothing very romantic about this place, romantic in any downtown sense of a New York retrieved from its wilder past and reconstituted among a newly fashionable set. I liked it because it was near my apartment, I knew people who went every time it was open and who DJ’d there, and, importantly, it was very easy to find someone to take home.
I often met people on a torn couch near the bar.
(Eventually, this couch would disappear and a new wing of the club would open in the back, greatly enlarging the available space for hanging out as crowds grew larger by the mid-2010s. In the end, we crowded ourselves out—and the Spectrum closed, though a newer, but quite different version later materialized in Ridgewood, Queens a few years later. But we’re far from then right now. At this moment, let’s say it’s the very narrow moment right after Sandy and before I meet Helen Hunley Wright, the Spectrum is still very small, tight-knit, without much attention from the coming retinue of curators, gallerists, and European art tourists from Berlin on some kind of cocaine tour of how the other side lives, not so many straight people, and few if any pretensions to anything other than its own convenience as a place, or perhaps a platform, to dance and do what you want among others like you.
You, and by you I mean me, could also not dance: you could sit on a couch, smoke a cigarette, and wait for someone to talk to you and tell you what they wanted to do with you.)
A hot cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air, up near the paneled ceiling, and the room had grown stuffier as we clocked past three a.m. People, mostly shadows that assumed brief human form between rotating lights, had begun to undress. They stuffed neon mesh shirts, things hung together by plastic or leather straps, faded jeans, shorts, anything they were wearing into corners, beneath tables, wherever you could hide your clothes, and these piles began to accumulate like soft sculpture. I was already hoarse from the smoke and alcohol, a bit dizzied from a joint someone had passed me in the half-light, at least three bumps of cocaine, and my head rolled on my shoulders.
“Hi,” a boy said. He dropped onto the couch and wrapped his arm around my shoulders like he knew me. He was handsome, thin, a little tattered by whatever he had done that night, with faint gray rings around his hawkish eyes, and a long, ovular blotch of red skin where someone must have sucked on his pale neck.
“Hey,” I said.
“I think we’ve met before?” He was shirtless, and he tightened his modest chest muscles as we spoke, drunkenly admiring his skinny body, his long, brown hair hanging over his shoulders. He wasn’t someone I remembered, but I would have had we met.
I shook my head: “Maybe?”
“No, for sure.” He was barely audible over the bass of the speakers behind us. At the other end of the room, the DJ blared driving remixes of songs by artists I didn’t recognize into a pulsating throb that shook the walls and floor of the club. I shook, too. “Definitely did,” he insisted.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “My memory’s terrible.”
“I’m Zachary. Do you want to dance?” I said sure.
He escorted me to the dance floor a few feet away by hand. The Spectrum was close to capacity—whatever capacity was, since no one enforced any clear rules governing the space. Most had worked themselves into a heavy sweat that, in the un-air-conditioned hotbox of smoke, drugs, and dancing, soaked everything, flooded down into the world itself with the run-off of all these friends and strangers so that the only remedy to the near-unbearable heat was to take almost everything off, as Zachary did, and what that slippery world wanted me to do, too.
He pulled my shirt off, threw it into a corner behind the speaker system, and then shimmied out of his pants, into his briefs before trying to unbutton my jeans. He slid his fingers under