Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [31]
Apparently the idea of conversation was not a fetish that interested anyone, as it was almost impossible to hear even a shouting human voice in the midst of the vibrating roar. “What are you supposed to be?” I tried yelling at a white-haired man in his sixties dressed in a mysterious robe-and-jockstrap ensemble topped by an asymmetrical crown.
“What?”
“WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO BE?”
“KING NEPTUNE! I HAVE A FISH FETISH!” he screamed back, dangling a fishing line with a Caucasian-colored latex dildo hooked onto it in front of my face. Unable to think of a witty retort of any kind, I smiled, nodded, and moved on, wondering whether his outfit had started with the dildo or the crown.
Talking was also out of the question for the vaguely human creature who lay on the floor breathing through a plastic strawlike tube, trapped between layers of form-fitted black latex sheeting stretched across a rectangular frame. He or she looked like an oversized, poorly labeled liverwurst packaged for travel to a distant planet. I had stumbled into the latex room. Against one wall was a platform stage on which latex-clad women, like shiny intergalactic girlfriends of the Fantastic Four, were cavorting and striking threatening poses. Nevertheless the full-enclosure vacuum bed on which liverwurst person was stretched and shrink-wrapped into complete immobility seemed to be a bigger draw than the sexy ladies. A crowd of people stood around, staring quietly at this unidentifiably gendered person trapped like a gnat in a spiderweb. For a childhood asthma sufferer like myself, something about seeing the restricted oxygen supply being meted out by the tube was so unnerving that I stumbled backward into a light switch and accidentally turned on all the lights in the room. “Lights on” was definitely a fetish no one here seemed to like in the least.
Beating a hasty retreat back to the crowded hallway, I tripped forward into a tall, thin man in a fifteenth-century brocaded French cavalry uniform with knee-high boots, brandishing a riding crop. He smiled. It was my friend the chef, having the time of his life. “What are you so freaked about?” he shouted, reading the anxiety on my face. “Ninety-nine percent of the people here are not in the least bit dangerous. You want to know who is dangerous here? See those four jocks in T-shirts and jeans over there who probably snuck in?”
“How do you know they snuck in?” I asked him.
“Well, they could never have gotten past security in those clothes,” he replied. “They are the kind of guys who scare me. The straight ones. They might get drunk and hurt somebody.”
By now, both floors of the place were filled with wall-to-wall revelers. Each room had been transformed into a seething holding pen for the extras from a James Ensor painting. As the hour grew later, the crowds kept getting bigger and bigger, until the whole place was a simmering, pulsating petri dish of human eccentricity … as if Hieronymus Bosch had thrown a party in which only the species with the most aberrant mating habits were permitted to attend: only the frigate birds, the bat-eating centipedes, the night-swimming scorpions, the cannibalistic, sexually doomed praying mantises. And as befits nature at its strangest, every interaction came complete with an elaborately staged and carefully choreographed tango. Leave it to humans to take something as basic as courtship rites and add details so complicated that they required the invention, manufacture, and international distribution of polyvinyl chloride.
I had begun the evening with every intention of maintaining a spirit of amused journalistic tolerance. I considered myself a graduate of Basic Freak Culture 101, having studied in both Los Angeles