Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [33]
This time I was wildly relieved to rejoin the pulsating carnavale-like throb of the million-odd tribe members out in the hall, as I made my way back toward the stairs, past young nude men dressed only in chaps, past the old geezers in G-strings (where oh where do they get all that confidence?), past a bare-chested guy with a disco ball on his head, arm in arm with his partner, a guy dressed only in a truss. I pushed onward, onward toward the main exit, past the woman in the Little Miss Muffet outfit who looked like Judy Tenuta but wasn’t. Past the woman in the rubber dress who looked like Margaret Cho and was. (“Hi, Margaret!” “Whaat?” “I said, ‘HI, MARGARET!’ ” “Hi, Merrill! What did you say? I can’t hear you!”) Onward past dozens and dozens of women in shiny PVC separates with their grommeted, spiky-rubber-and-leather-clad pals, all of them out for an evening of hotness, extreme foot pain, and photo-opportunity kissing.
Look—there’s a man with a whip and a bridle and a full-body harness that is meant as some kind of a pony getup! And right next to him is a woman with a broom and a dustpan! Some sort of anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive thing? Finally a weird fetish that I do understand. Oh wait … she’s actually cleaning up.
And so, at one o’clock in the morning, I said goodbye to the Fetish Ball, knowing it was not even close to being over, relieved to feel the fresh air outside the building and so happy to get back into my car that I almost cried. My body continued vibrating and buzzing like an electric razor as I decompressed on the drive back home, even as I marveled at the sheer madness, absurdity, and creativity of my species, the only creatures on the planet that do anything remotely this preposterous. We, the humans, who contemplate dark matter for our work and then, for our relaxation, want to be immobilized by latex, tickled with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and fed our air through a tiny tube. No imaginary life on any theoretical other planet could be any odder or more full of strange details than this. Maybe each and every male bowerbird attracts a mate by decorating his nest with an individually chosen assortment of beautiful berries, flowers, shiny pebbles, and insect wings, like an ornithological equivalent of a Las Vegas hotelier; but name another creature who volunteers to wear a bridle, a harness, and a horse tail and who also isn’t in any way, shape, or form a horse!
As I merged onto the freeway and left Hollywood in my exhaust, I felt like I always do at the end of a vacation: happy to have gained more perspective, but stressed. And glad that I lived somewhere else.
When I Was Jack Kerouac
BY EIGHTH GRADE, AT NORTH MIAMI JUNIOR HIGH, I WAS under the impression that I was a made man. I had just been inducted into a secret sorority run by my many best friends: a group of clothing-label-obsessed girls who all lived in beautiful homes that were right on the water. We were thirteen and only too aware that spending seven hours a day together at school and then talking to each other on the phone for a few more hours at night offered barely enough time to discuss and analyze how many pairs of Pappagallo shoes each of us had.
Pappagallo shoes were, for us, many things: a wardrobe anchoring point, a yardstick of fashion savvy, a sought-after collectible, a weekend shopping destination. In our group, my personal supply fell embarrassingly short. I had only two pairs, both patent leather slip-ons. I was unable to raise my total because my mother didn’t like the idea of a bunch of eighth-grade girls telling her what kind of shoes she ought to be buying for her kid. She preferred to shop at Pixx Shoes for Less, where we could buy