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vodkatea in West LA
Saturday, September 30 2000
For much of the day, I stayed at Kim's house working on her Bathtubgirl.com website. At around lunch I began playing around with iMovie on Kim's iMac. Using this software it was relatively easy to stitch together clips and apply familiar-looking video transitions. It was so easy, in fact, that I think Kim will have no trouble doing it herself. The raw video she has is of high quality (shot by Oni, a former Dr. Susan Block cameraman), so, jaded as I am, I'm fairly certain Bathtubgirl Productions, Inc. will eventually produce something worth viewing.
When Kim finally took me home, I took a long nap.
Upon awaking, I found that my housemate John (who I hadn't seen since Thursday) had also been napping all afternoon. At this point in our lives we're both morning people who tire early in the evening, but because of our respective naps, we were unusually wide awake even as night fell. Yet there didn't seem to be any way to apply our energy. It's not like either of us is particularly social.
John played some loud Velvet Underground with the muted teevee on while I casually surfed the web on the downstairs computer. The music was so loud I eventually fled upstairs to my room to collect my thoughts.
Later, John and I were hanging out together, both of us sipping vodkatea. It was John's first experience with my drink of choice, and he claimed to be enjoying it. I told him that my aspiration was to popularize vodkatea and have it sweep the nation, and then capitalize on my ownership of the vodkatea domain name. I went on to explain that the way to get the ball rolling on the new vodkatea craze was to go into bars and order it, and maybe get a few hot chicks (celebrities, if possible) to order it too.
About this time Fernando showed up with one of his friends, a tall thin young woman named Catherine. She wasn't Fernando's girlfriend, and this wasn't, as I first suspected, a date. The plan, we learned, was to meet up with some of Catherine's friends at a bar in Santa Monica called The Westend. "It'll be great," Catherine assured us, "It's 80's night!" Oh brother, 80s night, what an original theme for a Saturday night! But it wasn't like I had an alternative plan.
John's exercise partner Chun (formerly a big-shot producer at MTV, now a big-shot producer at an agressive new Valley Dot Com) showed up. John and I introduced everybody to my invention, vodkatea. They all acted as though it was good, but I didn't see anybody sucking the teabags (something I always do when I finish a glass of vodkatea). When we were all done drinking and had put on out shoes, we piled into two cars and drove down to 80's night at The Westend, which is at the intersection of 5th and Arizona.
Ah, the Westend. What's to say about the Westend? The light was low, there were smoke machines and plenty of white people dancing to the early-80s white boy music. The tunes were the sort of songs people like to remember from the 80s, not necessarily the ones that received any airplay. I don't remember the Smiths or the Psychedelic Furs being on the radio all that often, but I sure remember "I Wanna Know What Love Is, I Want You To Show Me."
I hadn't expected to go out tonight, so of course I hadn't brought any cash. Fernando had paid my $10 cover charge. I tried to make it up for everybody, so I bought a round of drinks at the bar, but it turned out that the bar where I was hanging out was cash-only. This sent me in search of an elusive cash machine in the bar. All these complications, all these pratfalls and traps placed in my path to social acceptance!
Surprisingly, a live band had been booked for the evening. They were sort of a Swiss Army Knife of 80s tunes, equipped with early-80s glam-mullet wigs and able to perform everything from "Raspberry Beret" to "Our House in the Middle of Our Street."
Fernando was unusually energized and kept cajoling us into going out on the dance floor to dance. It was fun, in a way, but for someone like me who can remember dancing to this music back when it wasn't kitschy-cool, I found myself wondering what sort of evening I'd be having if I had more say-so in how I spent it.
Eventually John and Chun announced they'd be going to another bar called Renee's only about a block away. Since I was the only one carrying the key to the condo, I agreed to tag along, leaving Fernando and Catherine at 80's night.
On the walk to Renee's, Chun chided John for Catherine's apparent interest expressed on the dance floor. She'd evidently been "rubbing up against" John to an extent he felt he needed to discuss. Chun joked that he'd be getting a "booty knock" later tonight. I'd never heard this term before, but evidently it's something like a "booty call."
Renee's was yet another ho-hum Santa Monica bar, though it bore such a strong stench of vomit that it demanded a period of olfactory acclimation. Chun, John and I sat in a nearly-deserted back room and chatted about this and that, particularly the needling social brilliance of John's brother Joe, whom I've only met once (the day John checked out the condo and decided to live with me). I'd had such a strongly positive immediate impression of Joe that I'd agreed to John's moving in without bothering to check his credit or references.
Later we were rejoined by Catherine and Fernando. We drank a little more, Chun smoked a cigarette (sort of shocking in view of how neurotic she is about physical fitness), and then we all called it a night and went back home.
I rode with Chun and John and most of the way they discussed how best to sabotage Catherine's apparent romantic interest. I had the feeling at this point that Chun was leading the discussion and that John (despite protests of celibacy) would have loved to get a little nookie. Chun's relationship with John is always presented to me as being one of buddyship (Chun met John when she was going out with his brother Joe back in New York City) - but I have a feeling, particularly after tonight, that there are emotional complexities buried beneath and giving lie to such a simple story.
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