I am halfway into my second drink when Keiko wants me dead.
“I need to talk to you,” she says.
“Should I sit down?” (I’m wondering if she and Rob want to move in with me and my family to open a restaurant.)
“Depends on how far you want to fall.”
Keiko tells me that my review of her Rickie Lee Jones tributes at Porn Star Karaoke have hurt her, and that she was in fact accepted to Juilliard on the strength of her singing. The Kill Girl Kill party is kind of loud, and Brooklyn keeps dry-humping passersby, God love her, so it’s tough to hear Keiko when she starts singing the entirety of Sleeping Beauty’s “Once upon a Dream”.
Still, it’s very good.
As she is giving me an earful, Self-Hating Lew arrives and is no help at all. In fact, he takes pictures. I feel like Inspector Javert, about to jump into the swollen River Seine. The world is upside down.
I tell him, “This is a conversation that should be happening to you.”
Keiko grew up in Florida listening to Steely Dan and other classic rock. When she listens to it now she thinks of Saturday mornings when her father turned up the speakers loud to cover the din of the lawnmower. She met Rob in seventh grade and started dating him when they were in a local production of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He was Pink, and she was the groupie who asked, “Wanna take a bath?”
“Best pickup line ever,” she says.
She tells me that those two Rickie Lee Jones songs are the only ones available at Porn Star Karaoke.
My former coworker from AVN, Katie Smith, pops up. She now runs a PR/Marketing agency called Throb and represents Wanted List and our old employer.
Katie and I never hung out much back there, as the editorial staff was forbidden to associate with anyone who made much more money, but one day we bonded over the Buzzcocks.
“What the fuck is Wanted List?” I asked. I see the name everywhere.
“It’s the Netflix of porn,” she said, and a little © appeared over her head.
She told me that I would get a free month’s subscription to Wanted List in my goodie bag (Eon McKai is a classy fucker – porn parties don’t usually have goodie bags; come to think of it, they usually just have a bunch of DOUCHEBAGS! Ha ha ha! LOL! :>{{]\) but upon leaving I only get a Wanted List hat.
I don’t need a Wanted List subscription anyway, but it is a tribute to the product, I guess, that someone stole the membership out of my bag.
The party is a lot of fun. There are people there one does not see at porn events. When a few of those people show up and move through the crowd, kohl-eyed Echo Park girls shiver and retreat like the munchkins when the witch arrived.
Still, it’s not so much of a fish-out-of-water experience that I don’t have the following awkward encounter with Brooklyn:
She is hanging out with VH1 talking head Hal Sparks and I ask if I can get her picture. She begins playing with her hair. “How do you want it?”
“Oh, sexy like you always are,” I say, absently, thinking about delicious Jack in the Box egg rolls.
In a second she is doing a full ass-out porn star pose.
“Whoa!” I say.
“Well make up your mind,” she says.
“Please just sit down. Everyone loves you when you’re sitting down.” She poses with Hal. (You’d better get used to this if you really want to break out of your Queer As Folk typecasting, pal.)
Roy Karch makes me laugh so hard I cry.
The national treasure is in the process of telling me his life story. I’m writing none of it down because the narration happened so fast. We’re going to have dinner later, I tell him, and I’ll bring a tape recorder or one of those women who speak into a cone.
But he says he was born in Massachusetts, where I’m from, so I ask him what he was doing when the Red Sox won the World Series.
“I was shooting an anal scene,” he says. “And the crew was saying, ‘We’re in second position anal,’ and I said, ‘You’re in second position anal; I’m watching the game.'”
I am going to call Johnny Damon and tell him this story. “We’re just a bunch of second-position anal idiots,” he’ll say.
Thursday evenings at the Parlour Club are usually coordinated by a Jay Moyes/Sgt. Pepper-looking guy named Bolles. As Bolles was the DJ for the entire evening, I did not know when the Kill Girl Kill party ended and the regularly-scheduled festivities began.
Around the time the bunny showed up, I was pretty sure the porn party was over, try as it might to bridge both worlds.
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