|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Thursday, October 12, 2006
IT TAKES TWO
Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock
Profile : 1988
[Buy It from iTunes]
EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN
Ministry
Wax Trax : 1985
[Buy It from iTunes]
DON'T GO
Yaz
Upstairs at Eric's
Mute : 1982
[Buy It]
YOU MAKE ME FEEL (MIGHTY REAL)
Sylvester
Fantasy : 1978
[Buy It from iTunes]
Pure nostalgia today, folks.
My friend, my best friend, was just explaining to me how every guy I've ever dated was secretly gay and it reminded me of my first years in Chicago, back when I was a lonely virgin. I had an unerring eye for sensitive boys from French class, all of whom wound up coming out to me over romantic candlelight dinners. But they liked to dance and so did I, and we spent many wasted weekends shivering on the el platform on our way to Medusa's, this juice bar near Clark & Belmont that played lots of goth industrial, stuff like Sisters of Mercy and Front 242 and, of course, Ministry, the local godhead. Oddly, the place was filled with sailors most weekends, which was to none of our tastes. But after midnight, they'd start jamming the house music. By that time, the fuzzy navels we'd drunk in the dorm room had started to wear off, but we were loose and in the groove. And they'd always kick off the house set with Rob Base. So if you were flagging upstairs, trying to muster some enthusiasm for the 10,000th spin of "Bizarre Love Triangle," when you heard that yelp (yeah! whoo!), which I didn't know then was a James Brown sample, you'd bust it downstairs to jack your body with the Navy boys and the Wisconsin girls who'd driven in for a big-city weekend.
And these guys could MOVE: my friend Chris could snake it down to the floor like he didn't have any bones in his body. At 17, I was incredibly self-conscious. I'd always been large and sort of clumsy (a charming childhood nickname was "megaton") and I thought of my body as something potentially dangerous to innocent bystanders, myself included. But I'm also competitive, and I wasn't going to be outdone by a bunch of skinny boys. I learned to feign total confidence and take the floor like I meant it and they'd be egging me on: Work it, girl!
At some point, we discovered that gay bars could be extraordinarily lax in carding cute young boys. We started hanging out at this place, Windy City, which was like the gay bar for the rest of us. Not everyone had a sixpack; not everyone had rhythm. There'd be lots of guys in jeans and white sneakers, incredibly average-looking, waving their hands in the air like they just didn't care. I was usually the only natural-born woman in the whole damn place, which was fantastically liberating. No one was checking me out. No one cared what I did. And we could drink. So that's when I learned all my ultra-nasty moves. My friend Bill would be spanking my ass, I'd be humping his leg, and it was all just playing around. Try pulling that off with one of the sailors.
One night we took a road trip to St. Louis and went to a gay bar down there. We were upstairs checking out the drag show and all these men kept coming up to me, telling me how beautiful I was. I was drunk with compliments. But as we were coming downstairs, this truly gnarly queen poked me in the chest, yelling nasally, "Omigod! He's pretty!" My friends thought this was hilarious and I was reliving that moment for the next two years of college. They even gave me a drag name, Cafe au Lait, which I spelled Cafe Ole for added flair. That moment became the metonym for all of my ambivalence about being a woman. I always felt kind of like a drag queen when I dressed up in girl clothes. Girl clothes were for 120-pound nymphets and I was Megaton, Godzilla's annoying Jewish aunt.
Eventually, I realized that hanging out at gay bars was not going to get me laid. I started hanging out with the indie-rock crowd, which was much less, uh, colorful and often downright phobic. My friends were disappointed in me. They wanted me to cuten myself up, get out of the combat boots. I got political and they were bored by my manifestoes. And so, we just drifted apart. I haven't seen those guys in years. It's funny to think that I learned everything I know about vamping and tramping from a bunch of gay guys. Maybe it explains some things.Labels: megan, memoir
posted by Megan
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
