The big screen finally lit up. We got to see movies about tornadoes, love serums and credit cards that charge 4% interest daily. We got to hang out in a hot tub on the roof of the hotel. And we got to drink at a gay bar tonight. Christ, I feel so out of place here…
We all met in the lobby around 10:00 and headed out to get some breakfast before the first movie started at noon. It was called “Customer 152.” The main character filed for bankruptcy, then received a credit card offer with a 4% interest rate. He used it to buy a $6000 car when his broke down—upon receiving his credit card statement, the fee was for over $33,000. He called the company and tried to clarify that the total amount should have been $6120 (which pissed me off—that’s 2% interest instead of 4%, dammit!) When he couldn’t pay the bill, some people came and broke his fingers, then got him liquored up… when he woke up the next morning, a hooker and his best friend were dead inside his house and his (broken) hands were covered with blood. He ran outside screaming, then got hit by his own car.
Unfortunately, the movie continued to show criminal charges being pressed, a flashback of when he was 12 and seen in front of a girl who had drowned in a kiddie pool, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia… overall, it wasn’t very good. The movie wasn’t bad enough to walk out of, but it definitely wasn’t good. (Of course, the only time I couldn’t bring myself to finish a movie was watching Martin Lawrence perform stand-up comedy—I had to turn it off after it was only halfway done.)
The next movie on that screen was “S.C.I.E.N.C.E,” which I really liked. Parts of the premise were kinda cheesy—Neil, a young inventor, developed a liquid microphone and the CIA wanted to either get it or take it from him. More parts were pretty awesome, though. My favorite scene was in a martial arts dojo, where he was meeting a girl who offered to go on a date with him. She wanted him to hold onto a pad so she could get in a quick workout before they left, so he stood there as she took a couple punches and kicks at it. “Was that so bad?” “No, not really.” “Okay, this time I’m going all out on it.” When she came up and kicked the pad, the camera angle switched to the side and showed Neil literally flying across the room and slamming into the wall before collapsing.
After that, us five WaZoo members got together with the guys who worked on that movie and we all headed out for lunch. Bob wanted pizza or Chinese afterwards because in the movie, there was a guy delivering pizza who actually worked for the CIA and had a gun in… that container delivery guys put pizzas in to keep them warm. Matthew has a GPS, so he used it to look for Chinese restaurants and found one called Che-Ching Restaurant. (I think that’s how it was spelled—I just know that we pronounced it like the noise people use to sound like cash registers opening up.) Once we got to that particular address, though, we discovered an Indian restaurant in its place. Dunno if it sold out or something, but we opted to wander a little farther to find something else.
What we found was a large family market. It had a food court filled with a variety of small restaurants (which included both pizza and Chinese), so we ate there instead. After lunch, Matthew grabbed some chocolate from a little booth as the two of us headed back to the hotel while Mike, Stephanie and Bob went to the theater to watch that tornado movie along with a couple others films after that.
I figured that since I’d been here for so long (this is Day 2), I should head up to the roof and check out the swimming pool and hot tub. Yes, they’re open-air on the rooftop of the hotel. (As a side note, I noticed this last night and again when I changed clothes in the bathroom: the lights don’t turn on all the way when you flip the switch. They start out kinda dim at first, but after about thirty seconds or so, they start getting brighter. In other words, they give your eyes time to adjust to the light instead of blinding you if you have to take a pee in the middle of the night. Just one more example of posh…).
The hot tub and pool weren’t that much different than any others I’ve used, though the view was spectacular from up there. You could see smog in the distance in every direction—it was awesome. During the few hours we spent up there, we met Tom, a guy from the U.K. who’s here with his father for the musical portion of the festival, and some woman whose name I can’t remember. What I do remember is that she’s Australian, she works with the film festival (she asked if we were going to New York as well) and she told us we’d been nominated for Best Comedy Short. Dunno if we’ll win or not, but either way, it’s a credit we can include in our promo packages.
Now this is the part I’ve been debating with myself about for an hour or so. I’m trying to decide whether I should just describe what happened in general terms or whether I should turn it into a short therapy session for the sake of everyone involved. I figure that if I fill in all the cracks, it’ll make a more complete picture and maybe be therapeutic as well. Or at least garner me some pity points. If you’re not interested, just head back to the outline in the first paragraph and move on to another entry.
See, we started out by going to The Cat Club tonight, which was advertised as the location of the after-party. I got a kick out of that place just because I’m turning 28 in a couple weeks and I got carded at the front door. People have thought I look old for my age since I was 15 or 16 (back in the day when I could buy dirty magazines if the gas station cashier didn’t ask for my ID), but tonight, someone apparently thought I looked a lot younger. Sure, it’s funny, but I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a good thing or not…
Once we got inside the club, it was loud. There was a small area upstairs that had some couches and stuff like that—we had to go up there to get out of the noise a little bit and be able to hear each other talk, but couldn’t hear much more than that over the music. Needless to say, we didn’t stay there very long (some members of the group were a little old for that sort of atmosphere). So we left and decided to do a little walking around to check out some other clubs. I don’t recall the name of the one where we stopped, but the guy in front sounded like a stereotypical gay man telling us to come on inside.
It wasn’t a big deal initially. I got a Coke while the others got whatever alcoholic drinks looked appealing to them (a few more things I can’t recall the names of). We also ordered some nachos to share and were having a pretty good time. There was plenty of joking around and, well… it was a gay bar. Lemme just say that it felt really strange being the only one at the table who was allergic to pot (it gave me a headache whenever I smelled it at college), the only one who didn’t drink and the only one who wasn’t checking out the guys around where we were sitting. But that wasn’t the bad part.
It got worse when we headed downstairs towards the exit. We were all standing around the same table, but the others started going around and doing their own thing. That’s when it went from being kinda strange to pretty uncomfortable. Perhaps that comes from being extremely shy when I was in high school, something I guess I haven’t grown out of entirely. I mean, I’ve always been more comfortable in small groups. The parties I’ve enjoyed the most have involved fewer than 20 people or at least no more than could fill up one person’s apartment.
When something gets bigger than that, I usually latch onto someone as a kind of safety net. At my friend Clay’s graduation party, I got there and pretty much hung with him the entire time—when he wandered somewhere, I followed him. Clay was cool with it and probably appreciated it as well, given that his mom organized the party and he didn’t really know a lot of the people who’d been invited. Still, if I’d been left to my own devices there, I probably would have headed home pretty quick. Tonight, I was standing around a table in a gay bar and the others were off doing their own thing.
Perhaps I should add another quick story that might clarify things a bit further. I attended a Halloween party last year (I knew very few people there and didn’t realize that so many of them were gay until later in the evening). I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch—I’m a people-watcher by nature—but while I was standing around a couple times, there were a few guys who stood next to me and rubbed the small of my back. I didn’t jerk away or anything (mostly because I was freaked out by the situation), so it kept happening. At one point, I was talking with a group of guys and because of the way we were standing, I was essentially pinned against the wall. Once again, I wasn’t panicking in front of them, but my guts were flip-flopping all over the place.
It was a lot later that night when some of the guys realized that I was straight (quite a few of them were disappointed by that fact—the host of the party said a lot of people were interested in me). I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone outright that I wasn’t comfortable with what was going on, so they had to figure it out on their own and I got to suffer in silence. Okay, maybe it wasn’t suffering, but I hated that aspect of the party while I was there.
I didn’t have anyone to act as a safety net that Halloween, which might have helped me tell people I was straight or the person with me might have done it him or herself. At the gay bar, it was the same thing. Some of the guys there were making eye contact just a little too long, shaking hands and holding my fingers for a moment afterwards… I was creeped out. If I’d had a WaZoo person standing there whom I could talk with, I imagine I would have been fine. I felt perfectly okay upstairs—our waiter and a majority of the other people were obviously quite open about their sexual preference—but once the party broke up, I got to flounder around on my own.
I’d like to say that I was completely relieved when we finally left, but I wasn’t. The effects have been lingering since then (thus, the difficulty in deciding whether to spill my feelings about everything or just describe the events as objectively as possible). I spent half an hour playing solitaire after writing the first paragraph, I went and sat out on our patio for a little while… it was a lot like when I was hanging out in some friends’ dorm room at college and they broke out the bong. I panicked as soon as they lit it up (not realizing at the time that I was allergic) and said I had to go. I walked out through a cloud of smoke and made sure to breathe out as I walked out the door so I wouldn’t inhale any of it. After that very brief event, I took a long walk around campus and spend a really long time brooding about it afterwards. I don’t know why these kinds of experiences linger with me for so long, but they do. They linger enough that it’s about 5:40 in the morning here and I’m still writing this blog entry.
So we eventually left the bar around 2:00 and had to walk up a nice, long hill to get back to the hotel. I can honestly say I’ve never led a group of drunk people anywhere before, but we had to get back and I was the only one of us who was completely sober (though some were in worse shape than others). We all got back and headed to our respective rooms and I got thanked for sticking it out at the bar. That’s how I know I’m a good actor—I can smile and nod at the bar and do the same when someone thanks me for doing it, but there’s still a part of me that ain’t happy right now. I’m glad that everyone enjoyed the evening and I thought that most of the night was pretty cool, but being at that bar without a friend right there to be a safety net… maybe I should just think about that newspaper ad for Strap-On Samantha with her jelly tonight. That’ll give me a good case of the jitters, which will probably take my mind off everything else. Especially “Customer 152.”
