Chapter Thirteen
Chapter
Thirteen
“I thought I told you to wear something cool!” Christian blurted out as Danny arrived at their meeting spot near the school’s front steps.
“I thought I did,” Danny said, looking down at his T-shirt, then back up to his four friends, who were slouched, cockily, against the banister at the school’s entrance like they were getting ready to perform that “Big Spender” number from Sweet Charity.
“An Eagles concert tee?” Christian said, his lips curling like he’d just taken a bite of the cafeteria goulash.
“Who’s cooler than the Eagles?” Danny replied, wounded.
“Please tell me that question isn’t rhetorical,” Astoria muttered into the collar of her trench coat, which was hand-painted in black-and-white Beetlejuice stripes.
“I told Wintergreen I was bringing famous Club Kids. That’s the only reason she got you on the list,” Christian whined. “I can’t just roll up with some dude who looks like he came from tailgating a monster truck rally.”
Danny knew enough not to volunteer that he’d spent his fourteenth birthday cracking beers for his father at a monster truck tailgate in the parking lot of the Orange County Fair.
“But I’m not a famous Club Kid,” Danny said. “I’ve never even been to a club.”
“Wintergreen doesn’t know that!” Christian huffed, plopping down on the stairs, his forehead smacking against his palms.
“Well, I look amazing,” Astoria said, reaching down and scratching another run in her tights, which peeked out from the bottom of her trench coat like the squashed legs of the Wicked Witch of the East.
“And I don’t look that fly now,” Nina said, “but when we get ready at my place, I’m changing into my Aunt Estelle’s fur coat.”
Danny looked over to Orion in his magenta pleather suit and jewel-encrusted sunglasses, who Danny guessed could have passed for a Club Kid on basically any day of the week anyway.
“Yeah, but what about Danny?” Christian sighed.
Danny stared dejectedly down at the sidewalk.
The worst part was, he’d actually tried to dress the part that morning.
The shirt was the one his unquestionably cool older cousin Luca had left at his house last summer after a family barbecue.
He’d even spent an extra ten minutes in the bathroom mirror attempting to make his hair look spikier than usual.
Just then, Orion snapped his silver-painted fingernails and leaned over to whisper something in Christian’s ear, something that made Christian perk up, something that sent a smile shooting across his face like a pebble skipping across water.
“Hey, tough guy,” Christian said, eyes narrowing. “How much money you got?”
“Uh, fifteen dollars, I think,” Danny said, shrugging. “But Ma gave me that to cover for dinner.”
“Well, Nina’s got a twenty,” Christian said, prompting Nina to raise a silent eyebrow. “That’s more than enough—come on!”
Christian leapt from his seat on the stairs, hustling to the crosswalk.
“Where are we going?” Danny called after him, now all too used to being dragged on adventures around the City.
“To the place where all the punks get their best club looks,” Christian announced over his shoulder. “The House of Field.”
Danny and his friends rode the 1 train down to Christopher Street, where the subway opened up to a triangular park.
They passed an old woman with a mangy-looking lapdog, a guy doodling in a sketch pad, and a mother wielding a soggy napkin, wiping chocolate milk drippings from her daughter’s Mister Softee cone.
Danny looked across the street at the redbrick building, the words “The Stonewall Inn” squiggled in red neon letters in the window.
“Hey, what’s with the ghosts?” Danny said, laughing, as they approached four creepy white plaster statues gathered by a park bench.
But if his friends responded, Danny didn’t hear them—his gaze had locked onto a man at the far end of the park, holding out a clipboard with a freckled arm.
The man stood behind a foldout table topped with a fishbowl of condoms and signs reading “Fight AIDS, Love Life,” “Play Safe,” and “Stop Shaming Us to Death.”
“New cases have declined for the first time in fifteen years,” the man called out in a scratchy New York accent. “But AIDS is far from over.”
Danny held his breath, like he did when crossing Jersey Street or entering a subway car with a puke smell.
He didn’t know much about AIDS—just snippets from the news, his father’s grunted asides at dinner, and lyrics from his Rent cast album.
But he knew that when AIDS appeared in Act One, there were funerals in Act Two.
He wanted to grab his friends and run, far from the triangle park, the ghostly statues, and the man with the clipboard, glaring at him like a grim reaper.
But before he could act, his friends were reaching into their pockets, dropping change and dollar bills into the watercooler.
“Thank you,” the man said, pressing his freckled hand to his chest. “It’s kids like you that give us hope for the future.”
This stretch of the Village was filled with gay bars and pet stores and cigar emporiums and sex shops selling whips and leather zippered masks, and women in flannels sharing cigarettes underneath awnings and fake dollar bills that mysteriously littered the pavement, and an alley where a street sign read, no joke, “Gay Street,” and finally a shop window splashed with decals: “Sale,” “$5,” “$10,” and a giant purple signature, the name of a woman: “Patricia Field.”
“This is it,” Christian said, hopping down the stairs to the basement-level entrance.
Walking into House of Field was what Danny imagined a hit of windowpane acid must feel like.
“You see patterns in stuff you’ve never seen before,” Danny remembered Joey Bagaducci bragging to a group of female lifeguards that summer. “Everything sounds clearer and has a halo of light, and I swear to God, you can smell the colors.”
As Danny walked through the door, time seemed to bend.
The traffic noise of East Eighth was replaced with the sounds of thrash-y guitar and David Bowie’s voice singing about “scary monsters” and “super creeps.” He was bombarded by the rows of bright gumdrop caftans and bubblegum tutus and kids with pierced faces flicking through racks of radioactive blouses.
Despite the late-afternoon sun streaming through the windows, the shop felt more like a nightclub than a place to buy dresses.
No one seemed to be buying anything and everyone seemed like they knew a secret that Danny didn’t.
Christian led the way to a makeup counter in the back that could have doubled as a spaceship in a sci-fi B-movie.
Perched on the counter sat a man (or maybe a woman?) wearing a see-through plastic raincoat, shaggy aquamarine hair, and a pair of white-colored contacts that made them look like an undiscovered X-Men mutant.
Their face was thickly coated in ivory foundation, with electric blue lips pressed together in concentration as they gave their freshly painted nails a gentle blow.
“Careful—Bjork’s gonna want that look back,” Christian said with a smirk, strolling up to the raincoat person.
“Christian Geronimo,” the aqua astronaut said, beaming. “And Orion, too! I should have known when Venus entered Scorpio this morning that I would be getting a surprise visit from you.”
“Bethesda, darling!” Christian cooed, giving European-style kisses to each of this aqua-haired shop-person-slash-space-crusader’s cheeks. “Friends, I present to you certified Club Kid and androgynous icon Bethesda Fountain. Bethesda, these are my friends.”
“Nice to meet you,” the girls chirped in unison, reaching out to shake Bethesda’s hand, which was adorned with long ice-blue nails.
“How’s it goin’?” Danny said, giving his head an up-nod.
“Christian,” Bethesda purred, eyeing Danny with cougar-like fixation. “I didn’t realize you were friends with such trade.”
“Wig-zactly!” Christian trilled. “Which is why we’re here. I’ve got my debut at the Limelight tonight, and we need your help turning this longshoreman-in-training into a party monster.”
So this was an actual real-life Club Kid. Bethesda Fountain looked even more flamboyant and provocative than Danny had imagined, somehow. At this point, trying to turn him into “one of them” felt about as useful as tossing a lucky penny into the Gowanus Canal.
“I promised Wintergreen I was bringing some of the Club Kids,” Christian said. “So if you can help Danny here figure out a club persona, I’d owe ya big-time.”
Bethesda circled Danny, inspecting him like a rental car being checked for dings and scratches at the end of a trip.
“Wait, sorry—” Danny cut in. “What’s a…club persona again?”
“Oh!” Bethesda’s synthetic—yet surprisingly human—eyes lit up. “A club persona is the character you get to be in the nighttime. It’s the external expression of what you’re feeling on the inside.”
“It could be campy,” Christian chimed in.
“Or grunge,” Astoria piped up.
“Or flashy,” Nina said.
“Or andro, like me,” Bethesda added.
Bethesda looked over at Danny, sensing the confusion on his face.
“Androgynous, dear. Andro—not male, not female. Something in between, or entirely new!”
And with that, Bethesda brushed past Danny and made a beeline to the nearest rack of clothing, plucking off garments and tossing them over their shoulder to Christian like a gardener weeding a vegetable patch.
“Some of us don’t get to be ourselves when the sun’s out,” Bethesda said, flicking through the hangers on the clothing rack. “Giuliani doesn’t even like ferrets living in this city—imagine what he thinks of us.”
Bethesda held up a jacket with the face of Michelangelo’s David sewn on the back, considering it briefly, then tossed it to Christian.
“Out there, you gotta blend in, but in here, being weird is just part of the uniform.”
Bethesda skated over to a row of mannequin heads, each one wearing a Dr. Seuss–looking hat.
“How about this?” Bethesda said, lifting up a Russian military hat. “You like?”