Seattle is a city unlike any other. In fact, the whole of the Pacific Northwest has this undeniable essence that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. From its unique landscape—seemingly a mishmash of the rest of America smashed together—to its incredible affection for the artistic community and its overwhelmingly youthful vigor, there really is nowhere else like it in this country.
And because Seattle is so young and artistic, it’s only natural that a lot of crazy shit happens there. That’s what this story is about: one crazy thing (of many) that happened to me in Seattle.
A little over two years ago in March of 2006, I drove through the American northwest with a couple of friends for spring break. As per usual, I’ll start by introducing you to the people who you’ll hear about for the rest of the tale.
Alex – Alex is a great friend of mine, and the one person outside my immediate family whom I’ve lived with for more than a consecutive year. Alex is incredibly unique and, when drunk, incredibly unmanageable. He’s the most genuinely emotional person I know today, capable of emotional highs and lows that are both respectable and, at times, hilarious. As a side note, I’ll inform you that he is my inspiration for telling stories…especially this one.
Jesse - One of those people who you may meet, never know, but never forget. He has an insatiable hunger for life, but tends to let that hunger land squarely on nightlife rather than the whole thing. He and Alex are great friends as well, and I remember living with Alex and listening to stories about their shenanigans, many of which happened at Denny’s, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, between three and five in the morning. He now lives in Seattle; apparently this very trip was enough to convince him to pack up and head out. I think you may agree.
Nick - Nick is the kind of person who will say one thing and make you think about it until your head explodes. He’s the most introspective person I think I’ve ever known, and his insights are opinionated but extremely deep. I’ll preface the story further by explaining that Nick, unlike the rest of us, does not drink alcohol and acted as the designated driver for all nine days of our tour. He’d probably tell this story a lot differently than I.
On our last night in Seattle (after six straight days of mind-bending consumption and one of history’s most pathetic attempts at creating a Pacific Northwest art scene documentary), we decided to meet one of our new friends, a bartender, at a place on Capitol Hill for a bachelorette party. Our new friend’s name was Lisa, and she worked at a German beer bar called Prost—the German substitute for ‘cheers’—in Greenwood, across town. On our first night in the city we stumbled upon Prost, met Lisa, and became enamored with the half- and full-liter steins of Spaten Optimator, which I will forever consider the black tar heroin of beers. We returned to the bar subsequently four out of the next five nights to drink the sweet black bile from giant glasses, and chat it up with one of the only people we knew in
Seattle. On the last visit, Lisa finally relented to our advances, inviting us to the aforementioned bachelorette party to hang with her and ‘her girls.’
What she didn’t tell us was anything about exactly
where the party was being held.
Now, I have caught my fair share of shit-talking for the way I dress, dance, and sometimes even act; but I am not homosexual. Jesse is the same way, at least in terms of his physical appearance. I think some of you would call us hipsters, or worse, emo kids. Yet I’ll stress again, for the purpose of the story, neither of us is gay*. We just embrace gay culture through its fashion and music and sense of personal confidence.
The reason this is important is because Lisa’s friend’s bachelorette party was at Neighbors.
Seattle’s biggest and gayest gay bar. And it wasn’t until Alex, Jesse, Nick and myself approached the front of the club and were redirected to the back by a sign reading
Enter From The Rear that we finally understood what we were about to do. At least, we
thought we understood.
Upon actually entering the bar (from a far less accessible alleyway) and having our suspicions immediately cemented by a pounding techno-remix of Morrissey’s “This Charming Man,” we stared awestruck at the new world of nightlife erupting in around us. It was actually kind of beautiful, in a fucked up way. Men kissing men. Women kissing women. Men kissing men dressed as women. And not a single heterosexual female in sight.
Alright, so that part wasn’t so beautiful.
And it wasn’t so beautiful that the lot of us (Nick excluded) found a reason to
not get very drunk, very fast. It was refreshing to discover that the gay community in
Seattle has adopted at least one quality from the bigoted, redneck republicans who hate them: the beer was surprisingly cheap. Beer after beer we drank, like so many times before.At some point after who knows how many drinks, the four of us—still the only recognizable hetero group inside—ventured onto the dance floor to either a) pick up on some new dance moves, or b) to escape the men both svelte and swollen already hitting on us at the bar. It was there that we discovered not only were we at a gay club, but that it was the fifteenth anniversary of said club’s first night of operation.
How did we find that out? Well, when “
America’s most famous drag queen” (outside of
RuPaul, apparently) stepped onto the dance floor amidst a barrage of whistles and Arsenio Hall-worthy whooping, we asked if this was a normal night’s activity. It wasn’t. In fact, I remember Alex telling me about a conversation he overheard in which someone said it was the best night he’d ever seen at Neighbors.Yippee.
Nick spent most of his week in
Seattle corralling us into quiet bar corners one at a time and asking us if we were enjoying life amidst the haze of inebriation. Of course, he tended to get upset when every time the response was a resounding “fuck YES I’m enjoying life!” By the last night, it would appear that he’d had enough, even though he continued to act as mother, father and driver until the day we left. At times, I felt bad for making him come along, even though the trip was his idea. At Neighbors, I felt especially bad.So, in a drunken attempt at forgiveness, I left the dance floor to yell at Nick about how both of us was “emotionally vested in something back home, so you better not do anything stupid,” to which he dryly replied “Chris we are in a gay club.” I must not have picked up on his point because this happened a few times throughout the rest of the night.
Finally, around 1am, sober Nick caught a glimpse of Lisa and her bachelorette party friends dancing in a tight circle by the bar. Without mentioning anything to the rest of us he headed that way and struck up a conversation with one of the few girls cerebrally capable of putting together complete sentences; but Nick had a girlfriend at the time and so his efforts to make nice with the girl were far outweighed by his apparent disgust with the state of everyone around him, including myself.Nick’s moment of clarity was fleeting, however, as somebody discovered what he already had: a group of uninhibited,
straight women dancing and drinking at the bar. We were welcomed by these women with open arms; forget that we’d never met before. We shared something more important than history. We shared a love for each other’s pieces. And so we danced around the bar in jubilance, one of the girls repeatedly screaming out “Straight circle! Straight circle!” What a circle it was.
After buying the bride-to-be and her friends a few rounds of drinks, and a few for ourselves, we all ventured, slack-jawed and stumbling, back out onto the dance floor where we proceeded to take center stage in front of the same whooping men previously drooling over that tranny I couldn’t identify. At Neighbors, like many clubs, there’s a platform on which couples can dance above everyone else. Until this very moment the platform had been relegated to awkward male couples and the occasional drag queen screaming at adoring fans below. But at this moment, it was us on the stage, bumping and grinding to more Morrissey and letting the cheers (jeers?) of other attendees fuel the fire.There were two quotes that, when dropped in the presence of anyone who witnessed them, will to this day set off an explosion of laughter: the first involves myself.
I have to explain that this part of the story is hearsay, and I cannot personally remember it actually happening. But that certainly doesn’t mean it didn’t. Anyway, at some point during this debacle on the dance floor I leaned back against a railing and was instantaneously wrangled by a burly man dressed in a cowboy hat. He attempted to dance with me with the railing separating us, screaming “Tainted loooooove” at my ear. As Alex tells it, I wrested myself out of the grasp of gay terror and announced to him (and the rest of the bar), while drinking from two beers at once, “That was scary as shit…but this is the best night of my life!”The second quote comes directly from Alex, and is quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever heard out loud. As it happened, Alex found himself on the highest level of the platform I mentioned earlier with one of the more outrageous members of Lisa’s bachelorette party. The two were dancing, and Alex, in his typical style, was more dancing with himself and playing off the crowd than with the girl. The rest of us watched from a few steps away. It was at this moment that the girl told him, quite audibly even over the synth tweaks screeching through the PA: “I said,
fucking grind on me!”
Needless to say, Alex’s response was simply “Oh, fuck yeah, bitch.”Because of Neighbors’ anniversary celebration we stayed at the bar until closing, which was about three in the morning, before being boisterously kicked out by the queen bouncer (pardon the double entendre) and onto
Pike Street. By this time Nick had already been gone for an hour driving around the city by himself, clearly aching for any escape from the debauchery and Catholic-condemned sin going on where he left us. When he found us again, we were in a parking lot which I later learned is one of the narcotics hubs of Capitol Hill (Jack-in-the-Box anyone?). Jesse was on the ground, I lay against a car whose alarm I had personally set off, and Alex shouted at Nick about how he
had to go to Denny’s, like
now.
At some point Alex mentioned Lisa and her friends, and Nick
—confusing as he is—said that oh yeah, they wanted us to come home with them but I figured it wasn’t a good idea. We never saw nor spoke to those girls again.
The night ended for me at this point, simply because standing was something I could no longer feasibly be expected to do; but Nick and Alex did in fact spend the next two hours looking for a Denny’s amongst at least twenty conversations with the operators at 411, only to be simply denied service by one operator who couldn’t help because he was “about to eat a sandwich. Good luck.”
They had none, and the Denny’s eluded them even though Google Maps suggests there are ten locations in the downtown Seattle area. They too went to bed hungry, but not before Alex and Jesse engaged in a violently playful wrestling match in the middle of a friend’s hardwood floor. Jesse woke up the next morning, pillowless, hugging a VCR.
There is so much more to tell about this trip (which I still consider one of the most ill-advised and incredible experiences of my life), but perhaps I’ll save the rest for another time.
Seattle, Washington: young, gay and totally insane.
*To any gay readers, let it be known that I am fully supportive of equal rights for all law-abiding Americans and I think whether you folks want to get married or not, that’s totally cool. Honestly, if Cirque du Soleil is allowed to exist (and people are going to pay to see it), I don’t see why you can’t do whatever you want in your daily life. It couldn’t be any weirder than that.
3 years ago
