Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid Part 10

Jun 19, 2018

Written by Kelly Cole

DISCLAIMER: My intention is not to glorify or condone any of my past behavior. I am not proud of it, nor do I regret it. It simply is what it is. My intention is only to give an honest account.

Michael Musto and I, Summer 1989.

Yoko lived at St. Marks place and 1st Ave in a sprawling, shared 3 bedroom apartment above the St. Marks bar and grill. Our bedroom faced another bedroom in the front which was occupied by a couple who I literally never formally met, and hardly ever saw. But they were in there. The 3rd bedroom was at the opposite end past the kitchen and living room. This room belonged to the guy who was on the lease, a Swedish photographer named Jesper Haynes. I had met him, but he was never in town while I was living there. Over the years, the place had a revolving door of bohemians in and out of there and Jasper made a book about it.

Yoko and I had an ambiguous relationship. We slept in the same bed and were intimate a few times, but it was never spoken as to what our thing was. It was vague. She was going back to Japan for the summer, and was allowing me to sort of sublet her room. I didn’t come home a lot of the time, and she never gave me any grief. At Mars, Yoko worked under the club’s intense co-director, Yuki Watanabe. Although we were welcome there, the Mars crowd sort of looked down on Club Kids, social terrorists that we were. They saw themselves as one notch above us. They employed a friend of ours, Mykul Tronn, to be the resident in-house club kid and host parties, so they didn’t fully alienate us. They just kept us one step removed. I had a kind of special relationship there, since I was friends with the Japanese component. Yuki hosted a night called “KOOLest Thursdays: hosted by MR. KOOL”(“Mr KOOL” was Yuki himself). The party borrowed it’s branding aesthetic from KOOL cigarettes. The summer of 1989 was roasting hot, and Mars was having trouble with their air conditioning. Michael Alig and I had the brilliant idea that we would spoof their party, and create a “KOLDest Thursdays” invitation “hosted by MR. KELLY KOLD, at the fully air-conditioned Red Zone”. We were cracking up about it, and made the invitations, identical to theirs. I didn’t think it was a big deal. It was all in good fun. But Yuki was volatile. He was a bit of a coke fiend, and one night shortly after our prank, he was on a tear and caught me on the 4th floor of Mars. He began hysterically spitting expletives at me in Japanese, the veins bulging in his neck. He grabbed me by the nape of my neck and lifted me off the ground, dragging me toward the fire exit door. I knew this door: it led to a long staircase, 4 flights in all, directly down and out into the street. “Oh shit…”, I thought, “This guy is crazy. He’s actually going to throw me down four flights of stairs!” End over end I went down, my club flyers cascading through the air, littering the stairwell. He could have killed me, but I was completely unscathed. He stood at the top of the stairwell, continuing his tirade, gesticulating wildly. Although I couldn’t understand the words, I assumed I was no longer welcome there.

Yoko left for Japan. She wasn’t due back until the end of September. I was alone in this apartment with the weird recluse couple. The one rule was that I wasn’t supposed to have any guests. So, naturally, I started having people over.

One night Bella and Freeze had gotten their hands on some PCP. We had a little party in my tiny bedroom, cramming about 8 people in their, all smoking it. Things went a little hazy. I ended up stumbling out into the street and blacked out. I came back to consciousness in a graveyard in Queens, with two people I didn’t recognize, silently standing there. I have no idea how I got there.

One morning, still partying by myself from the night before, I was lonely and horny beyond comprehension. I had heard about a brothel in Gramercy Park, and I decided to investigate. I called the place and asked if their were any young girls working. I told the lady on the phone that I was 18. The lady said that yes, in fact, there was one girl working and that she was also 18. Fantastic. I told her I’d be right over. I took my remaining drugs and walked out into a bright, summer Friday morning. Making my way once again past the shiny happy folks on their way to work, a zombie on a depraved mission. The place was in an unassuming brownstone on 2nd avenue at around 19th street. I buzzed in and walked up a long, creaky arched stairway to the 2nd floor. The madam led me in to a well appointed, bright apartment and introduced me to a very cute blonde girl who was seated on her knees on the floor in the middle of the room. She had an expectant, excited expression with a huge smile across her face. As the madam began explaining the rules, the girl abruptly interrupted: “Are you a movie star?!” she asked. “I want to be a movie star!” She had a strange innocent, airy quality and spoke in a bizarre almost cartoonish voice which I cannot find the words to accurately describe. The madam shushed her and continued her explanation. The girl stared at me with that massive smile. I was now curious to see what on Earth was going to happen here. This was definitely going to be interesting. After I paid her ($200 I believe), the girl and I were shown to a small room. The girl babbled some nonsense as i took out my cocaine and did a little pre-action bump. This piqued her interest. “You have drugs?” she queried in her bizarre voice. I showed her that I did. She took the remaining cocaine and tried to pour it into a crack stem and smoke it. She made a mess. I couldn’t figure out if she actually knew what she was doing. It was strange because she didn’t seem like someone who would be using cocaine. She asked me if I could get more. The Twins were living on 14th street, right around the corner. The girl gave me some money, and I literally ran the few blocks down to their apartment and woke them up(it was probably 11am). They buzzed me in and literally sold me the coke from their bed, which was just inside the front door of the apartment, in the living room. They didn’t even get up. I ran back to the brothel as fast as I could, because I was on the clock, after all. The girl and I hung out and got high for the remainder of my time. We never touched. At the end of my hour, she said she wanted to come with me. “Sure” I said “But are you allowed to leave?”. She very confidently assured me that she could. She stomped out of the room. I could hear her in the adjoining room arguing with the madam for some time. Sure enough, she returned with a fistful of cash: “Let’s go.” As we were leaving the madam glared at me. I gave her a sheepish look, as if to say “hey, it wasn’t my idea!”

She paid for a taxi to my place, and we holed up in my little room and began doing the coke I had gotten from The Twins. The conversation was minimal. We still didn’t touch. We listened to music and got high. I was fascinated by how odd she was. After a few hours the Twins’ coke was gone, and she wanted more. I was like “look, maybe we should call it a day.” I had been up for 2 days. The mood was turning. There’s a point while doing cocaine where, if you don’t have a down drug to equalize things, you sort of amble forward in this tense, teeth grinding state, and if you keep going, things just get weird. The girl insisted. I reached out to the dealers I knew and none of them were available. I explained to the girl that we could go to the bodegas in Alphabet City, but it wasn’t guaranteed that we would score.

Let me explain the drug bodegas to you: In the 1980s and early 90s, there was a network of Dominican and Puerto Rican “bodegas” on the lower east side that sold drugs. Some sold heroin, but mostly they sold cocaine. Very speedy, strange cocaine. You had to know which bodegas did this, and they had to KNOW YOU. They absolutely wouldn’t sell to just anyone. You had to be introduced by someone from the neighborhood. Periodically, law enforcement would put on some obligatory pressure, and one would temporarily close, and the action would move to a different one. Or if one wasn’t holding drugs, they might still be open, only to tell you where the spot that was holding was.

They were pretty obvious. They were dusty, and the shelves generally were not well stocked. The neighborhood people all knew what these delis were about, and they might go there for cigarettes or toilet paper, but most serious shoppers stayed away. It worked one of two ways: typically you would get a roll of Scott toilet tissue and bring it to the counter and say “20”, meaning “I want a $20 bag of cocaine”. The stoic, grizzled attendant would study you for a moment, take your money, and put the rolled up glassine envelope into the center of the roll of toilet paper, and into a paper bag. That was my technique anyway, inherited from whoever first took me into one of these places. The other more uncommon way was, you moved a box of detergent on a shelf somewhere in the back, and there was a hole in the wall: money in, drugs out. They always had a pallet of those little barrel shaped plastic bottles with the foil lid, filled with that god awful electric colored sugar fruit drink. They would tell you to take one of those and drink it on your way out so you didn’t look suspicious. Great plan.

On this particular day, as our taxi pulled up to Avenue C, we were stopped by a police barricade. I tried to tell the taxi to turn around, but the girl wasn’t having it. She waved a police officer over. “What’s going on?” she asked. The nice officer explained to the two of us, FLYING on cocaine, that they were doing a “sweep” of the block. This meant that they were checking all of the businesses for illicit activity. Now this meant that, even if you were the best customer the bodegas had ever had, you were NOT getting served. I tried to explain this to the girl. I tried to impart the truth to her that there was 100% no way that we were going to be able to buy drugs on this block. She didn’t want to hear it. I pleaded with her. I didn’t want to get into some fracas with this crazy girl and the police and end up in jail, coming down from a 2 day coke binge. Here’s what happened next: with absolutely no knowledge of the block or the bodegas, she got out of the cab and walked toward the police barricade. As she disappeared around the corner, I was sure that the next time I saw her she would be in handcuffs. I mean, she was a little nutty. I could imagine her walking from business to business just asking for cocaine. The cabbie seemed interested in what was going to happen as well. He gave me a little look and just pulled the car over. He had heard our conversation, and I think he probably knew what went on in this neighborhood. We sat there for what seemed like an hour. After what was probably 10 minutes in reality, I see the girl come around the corner, with her hands cupped together in front of her. She has a quick, friendly greeting with the officers at the corner, moves around the barricade and gets back to the cab. I’m looking at her, but her hands are full of something so she can’t open the door. I reach across and open it, and she gets in. She looks at me, and dramatically opens her hands and dumps 10 baggies of bodega cocaine onto the seat, a giant smile swallowing her face. I couldn’t believe it. “Wha… How…?” But she was already telling the taxi to take us back to my place. I have no idea how she did it.

The girl began taking a tone with me like we were together. Lots of “we” and strange future plans, etc… Day was passing into night, and we were still going. I was starting to experience a kind of frozen cocaine psychosis. Time would skip. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed from just then to just now. I noticed that the girl was starting to behave even more strangely. She began crouching or curling up in a fetal type position in the corner. It was silent. Every few minutes she would skitter over to where I was sitting and whisper things in my ear from behind me. Strange things: math equations, lines from nursery rhymes. The only thing specific I recall her saying was this: “I promise not to tell your father where you hid the mittens.” You can imagine how that landed on ears that were going on 3 days awake. It was, to say the least, unsettling.

But I didn’t know how to get rid of her. Suddenly, she stood up and said she wanted to go shopping. Shopping? I could barley walk. I was so coked out that my brain couldn’t tell my limbs how to work properly. I was grinding my teeth and I looked like a psychopath. She somehow convinced me to go out into the night with her and help her find a dress. We went to a little store on St. Marks that was open late and I sat there like a good boyfriend while she tried on dresses until she found one. On our way back to my apartment, we did some window shopping and I coveted some shirts in the window of a store that was closed.

Eventually we made it home. My body was demanding sleep. I laid down. The girl laid down next to me. She began caressing my head and I slipped into sleep. When I awoke, she was gone. No trace of her.

I never touched her.

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a club kid part 9: Reality Inverted

Feb 23, 2018

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a club kid part 9: Reality Inverted

DISCLAIMER: My intention is not to glorify or condone any of my past behavior. I am not proud of it, nor do I regret it. It simply is what it is. My intention is only to give an honest account.

In the spring of 1989 I was given my first party hosting night: Freaky Fridays at Bolido. My name was finally on an invitation. I had arrived. I hosted the night with DJ Keoki and another young promoter named Sean Michael. We were thrown together by the club’s owners, and I felt that they resented me a bit. Keoki thought I was a prima donna, and Sean was a smart, fastidious quiet kid who clearly thought I was a train wreck. A pair of hip-hop promoters, Sean Combs and Jessica Rosenblum, were doing Thursdays at the club. I liked Jessica, but the Combs guy rubbed me the wrong way. There was an exchange between us at a club promotions meeting where he made some disparaging remarks about us.

Michael Alig had left The World, along with his sort-of partner, the club’s promotional director Steve Lewis. This was big news in clubland. The World was notorious for not paying it’s employees. One of the owners, Frank Roccio, had a wicked heroin problem. The staff was sort of a dysfunctional family so people stayed on nonetheless. But I guess some had enough, and the whole thing started to crumble. Apparently on a dare from Roccio and his partner Arthur Weinstein (more about him later), Alig and Lewis had taken on the promotions at Red Zone, a big, square, nondescript new club on West 54th street owned by Maurice Brahms. Brahms had owned the disco era club Xenon and had gone to prison in the tax evasion cases that happened in the wake of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager’s notorious Studio 54 convictions. Michael kicked off the grand opening with an Outlaw party at the McDonald’s in Times Square. It was a huge 2 level place. The plan was that we would all meet on the second floor at a certain time. Someone brought a mobile sound system, and someone else brought some liquor. The place was mobbed. Michael stood on a table and threw hamburgers around the room. After a while, the police showed up and broke it up, and we all went to Red Zone. This was the first of the new generation of Outlaw parties, and it was all good natured fun. No one got arrested this time.

The McDonald's Outlaw Party, 1989

It turned out that Bolido was somehow operating without all of the proper licensing and it got shut down. The Italian owners (not mob guys, actual Italians) had apparently been warned, but weren’t paying off whoever they needed to and kept opening without getting the licenses, and their time ran out. In those days, you could actually get away with operating an out-of-the-way place or an after hours without any licenses, sometimes for years, but this place was at 18th st and 5th avenue operating in a high profile way without them. So out of a job, I went to work for Steve and Michael at Red Zone. I became Steve Lewis’s assistant. This was not exactly a coveted job in the club world. Lewis was known to verbally abuse his assistants and fire them every other day. But It came with a salary, so I took it. It was a tumultuous situation. No one ever knew what drug Lewis was on but there was a lot of speculation. He always claimed that he didn’t drink or use anything, and I never saw him do anything, but he certainly was erratic and emotionally volatile. He did often get angry and fire me. He was definitely a megalomaniac. But when he was good to me, he was awesome and I learned a lot from him. He didn’t give me too much trouble for being out of my mind every night. It came with the territory.

I felt like I owned New York now. I was proud of my place in the subculture. I had the air of someone who was in the KNOW. I looked down my nose at the squares on the street, and the squares I worked with in the Kumagai offices. Man, they don’t know what it’s like to be FREE, to be a part of this SCENE. It became impossible to show up for work there. I was coming in later and later, if at all. The friends I had made in the office were sad and disappointed. I could see in their faces that they were concerned for me. But I was lost in it. Finally the day came when they fired me. It was painful for the Japanese office manager, Mr. Yakota. He was beside himself. It was like he was burying his first born. It was a bizarre ceremony. Everyone hung their heads in the office. I cleaned out my desk, did a line of coke in the file room and left.

Without a reason to get out of bed, I was now high all the time. The parties started stretching into a 2nd day, then into the next night, which would often be a haze or blackout where I ended up in worse and worse sketchy situations.

The World had stayed open only partially as an after hours. Half of the club was a dilapidated building adjacent to the main club called “IT”, operated by the It Twins, Robert and Tim. They held court and dealt ecstasy. I was there one night, and wandered into the main club where there was a lone group of people gathered at the bar of the cavernous, empty space. I recognized a couple of the people in the group from an acting job I had done. It was an impromptu wrap party for the Abel Ferrara film “King of New York” which had used The World as a location. I spotted Ron Abrams, a legendary make-up artist who had been Rock Hudson’s long time boyfriend. He had worked with everyone and was a beloved figure on set. Ron had really taken me under his wing when we worked together. I went over, excited to see him. I was flying on ecstasy. At first he didn’t recognize me, and then his face sort of half dropped. I was frantically introducing him to all of the after hours ghouls I was with. He took me aside and sort of gently got me focused on what he wanted to say: “You're a good kid” he said, “Please, please, please do not go too far into this underworld.” I was confused. I thought that of all people, he would understand. But he was crestfallen. And so was I. So I retreated back into the other side, and went deeper into that night’s substances.

There was a coke dealer around at this time who called himself “Snowstorm”. He was a silver tongued young brother, who was easily clocked as a con artist (Think David Hampton, the character at the center of the film/play Six Degrees of Separation). A curious thing though: where cocaine was involved, we were oddly willing to endure the most blatant of bogus personalities. Snowstorm would always appear very late in the night. He stopped coming around after one too many people got sick from his drugs. He would literally go into a bathroom and emerge with packets of “coke” that he had prepared moments earlier using whatever powdered substance was under the sink. True story. He should have called himself Ajax.

Back at the Zeckendorf, David and Bradley started voicing their concerns about my drug use. I’m thinking “THESE guys think I have a problem?” They were truly messes, and they were judging ME? I started spending less and less time there, instead crashing a lot at Reuben’s place. He was living in this crazy flophouse on 6th Street with a female spin-off of the It Twins, a pair of girls from Michigan, Liz and Gena, who called themselves the Go-Glo Twins. We didn’t sleep much. We basically hung there after all of the after hours places closed, hoovering up everything in site, and listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees. I tried a few times to crawl into the girls' rooms, but they were wise to me and weren’t having it. Usually present for our all-day binges were Bella Bolski, a flamboyant, scarcastic drag, and Robert Riggs aka “Freeze”, a hilarious Southern queen. We died our hair and pretended that our budget 40 ounce beers were mint juleps.

House music was exploding. Pioneering Djs were playing at Red Zone every night: David Morales, Frankie Knuckles, Mike “The Hitman”, DJ Dimitry. I was hosting nights and helping Michael with his parties. They were epic. There was an upstairs VIP room with a balcony over the back of the main dance room. He would do a “money drop” party where at midnight he would throw piles of cash into the crowd from the balcony. He did filthy mouth contests, bizarre fashion shows, and would have dinners for legends like Leigh Bowery. One time Leigh was there, in an outfit of head to toe tulle with an orb that covered the head and completely obscured it, amorphous arms, orb mid section, orb legs, and orb feet. Like a giant symmetrical poodle. One couldn’t tell if he was facing you or facing away from you. I thought I was talking to him for like 10 minutes in a coke face rant, but it turned out he was facing the opposite direction. For Michael’s birthday we installed carnival rides behind the club and handed out ecstasy. His mom, Elke was in town from Indiana, and got high with us. Michael, Elke, and a new friend of Michael’s, a hilarious, witty, colorful vegetarian girl named Susan Anton (not “The”) ended up at the after hours Save The Robots on the lower east side. Susan and I became instant best friends. She took zero shit from anyone, and was quick to illustrate the ridiculous in any situation. She was a provocateur like Michael and I. I had never met a girl like her. Michael was living at the Riverbank West at 47th and 11th. We were tripping our faces off at 9 am when Robots let out. With the sun blaring down on us and morning rush hour traffic in full swing, we walked the entire distance back to Michael’s apartment from the Lower East Side. Elke had lost her shoes and did the walk barefoot. Susan, who was stone sober, was a good sport and let me squeeze her hand the whole way (and has been holding my hand metaphorically ever since).

Average partiers have their lives, and then they have their party time. They go to bed and wake up for their lives again. Even the most hardcore partiers who hold down a job have some semblance of normalcy (see fashion industry people). When your life and vocation IS partying, and you have no other life really, there’s a strange paradigm shift that happens. In a short time, I had fully transposed my reality. I barely saw the daylight unless it was at the end of the first phase of a night, and I skittered away from it like a vampire into some stranger’s apartment for an impromptu continuation after hours party. I ended up in all kinds of bizarre situations, forced to ride the train home dressed like a total clown, crowded with morning commuters. Emerging from some Midtown condo, twisted on a narcotic cocktail, lumbering through the streets with no idea where I was or how I got there. Cocaine makes for strange relations, and I was amassing quite a menagerie of troubled companions from all strata of New York culture. I had befriended Chris Naess, who was the son of the Greek shipping magnate Arnie Naess. He had a sister, Katinka, who was absolutely stunning. I was desperate to hook up with her. One night, I had relentlessly pursued her back to her family's small glamorous Midtown apartment which was exquisitely preserved from the disco era with lots of white laminate and mirrored walls. There were a couple of random, oblivious cokeheads who were there only for the coke, and another guy who was also clearly pursuing Katinka. He and I both had a supply, and were producing it in some twisted mating ritual, trying to win the maiden’s affection. The other guy seemed to be winning. He kept disappearing into the bedroom with her giggling, closing in on his prey. He was saying some funny shit and spoke with an Australian accent (which I generally found annoying). As a coke party winds down, and someone is trying to get laid, there is almost always an awkward moment where people have to be asked to leave. The bullshit coke chatter stops, a serious tone pervades, and it all screeches to a halt. It was now down to me, some random good-natured dreadlock, Katinka, and the Australian guy. Katinka had made a final retreat into the bedroom, and HE started the wrap-up/kick-out process. The funny thing was, I guess since I saw him as competition, I had never really LOOKED at the guy. So as the dread and I were being ushered out, standing in the doorway, I finally looked at his face. It was Michael Hutchence. I was like “NO WAY DUDE!” and we had a big hug and a laugh. I’m not sure he actually remembered me from a couple of years earlier, or if he was simply going along with it to get the thing over with. But I thought it was hilarious. Fair enough, I thought. He IS Michael Hutchence after all. I had to take a cab with dreadlocks all the way downtown. The dude did all of my remaining coke and I got stuck with the whole tab for the ride.

There were so many after hours at this time. The most famous was the legendary Sound Factory on West 27th Street, where Frankie Knuckles was the resident DJ. The more druggy spots, which were more accessible to me, were within a single block on the Lower East Side and I traversed them in a loop that started at IT at 2nd and C at around 4am. At around 6, I went around the corner to Save The Robots on B between 2nd and 3rd, which was just getting fired up. Robots was a small, 2 floor club with a super tight door system. A guy named Dave Knapp ran the door. He sort of clowned on people in a punk rock way as they came in. The owners, a curt French guy named Denis and his partner Alex, an intense, sexy lady from the Netherlands, were always there with their eye on things. The club had no liquor license, but sold bathtub vodka out of unlabeled plastic water bottles. There was only one bottle behind the bar at any given time and usually only one mixer if you were lucky. The shit was volcanic, but usually one was too high to notice. When the bottle was empty, the bartender would press a buzzer, and a runner with a backpack would bring another bottle in from outside. It was a brilliant system. Although the police busted the place time after time, they could never figure out who was running things, and could never catch them with anything. The upstairs lounge had a weird colorful Asian theme with several inches of sand on the floor. The tiny basement was a sweaty dance floor where people were usually grinding on each other to reggae at deafening levels. There were two bathrooms that obviously always had interminable waits. The legendary Details columnist Stephen Saban often held court in the upstairs room, where the volume allowed actual conversations. I would marvel at his social experiments. He would sit amid a strange mixed group, almost certainly all fully throttled on cocaine: Some B celebrity, an Upper East Side couple, two Lower East Side Puerto Rican homeboys, a tranny, etc… He would play a demented version of the game “Would you rather?”, where he proposed preposterous scenarios for people to choose from. You learned a lot about a person while hearing their logic of why they would choose to allow their best friend to lose sight in both eyes in order to spare themselves the loss of their sexual organs.

I stayed there until it closed, at around 8 or 9, and went around the corner to the Choice, on 3rd between B and C. The Choice was owned by its resident DJ, Richard Vasquez. A dark, cavernous, no frills space with a blinding sound system, the club had only one light on the massive dance floor, trained on a single disco ball in the center. It was all about the music. Legendary house songs were incubated here. Robert Owens was often improvising on a microphone in the DJ booth. There was no alcohol behind the bar, only fruit and juice. Again, there were no licenses. It was in the middle of no man’s land. 3rd Street at that time looked like something out of WW2 Europe. The entire north side of the block was decaying, with buildings literally falling down. Two different outdoor heroin spots with armed guards blatantly operated day and night with lines of junkies going down the street. It was lawless.

Sometimes there was a deviation in the regular routine and a bunch of us would end up at the restaurant Florent in the Meatpacking District. It was a tiny diner with a wicked French influenced menu. They stopped serving liquor at 4, but we had a man on the inside. Our friend, Richard Move, waited tables and would surreptitiously serve us liquor in coffee cups. You would look around and everyone had a coffee cup in front of them. I had many memorable nights there chopping it up with RuPaul in the bathroom. She was the funniest person to sneak off with for a bump of coke in a cramped bathroom. Ever. Hands down.

We weren’t really paying rent at the Zeckendorf, and we got evicted. Mr. Yakota, with a security guard in tow, came to our filthy hovel. It was the afternoon and Bradley and David were laying on futons in the living room, the floor scattered with fast food containers and dirty laundry. With a mixture of sadness and disgust, he had me sign a paper agreeing that we would move out.

I had started messing around with a cute Japanese girl named Yoko who worked at Mars, and she asked me to move in with her. Poor girl. I don’t know what she was thinking…

Written by Kelly Cole

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Confessions of a Club Kid Part 8: Moving up in Downtown

Feb 09, 2018

Written by Kelly Cole

DISCLAIMER: My intention is not to glorify or condone any of my past behavior. I am not proud of it, nor do I regret it. It simply is what it is. My intention is only to give an honest account.

Confessions Of A Club Kid Part 8: Moving up in Downtown

I was going out every single night, immersing myself in the subculture of downtown. Learning it’s history. Studying it. Who was who and what was what. There was a reverence among us for the hierarchy, the history, for who and what came before. And it had to be TOLD in those days. Many an after hours party was spent listening to the elders giving oral histories of Warhol, and the progression of personalities and clubs. What led to what. Who the players were. I was getting an education. I became friends with(forced myself onto) old timers like Sylvia Miles, Stephen Saban, Patrick McMullan, and Michael Musto.

I was holding on to my day job at Kumagai Gumi by a thread. One of the properties they owned and operated was the swanky new Zeckendorf towers on Union Square. I managed to talk them into giving me a lease for a one bedroom there. David and his extremely strange and fascinating roommate Bradley were getting evicted from their place and so I had the bright idea that we could all move in together. Bradley’s fashion sense was quite unique. One night he would cover himself in tiny action figures. The next night with play dough, etc... He was quiet and weird and was often the recipient of harassment and beatings from street kids. So he, the 6’2” drag David, and I were roomies. I had taken to wearing cut off shorts, combat boots, no shirt, motorcycle jacket, and 50 gold chains and backstage passes. I grew my hair long and wore pale makeup. I don’t know what the hell you call that look.

I took the bedroom and they shared the living room. We had no furniture, no curtains, and no real kitchen implements to speak of. We had futons placed directly on the floor. It was basically a club kid flophouse in a luxury doorman building. It was filthy. One of the first things I did was to get Michael to throw a rooftop party with me there. The uptight doormen and building management were less than amused by the ragtag group of freaks coming and going at all hours, a circus of colorful, psychedelic characters wandering lost and drug addled through the floors of a very expensive, buttoned-up building. It was insane.

I was starting to realize that if I WORKED in the clubs, it would simplify matters. I started handing out flyers for Michael’s parties at the World. I was fearless and would go anywhere and talk to anyone. An art opening, a fancy uptown restaurant, on the street. I was relentless. I had a custom lunchbox made to carry my flyers in. A black flight case with chrome studs. I wanted to be the best at it. And I was. I was meeting more people and using my natural charm to make a name for myself as a colorful, sometimes obnoxious, provocateur and personality.

Now I’m working day and night, and I’m drinking a lot. Every night. It’s taking it’s toll on my energy. One night, I was visibly drunk and exhausted and someone suggested that I do a bump of cocaine. I had been warned over and over to stay away from it. My brother had a friend that had lost everything to it. I knew the stories. By now I was using ecstasy regularly, and it didn’t seem to be such a stretch. And a love affair was born. Cocaine made everything make sense. I could drink all night without getting drunk(and I was drinking for free everywhere I went). I was obsessed. I had to have it at all times. It seemed like every girl i met liked it too. It was the perfect accessory to my burgeoning prowess with women. This magical drug, coupled with my new found stature in the scene, was making it easier and easier to get girls into bed(or into the bathroom stall). I was 18, cute, and already pretty much completely full of shit, and the Cocaine removed a filter which allowed me to say whatever I needed to say to close the deal. There were white girls, black girls, young girls, older girls, rich uptown girls, funky downtown girls, Columbia girls, Barnard girls, goth girls, punk girls, hip-hop girls… I wasn’t a womanizer. I just didn’t know how to have a relationship. And I thought that this was all that I deserved. I had no sense of self. It was all instant gratification, and I couldn’t let someone really get to know me, because I didn’t even know myself. I was making me up as I went along. Because I was around the gay scene, and this was the late 80s, I knew many people who were either dying of Aids, or losing someone close to them. So I was meticulous about using protection. I’m grateful for that. It’s a miracle that I came out of it unscathed. In a sense, my gay friends saved my life.

R. Couri Hay approached me and asked me to work for him. He was a colorful dandy and a real old school socialite, a nephew of Timothy Leary who had once written for People magazine. He was a little older, and having been around in the studio 54 days, knew a whole different strata of social players than the rest of us. I handed out flyers for him and soon started working the door for his little dinner parties at a club called Bolido in the flatiron district. He hosted dinners for Tama Janowitz, Sidney Biddle Barrows, Diane Brill, and the like. It was dizzying. I was meeting all of the legends of this strange Warholian world. People who sometimes might not be at all relevant in the daytime world, but by night they were everything. Sprouse came with Debbie Harry to a few of the parties, and through a process of relentless persistence, I got to know him a bit. He was very quiet and very shy. It was always awkward trying to talk to him in those days. He would be more or less freaked out depending on how high I was on that particular night. But he took a liking to me. We were both from Indiana, and we shared similar tastes.

A new club called Mars had opened on the west side highway. Rudolf, the impresario responsible for the Tunnel, had created a 6 floor masterpiece where the music and themes were different on every floor. The vibe was really special. It was a little “smarter” than the other clubs. Black, white, gay, straight, young and old mixed seamlessly here. To tell the truth, it felt like they almost looked down their noses at us club kids here, but I tried to transcend it because I loved it(and the girls were really smart and hot). The De La Soul album 3 Feet High and Rising had just come out, and seemed to me the soundtrack of this place. The legendendary DJ Larry Levan played on Sunday nights, and we all went religiously to hear him play. I became pals with a young DJ named MOBY who played a mix mash of rock and everything else on one of the upper floors. The staff was rad, and many were Japanese.

My friend Reuben Sandwich was providing most of my cocaine. He was a tall, lanky goth gay whose hair color changed almost nightly. He was one of the all time greatest characters to spend the waning moments of a binge with. Absolutely enthralling and hilarious. I loved him. He even turned the coming down into a work of art. He was a master story teller. He had a friend named Gus. A dapper, Puerto Rican rockabilly guy who was a low level coke distributor. Reuben thought I had a natural talent for dealing. I certainly had a natural talent for vacuuming up every bit of cocaine I could get my nose above. So against what better judgement I had left, I decided to try it. Needless to say, I was a shitty dealer. I was always in debt to Gus, because I was using everything he gave me. But the train was rolling so fast now. No way to slow it down…

Stephen Sprouse and Kelly Cole, 1989 (Photo by Tina Paul).

Written by Kelly Cole

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Confessions of a Club Kid Part 7: The Voodoo Ray

Jan 13, 2016

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid Part 7: The Voodoo Ray

I find it painful to wake up early. I have never been a morning person. I never quite knew what to do with myself in the morning. All those shiny happy people bopping around. Night time always seemed so much cooler. For as long as I can remember, and definitely since I was very small, I have been a night owl. I very rarely saw Saturday morning cartoons as a child, maybe ten times. I was far more interested in the late night programming on a Friday night. It was ok though, because when I woke up on a Saturday, usually mid day, all of the weird live action shows like Land Of The Lost and Space 1999 were just coming on.

As I started to follow the club kid cavalcade around every night, it became an increasingly difficult task to wake up for my clerical job at Kumagai Gumi, but I would drag myself in there, hung over and bleary eyed. It's not easy to understand a Japanese person who speaks no English, even when you're not hungover. The kids were at one club this night, another club the next. I kept seeing the curious girl from The World around. One night I finally mustered the courage to sit down next to her. I introduced myself. She was very shy. She said her name was Jerry Hall. After a few moments of talking to her, I realized that she was a transvestite(her actual name was David). I was always very secure about my sexuality. I mean, I was way into girls. I had plenty of opportunities to seize the moment if I were gay, and I certainly would have seized it. I always thought it would have made life so much easier in some ways, and way more complicated in others. I was always envious of how cavalier it was for my gay friends to hook up. A nod. A wink. An unspoken language. They just got down to it. Wherever they happened to be when the connection was made. But there were other aspects to their lifestyle that seemed always to cause them pain. Especially in those days. I had a great affinity for their world. The humor, the flamboyance, the camaraderie. But I just wasn't into it physically. This creature, however, was compelling and I couldn't explain it, even to myself. This weird, distorted, dark taboo. She was somehow MORE feminine than a true female. It was exaggerated. Amplified. I was intrigued by it. We became friends. But I couldn't pull the trigger physically. I was torn. She was my entree into the center of the club world, and she introduced me to everyone: Armen Ra, Kenny Kenny, Sticky Vicky(Victoria Bartlett), Bella Bolski, Julie Jewels. Goldyloxx and Janet Planet. Fuchsia and Harlequin. Ru Paul and Lahoma Van Zandt. John Black Beauty. I was making exciting, colorful, exotic new friends, and every night was an incredible improvisation. We were having a great time. I was going deeper into the subculture every day. And eventually, one night, she suggested that we take ecstasy together. By this time, I was feeling left out that I wasn't doing it. And so we did it. I will never forget being on the dance floor and hearing A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray" as the drug hit me. To this day, that song has a very specific sensory recall for me. It transports me back to that moment, when I was hearing music, seeing light, feeling my space in the universe in a whole new way. I fell in love with this magical substance immediately and I used it at every opportunity.

Most of the other kids lived in a series of various pseudo-squats throughout downtown. The routine went like this: you got enough money together to get a lease, and maybe paid rent for the first few months, and then simply stopped paying until the landlord was able to legally evict you. There was a reckless, care-free, communal feeling to it all. We shared everything: food, drugs, and most certainly, the all important wardrobe. In those days, only a very few people made money off of the party business, so mostly everyone was broke. And those who did work invested their money exclusively into partying, so they were broke too. There was a lot of DIY fashion. A lot of kids who went to F.I.T.(Fashion Institute of Technology) would make clothes for themselves and others. Or you could shoplift. And of course there was vintage. The clothes by the designers that we celebrated were highly coveted. I was still holding onto my day job, so I was able to contribute a lot to the situation. Soon I had a diverse new wardrobe of Stephen Sprouse, Vivienne Westwood, and the like. You might take your new jacket off at someone's after-hours house party, put on a different one, and subsequently watch yours rotate through the scene on different people for a couple of months. And maybe you got it back. Maybe not.

I wasn't really getting any acting work. I kept coming close, but was just missing the mark. I was a little weird. A little left of center. A little intense. They couldn't find a place where I fit in. As I started to feel like I DID fit in to this new, immediately gratifying night culture, my focus fell less and less on acting. One casting director, Howard Feuer, had really taken a liking to me. He was bringing me in for things, and I kept showing up. Among them was "Dead Poet's Society". The audition went really well, and I got called back twice. It came down to myself and another kid for the role, but they ended up going with the other guy.

I had been living on the upper west side in a giant apartment share with 3 very sensible young upwardly mobile roommates. I was spending more and more time crashing downtown, returning uptown only to retrieve clothes here and there. In the weeks after the Dead Poet's audition, I had spent a long stretch downtown partying. Upon returning to the upper west side, I found that the community message board at the apartment was jammed with urgent messages from my agent, who had called repeatedly over the weekend, which was very unusual. I finally called her back, but it was too late. Apparently the kid who they had hired for the role I was up for had been fired a few days into shooting. They had frantically tried to reach me to go immediately to Pennsylvania to replace him. Another actor whom my agent represented, Al Ruggiero, ended up playing the role. He answered his phone. I still haven't been able to bring myself to watch that film. Had I gotten that message, so many things might be different today. I don't know if I consciously thought about it at the time, but this whole event seemed to fuel my desire to escape reality, to go deeper into the night.
And so I went...

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid Part 6: Into the Rabbit Hole...

Apr 08, 2015

Written by Kelly Cole

INTO THE RABBIT HOLE...

"Everyone overemphasizes the importance of his own era." - Unknown (actually, I forgot)

Anyone who has ever been a part of a true scene can never forget the moment when they stepped inside that bubble. The obsession to be a part of it, to be one of THEM, is consuming in a way that is difficult to understand unless you have felt it. I had experienced this feeling when I discovered the theater, and now, for better or for worse, I had the same fascination with this nightlife circus. My friend Sylvia Myles once said that I "Had left the theater and found the theater of the night." I suppose it was an easier stage to get onto. I couldn't sleep once I had that invitation. I had a time and a place fixed in my brain where something was going to happen. There was something so compelling about it. This thing that moved with reckless, wild abandon was calling out to me. A group of misfits from all over who bound together to form a new, bizarre, living, breathing organism. These were the grandchildren of the Warhol scene. Andy's death had left a void in New York. Aids and a poor economy had rendered nightclubs passé. The perfect storm was created for a cadre of self-made celebrities to flourish and take over. There wasn't necessarily any requisite training, or ability required. One simply chose a loose identity, perhaps giving his or herself a moniker to go along with it, and embellished themselves as they went along. I had lied to get into things, and lied to get out of things, so I was excellent at improvising the story of me.

The main dance floor at The World, 1988 - Photo by Stephan Lupino

I hadn't yet been to the lower east side or "alphabet city" as people called it then. As my cab crawled further downtown, things got dingier, darker, and more exciting. I saw the decadent, burnt out shells of buildings… Different fashions on the streets. An edgier, sexier aesthetic to it all. The World was on 2nd street just west of Avenue C. There was illicit hustle happening on the sidewalks surrounding the club. It was a week night, Tuesday I think, and yet it was chaotic on the street.

James St. James was at the door. He opened the rope and said hello to me as if he knew me. WELCOMED me. It was a massive, dance hall with three levels. The upstairs main room had been a wedding hall in the early 20th century. A huge room with a balcony that wrapped around the back, It was decayed and beautiful, with a mix of black, latino, white, gay, straight, boys and girls and everything in between. It was minimally decorated and lit with a moody, makeshift feeling. I wandered around and immediately felt at home. It would be hard to imagine a club like this existing in today's bottle service driven, antiseptic, posed fun club world. This place was downright dangerous - lawless, dark and cavernous with nooks and crannys where anything could happen. The party was in the crystal room on the first floor, named for the giant chandelier that hung low in the middle of the room. When people danced above, the ceiling pulsed and the chandelier shook dangerously, as if it would fall at any moment. A kid named Keoki was djing. The music was a mix of early acid house and new wave classics: New Order, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, etc… Classics that were only a few years old at this time. I was in heaven. I had barely been exposed to this music but I loved it, and now I felt like I was INSIDE the music video. All around me, wild, colorful, theatrical kids inside the very room where The Talking Heads had shot their "Burning Down the House" video. I had seen it a thousand times, and recognized the backdrop immediately. The fashion was DIY - improvised. Touches of New Romantic, Gothic, and outright preposterous imagination. The It Twins, Robert and Tim were there, dressed in identical Vivienne Westwood Seditionaries outfits, with matching neon hair. Julie Jewels, a beautiful blonde girl in semi-bondage attire held court and laughed in the corner. This was the world of Grace Jones and Nina Hagen, of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, or as near and accessible a world as I could find. The club's name was appropriate. It was a melting pot.

Julie Jewels in the Crystal Room, 1988 - Photo by Stephan Lupino

I saw Michael Alig, in lederhosen, holding court near the DJ booth. I went over and introduced myself. I told him I was from Indiana, etc… and we connected. He gave me an invitation for a party the next night at a club called TRAX. I had heard about this club through the vogueing kids, who went there to hear legendary DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan.

I saw an odd, tall girl in the corner. Cute. Strange. Awkward. I studied her for a moment. She was so odd and interesting. I was feeling shy, but I thought maybe she would be at the party the next night.

At midnight, kids gathered around a punch bowl that was brought out and placed on the small stage. Michael asked if I wanted some. I was too scared to look uncool, so I didn't ask what was in it. But I was afraid to try it, so I politely declined. I didn't yet know about Ecstasy, but I was about to learn.

The Balcony at The World, 1988 - Photo by Stephan Lupino

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid: Part 5

Apr 02, 2015

Written by Kelly Cole

My last day waiting tables at the St. Moritz, I watched a homeless man emerge from central park, purposefully cross through traffic on 57th street and walk directly up to an elegant older lady sitting with her son at an outdoor table. He asked her for money, and when she politely refused, he put his cigarette out on her cheek. Boy was that fun. Then I got fired.

I had found an apartment share in the Village Voice. Bizarrely, it was with a guy from Indianapolis named John Sarno who had written some plays for my home theater group, The Phoenix, an offshoot of the Steppenwolf in Chicago, and the most progressive theater in Indianapolis. The apartment was a railroad flat with the bedroom in the far back, which was mine. John slept in a loft bed constructed directly above the front door. He was an insomniac and was very agitated and excitable. He lived on a diet of melon. Only melon. I have never heard of this diet before or since. It was one of those NY situations where stuff was piled everywhere. A small dresser on top of another dresser, with newspapers stacked on top of that. A television on a chair with a lamp on top. Nuts. We weren't a good match. I was bringing girls home, and he would angrily leap from his loft bed, nude, and chastise me. It was not a sexy situation. After one month, I moved out. My main memory of that apartment was that EVERY single day for 2 weeks, the song that woke me on my alarm radio was "Don't Worry, Be Happy". A perfect way to start a hangover. I smashed that radio into a million pieces.

I figured that since I sucked as a waiter, I would try something else. New York had at that time had an unemployment office where you could go if you actually wanted a job, and they would find you one. It was not a very busy office. It looked like the set of an employment office out of a 1940s movie. Metal desks, huge steel file cabinets, and old fashioned fans. An agent would sit with you and go through index cards of available jobs until something clicked. I found a job as a temporary clerk for a huge Japanese real estate development firm. The Japanese executives would take me to lunch and put bizarre foods in front of me and wait expectantly while I tried them, and then laugh and discuss my reactions in Japanese. I have no idea what I was eating. I was still auditioning for things, but I needed to make money. They found me entertaining, so they kept me around.

I started going out to clubs, hoping to find my people. I had been to clubs in Indianapolis. My friends and i used the stipple brush from my theatrical makeup kit to put makeup beards on our faces to get past the door security. It actually worked. Our cover was blown though when one of us made out with a girl and the beard got smeared.

The clubs in NY were slightly different. After getting turned away a few times, I figured out that I wasn't really dressed right, so I had to start building a new wardrobe. I would watch the people who WERE getting in, and try to emulate their outfits. Slowly I assembled an outfit that got me past the door. Finally.

Michael Alig was doing parties in the basement of the Tunnel at 27th and the West Side Highway, a cavernous place which had once been a repair shop for subway trains. The subway tunnel was still exposed at one end, lit up and ominous. I talked Sizemore into going with me, but we went on the wrong night. I was struck at the mix of people there: black, white, gay, straight. It was awesome. It felt like a living, visceral version of things I had seen on television. That night, I met this cute black girl who I went back to see the following week. She was friends with a group of fantastic, flamboyant, energetic, hilarious, gay kids from Harlem and the Bronx who were members of the Houses of Extravaganza, Labasia, Pendavis, etc. These were to become my first friends in New York...

They accepted me immediately and unconditionally, and taught me how to jump the train without getting caught, how to sneak into clubs, and how to protect my neck in general. I started hanging around with them. They were extremely entertaining, and as I was straight and they were all gay, there was no competition for the cute girls that were around. These kids loved to dance, and knew all the music. The songs were foreign to me, but it was exhilarating. House music was in it's infancy and there wasn't enough to fill an entire night, so DJ's were playing a mix of later disco stuff,some new wave, and other stuff to make it work as a whole set. Anytime a new house track came out and was played, there would be a major buzz that very night. "Did you hear that???"

One night some club kids came through the Tunnel handing out fliers for a party hosted by Alig at another club called The World. It was on the Lower East Side. These kids were outrageous, dressed up in ridiculous costumes and rolling through the club like a mobile circus. Absolutely insane. The flier said "X Marks The Spot" and said something about punch being served at midnight. These were the kids I was looking for.

Party Up: The Tunnel, 1988

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid: Part 4

Mar 25, 2015

Written by Kelly Cole

PART 4

I had met the legendary children's talent agent Nancy Carson at a Midwest talent roundup. She had worked with a lot of the kids that I did theater with in Indianapolis who could afford to fly back and forth to New York for auditions. We had kept in touch and she had always said that if I could come to New York, or if I could move there, that she would represent me. She was the first call I made when I arrived back from Evansville. The second call I made was to Jeff, the only other person I knew in New York: A nasal-voiced, middle-aged, unsuccessful actor whom I had worked on a play with while he was in Indy for a summer. He had been a caseworker for the NYC child welfare department, and had lost his job in some controversy. He had successfully sued the city and gotten his job back. I always thought that was a weird situation. They didn't want him there, and yet he had to interact with them every day. Must have made for a pleasant work environment. He was a weird dude to put it mildly. He had a shocking Afro of black hair, a huge nose, thick glasses and a pale unhealthy pallor. He met me at the airport in plaid shorts that clashed with his plaid button down shirt, black socks, and some type of orthopedic shoes, with a NY Yankees cap that appeared way too small for his huge head. I've never liked the look of a baseball cap on a grown man's head, especially backwards. It just looks ridiculous. We took the subway into the city. I will never forget the smell down there on that August day, a musky blend of urine, sweat, cleaning solvents and damp underground soil. It smells the same to this day during the humid months. No matter what they do to that city, they will never get rid of that smell.

Jeff had agreed to let me stay with him for 2 weeks in his filthy SRO (single room occupancy) hotel at 102nd and West End, on the Upper West Side. I had to sleep on a diagonal with my head under the bedside table and my feet in the closet. My first night in New York, dude took me to a "nice meal" as he put it. We went to the Times Square Beefsteak Charlie's. It was one of those old school New York chains. A step above Tad's steaks, but several below Sizzler. Even this wide-eyed Midwestern boy knew that this was no swanky place. Jeff informed me that I would have to keep a low profile at the hotel, so that the tyrannical manager didn't know that I was staying there. He also let me know that one night while I was there, I would have to make myself scarce during his monthly meeting with his Indian call-girl. This was his sex life.

Times Square, 1980s.

I was 17. I didn't have any friends in New York. I had been working steadily in one play after the next in Indianapolis, and assumed I would pick up where I left off in New York and immediately be welcomed with open arms into the theater community. It didn't happen like that. I did get a couple of jobs right away, including a TV movie with Jenny Wright, Cynthia Nixon, Marcia Gay Harden, Michael Rooker(who I knew from Eight Men Out), and a young unknown actor named Tom Sizemore, who would become my best friend for a while, probably because we were both maniacs. I adored Jenny Wright. She was cool, glamorous, and unlike anyone I had ever met. I hung around her as much as possible. One day we were shooting on location downtown and she told me that her friends Deborah Harry and the designer Stephen Sprouse were coming to visit the set. They were two of my heroes! Sprouse was THE coolest designer at the time, and I knew that he was from Indiana. I waited on the steps of Jenny's trailer until I saw them walking up the block. I was freaking out. Sprouse would later save my life and become one of my greatest friends and mentors.

Me & Jenny Wright.

So things were happening, but I was mostly feeling rejected by the theater community and NOT feeling like I was with my people. I was lying about my age and my experience to get work. My first day in New York, I walked around and found a job waiting tables at Cafe de la Paix in the ground floor of the St. Moritz hotel on 57th st. Salvador Dali had lived at the St. Moritz. I was perhaps the worst waiter they had ever seen. Every day the human resources lady came down and asked for my I.D. so that she could finish my paperwork. At that time, you had to be 21 to drink alcohol, but only 19 to serve it. I was 17. I had claimed to have left my license at home when I was hired, and I kept using that excuse with the human resources lady. I somehow had to get a fake I.D. I went to Times Square one night and started looking around for a shop that did fake I.D. I didn't know the area at all and sort of got lost. Times Square in 1988 was certainly not the Mall of America it is today. It was fully depressed and seedy. Many of the streets in the 40s were poorly lit, and there was flagrant illicit drug and sex activity everywhere. The police presence was focused around the theatre to protect their patrons, and other than that, it was a bit of a free for all. I was in the middle of a block, and a wiry black man bounced up to me and asked what I was looking for. I told him. I instantly knew that this was not going to end well, even as the words were coming off my lips. He told me to follow him, that his boy could do the I.D. for me. We walked fast, and as we did he talked fast, and seemed to signal to other brothers on the block. We were moving fast and I didn't know the area, and was all turned around. The guys he was signaling ended up congregated in the middle of a block, around us. He said he could now get me the I.D. It happened so fast. He threw me against the wall and they closed in. My breathing was heavy and I could feel myself beginning to tremble.

"Alright, motherfucker. How much money you got?” I was up against a wall, surrounded by about 10 guys. I was screwed. I had about $100 in 5 $20s in a folded stack in my pocket. I thought if I could pull one out and hand it to them, I would be able to get off just losing that. I tried to pull just one out, but the others peeked out with it, and they snatched them all. After checking to make sure I wasn't holding anything out on them, they flipped the script and started pursuing me as if I had done something TO THEM! I was really freaking out now, I started running toward Broadway, out of the shadows, and they followed, shouting at me. We rounded the corner and there were a pair of uniformed cops there. I ran up to them, and when they turned, they seemed to know my assailants. They spoke to them by name and told them to beat it. I was a mess. The cops flagged a taxi and asked the driver to give me a ride home to the upper west side, which he did. Big love to the NYPD for that one.

It was the summer of 1988 and there was a cover story in New York magazine about the burgeoning, colorful club kid subculture that was happening downtown. It detailed all the players, including it's ringleader, a Svengali of a kid named Michael Alig. The article said that he was from Indiana. I followed the map the article provided, and set out to find him.

It would change my life forever.

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid: Part 3

Mar 18, 2015

Written by Kelly Cole

PART 3: The Party bites back…. again.

I was, in fact, working on the film Eight Men Out. I was skipping school and working as a P.A. on set. I had auditioned for a role they were casting locally, and couldn't do it as I had braces and the film was set in 1919.

But I wasn't about to miss out on this circus that had rolled into town: John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, D.B. Sweeney, Michael Rooker, Christopher Lloyd, New York indie icons Richard Edson and Bill Irwin, and the relatively unknown John Mahoney and David Strathairn. So I showed up and asked them to put me to work. I had seen "Brother From Another Planet" and was stoked to be around John Sayles. I asked him questions from time to time and he always took the time to answer. One night, we were preparing to shoot an outdoor scene at sunset and it began to rain. I knew that the scene didn't call for rain, and was curious how he would accomplish it. Sayles began to explain to me what filters would be used, etc... and I nodded and pretended to understand. During his lengthy explanation, my radio began to chirp with "John to set". After a couple of times, he reached down and turned the volume off on my radio and completed his explanation before returning to set. He was a class act if every I met one.

It was fun learning about filters, and being around a film set, but it was really all about the party - the fantasy of being involved in something real, something important, and the escape of getting loaded with these interesting and famous people every night. One legendary night, Cusack hired a beekeeper to frame out the door to Sweeney's room with a net and fill it with bees, so that when he came out in the morning an angry swarm would be waiting for him. Serious high jinx. I went to see the Circle Jerks with Cusack, my first punk show..

U2's The Joshua Tree tour came through town, and we went en masse to the show. It was a legendary night. Los Lobos was opening for U2, and their flight was late. To keep the crowd happy, u2 put on wigs, and came out as a "local group", the Dalton Boys, and did some country songs. About halfway through the set, the crowd started realizing it was them and went nuts. Sheen was supposed to leave a ticket for me at the will-call window. Apparently, in his drug addled haze, he forgot. Luckily a guy from Amnesty international was hanging around the window, and seeing my predicament, gave me a ticket. I went inside to join everyone and found Charlie hammered off his face backstage. I mean beyond. At this point in my life, I had never seen anyone wasted like this. He had a guy who would fly into Indianapolis with his required pharmaceuticals. The guy would literally pull up in a car from the airport with nothing more than a briefcase, and they would disappear for a bit, and the guy was out of there. One time, a dubious FedEx package addressed to a crewmember was intercepted by the Police and an investigation ensued. I was partaking in as much of the revelry as possible. I learned about Cocaine's popularity during this shoot, and having been warned about it, I abstained. It was all so captivating to me: the drugs, the circus community, the fame. I was busy keeping up with the lies I was telling to my school, to the film, and to the girls I was meeting. I was getting really good at dealing with my lack of self-esteem and self knowledge through creating fiction about myself.

One weekend toward the end of the shoot, I was entrusted with a van to pick up legendary actor Clifton James, and literary titan Studs Terkel at the airport. They were arriving on a Sunday, and the production office was going to be closed. I lived near the airport so it was an easy gig for me. My parents were out of town, and an opportunity for a serious party on that Saturday prior could not be missed. I was out until all hours with the crew. I set 3 alarms to wake up for the pick-up but still slept through it - all day. Of course there were no cell phones at this time, so Terkel & James were stuck at the airport in a strange city, with no one to call, and no idea where they were going. After several hours someone had stopped into the production office and noticed the phone ringing off the hook. Needless to say, everyone was slightly pissed. I was swiftly fired and I was devastated. The art department took pity on me and gave me a job. I finished out the shoot loading trucks and sitting in warehouses.

Studs Terkel

Because of the notice I had received for the work I had been doing in the local theater, I had been offered a full ride theater scholarship to the University of Evansville in southern Indiana. It was certainly the best theater school in the state, and one of the best in the Midwest. They selected only a handful of students each year, and it was a real honor. My parents couldn't really afford to put me through school, and my grades weren't so great by this point, so this was my best chance at a quality education. I went to look at the campus, and I was overwhelmed with a claustrophobic feeling. I could not sit here for 4 years. Thinking things through and listening to reason were not my strongest assets. So the decision was made…

I was going to New York.

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid: Part 2

Mar 10, 2015

Written by Kelly Cole

PART 2: ALL ACCESS

I had a knack for finding my way to whoever was important, wherever I was. I just figured it out. At NBA games, at the Indy 500, at Christian concerts, wherever. I craved access, excitement, and I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't meet you if you were exciting. When I was 13, I went with my cousin Brent to see Lionel Richie and Tina Turner - my first proper concert. I bought a program, and saw that Lionel had 3 break dancers from LA on the tour with him(exclusively for the "All Night Long" showstopper encore). I was like "I can talk to these guys. I had a crew." It was true that I had attempted a breakdancing crew. Two of us. We never actually DANCED, but we made a cool logo and listened to hip hop. I walked around the arena until I found the backstage entrance. As soon as I saw one of the breakdancers, I leapt. I made friends with them, as they were bored out of their minds in Indianapolis, and this fast-talking 13-year old must have been at the least an entertaining diversion. Before I knew it, I was backstage getting Lionel's autograph. My cousin and I then hung out with them until all hours at the hotel lobby. My mom was pissed.

I went to see INXS in 1987. I had made a bogus MTV Staff ID with a little cut-and-paste magic. It worked like a charm on the geriatric security guard at Market Square arena(where Elvis Presley performed his final concert). I wandered around backstage after the show until I found Michael Hutchence, shirtless in a fur coat, arm in arm with 2 babes. I walked right up to him, threw him whatever line of b.s. I was spinning, and ended up kicking it with him, and the babes, but I didn't have the kind of game to hang for very long.

And then there was the Eddie Murphy RAW show(also at Market Square Arena). This was at the absolute height of his fame. I had read a Rolling Stone cover story on Murphy which detailed how his operation worked, and how his family: cousins, uncles, etc..., were his infrastructure. I waited around after the show until I saw his Uncle Ray, who I had learned was his tour manager, onstage directing the break-down. I quickly briefed my friend on what I was about to do, went up to the edge of the stage and just completely freestyled it:

"Uncle Ray?"

"Yeah?"

"Hey, is Eddie still around or did he split?"

"Aw man, he's long gone"

"Damn. Ok, well if you speak to him, would you let him know that Tony Scott's nephews were here and said thanks?"(I didn't even realize this would have made us RIDLEY Scott's sons)

"You Tony Scott's nephews?"

"Yes sir"

"Hold on a second"

Uncle Ray got on his radio and walked toward the back of the stage. In a flash, he was back and offering his hand down to us to pull us onstage. Bingo. I knew it would work. So without saying another word, we followed him through a maze of backstage rooms. When we got to what I KNEW to be my heroes', the Indiana Pacers, locker room, I was amazed not only that I was in that holy room, but by what I saw. There were about 40 girls of varying races (as much as that is possible in Indianapolis) with numbered buttons on their chests, sitting in rows of folding chairs. One of Eddie's cousins was standing at a podium giving some kind of instructions. We continued through a maze of rooms until we came to a door at the end of a hallway. Uncle Ray opened it and motioned us in. Inside: Eddie Murphy and a young couple that he seemed to know. After a few minutes the couple left. We were sitting there with Eddie. Me, my goofy friend Keith, and Eddie Murphy.

"You Tony's nephews?" Eddie asked.

"Yeah."

"What are you doing in Indianapolis?" he queried.

"I don't know. Haha. Actually, I'm working on the John Sayles film Eight Men Out."

"Oh, cool...." (awkward pause) "You coming to the after party?"

"Uh, yeah. Ok."

"Have Ray sort you out."

We left. It was so bizarre. Had we really just done that? On to the after party…

We arrived at the Indianapolis Hilton (same hotel where Mike Tyson allegedly had his scurrilous encounter some years later) and apparently Eddie had rented the entire hotel. His security were at the elevators with walkie-talkies directing people to various locations. We were given clearance to go to the after party suite. While waiting for the elevator, a few of the numbered locker room girls arrived. One of the security guards would announce their arrival, giving their description and number over the radio. A voice would come back with a room number, and they were given individual keys. Seemed odd, but we didn't think much more of it. We went to the suite, which was more like half a floor. Periodically, one of the girls would turn up in the after party. After a while, I couldn't take it any longer and when over to one of them, a hot redhead in an extraordinarily tight dress. The type of girl I had theretofore only seen in music videos.

"What was that number thing all about”?

"I went to a room and waited. Eddie came in and chatted with me for a minute. Then he left"

"That was it?"

"Yeah. He asked me some questions about my sexuality. I guess he wasn't feeling me"

Damn, Eddie.

Written by Kelly Cole

Confessions of a Club Kid: Part 1

Mar 03, 2015

Written by Kelly Cole

PART 1: EXPOSURE TO THE OTHER HALF

As some of you may know, I was a notorious troublemaker and club kid in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a crazy journey that provided me with many stories that my friends have long been encouraging me to write. So here we go...

Me in 1984.

I want to start by explaining how I ended up in New York in the first place...

I grew up in a working class, Christian home in Indianapolis, with Very little exposure to culture. When I was 10, we got the then-brand-new technology of cable television. I became obsessed with the late night programming. The imagery and personalities I saw there were a surreal departure from my surroundings. I became fascinated with what I saw on shows like “Night Flight” and “Video Jukebox” and the strange films that were aired at these hours. In 1981, I was 11 years old, and MTV made its debut on the airwaves. It may be hard to understand it, given what it later became, but MTV at that time was incredible. It was a portal into a world that I didn't even know existed. Segments involving the likes of Jean Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol or artists like Devo or David Bowie blew my mind. I was like "where are these people? WHO are they?" I just knew that these were my kind and I wanted to find them in my world.

I went to see a play at the professional theater in Indianapolis, Indiana Repertory Theater, on a school trip. The play was Moliere's "The School for Wives". A dashing, exciting farce. I couldn't believe it. The vibe in the Theater was pulsing. It was exactly like what I had seen on MTV: Adult, weird, exciting. I knew instantly that I had to be a part of it. I had never truly felt like I fit in, no matter what my experience ACTUALLY was. I mean, I was popular at school, girls liked me, I was academically prodigious, but it all felt wonky. I felt as if, despite my achievements or apparent aptitude for whatever situation I was in, once people found out how weird I was, they would abandon me. I knew it would be different here. I could tell that this is where all of the people who thought differently, who were curious, who had ideas questioning to the status quo found communion with others. I had to be a part of it. I set out with an obsession to make it happen. I started doing whatever I had to do. I took city buses to auditions. I embellished my resume. School plays, Community Theater, crime re-enactments for the local news. Whatever. I didn't have an idea that I would be "famous". I just did it because it seemed like it was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I loved the communion with the often-older people. Talking about politics, art, and music. I felt nurtured in a way that I never had. Family and teachers often questioned whether it was an intelligent choice for someone with such academic promise, but I couldn't even hear it. I was certain that this was my path. Logic was no opponent for my obsession, once it was married with my burgeoning interest in girls and alcohol. I was on my way to finding my demi-monde.

Dennis & Hackman, 'Hoosiers' still.

There was big news in Indianapolis in 1985, my sophomore year in high school. A Hollywood film was coming to town. It was all over the TV and newspapers. Gene Hackman and Barbara Hershey were coming to town to film "Hoosiers" about Indiana Basketball in the 1950s. I was obsessed. I had to get involved. An open call for extras was publicized. My Dad took me and dropped me off. In typical fashion, I sought out the right person and asked if I could be involved. I was directed to a casting director who asked me if I could basically be on call as a "continuity" extra. Since the story centered around a high school basketball team, they would need lots of young extras as students at the school, games, etc... Of course I could be on call! My school had very poor attendance, so they had devised a system whereby you could make up multiple days of school by sitting in a study hall for 4 hours on Saturday Mornings. I exploited it. I must have missed 20 days of school shooting and made them all up in about 6 Saturdays. I was having the time of my life. There were cute girls, plenty of alcohol, and exciting, worldly types from New York and Los Angeles who seemed to embrace me as one of their own.

Dennis Hopper was also in the cast. He had recently gotten sober after years and years of notorious drug and alcohol abuse and insane living. I knew a bit about him and was fascinated by him. He always sat alone and seemed slightly nervous. Everyone else was so confident and he seemed so out of place. I didn't really understand the full magnitude of his career and life story, but I knew a bit about him. One day I walked over and sat down with him. A bold move. We struck up a conversation and became pals. One Friday night we were riding back to the hotel in a van and Dennis asked the driver if he knew where James Dean's grave was. The driver said he was actually from Fairmont, Dean's hometown. Dennis said he had never been and asked the driver if he would mind taking him on Sunday, our day off. The driver was completely stoked to take the screen legend to the grave of his old friend. Dennis turned to me and asked me if I would like to go. I couldn't believe it! Of course! I was ecstatic. This was exactly the kind of experience I was dreaming about. Saturday night, I went out with some guys from the movie. We got hammered. I drank more than I ever had to that point. I was slightly embarrassed about my age and I watched my curfew come and go. My pride about how these guys would perceive me if I said something far eclipsed my fear of getting in trouble. My mom was waiting up when I got home. I was grounded. Monday at work, Dennis sees me and comes over. "Where the hell were you?" he asks half-angry. Imagine the embarrassment of telling Dennis Hopper you were grounded. There are no words...

Me, Dennis, & Andres Serrano (1995) Me, Dennis, & Andres Serrano (1995)