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Bathtubgirl Productions Cancer-Birthday Party
Friday, June 29 2001
Because of my plans to move to New York, I'd been feeling sort of left out from all the excitement and relief surrounding the Yahoo acquisition of the struggling dotcom that employs me. But today I had a meeting with my boss and he said it would actually be okay for me to work out of the New York office. So it looks like the thing I'll be telling people in New York when they ask me what I do is, "I work for Yahoo." It could be much worse. I'm considerably less embarrassed telling people I work for Yahoo than I was telling people I worked for Collegeclub.com.
For the rest of the day I was sort of giddy from this news. Not only did it relieve a lot of the stress and uncertainty about the move, but it seemed to validate me as an employee. I'm good at what I do, but most of what I get when I'm workplace-successful is relief that I finished the project. It's rare that I get the sense that I'm really necessary for the health of the company.
Somewhat disturbingly, already Yahoo integration fever is sweeping the company. An email went around today suggesting that we all stop using AOL Instant Messenger and start using Yahoo's instant messenger instead. I certainly didn't want to be known in the company as the first guy who jumped on that bandwagon, so I stuck with AIM, like everybody else.
One thing that is nice about working for a dotcom in the days of its shrinking decline is the gradual reversion to the bad old ways of doing things from the time before there were standards, procedures, and hundreds of employees. "The link goes to a 404 page, big deal!" "There's a javascript error every time you go to that page, but it still loads, right?" "QA? What QA? Throw that puppy live!"
John and Joe showed up at my workplace at some point this morning wanting to check out a $1000 Sony Vaio being sold as surplus. When one does well in Vegas, buying a Vaio seems like the next logical step. I'm so isolated in what I do in my workplace that I didn't even know where to take them to find the people in charge of such things.
In the evening Bathtubgirl was throwing a big bring-your-own-beverage party at her downtown loft, and naturally I had plans of attending. It was sort of an early affair, beginning at around 6pm. At 7:30pm I gathered up some lamps (because Bathtubgirl's place is pretty dark), and then purchased a 12 pack of Sierra Nevada at the Smart and Final (this was the first time I have ever gone to the Smart and Final in a motorized vehicle).
When I arrived at Bathtubgirl Central, there were already several dozen people there, most of whom I didn't know and some of whom I did. These included the usual Bathtubgirl Central suspects such as Linda and Julian and Snow.
Also in attendance was this guy named Zero who had flown in from Holland. For the past couple months, Bathtubgirl and Zero had been carrying on an internet love affair so intense that Bathtubgirl had actually become estranged from Snow and he'd moved into a spare storage room. But evidently there's a difference between the chemistry that is possible over the internet and the chemistry that results from personal contact in the real world, because it was pretty clear that the love affair was already over. Of course, we all willingly delude ourselves in the name of the love, and falling madly in love based only on the content of emails and phone calls is only a more extreme version of, say, avoiding the bathroom when you suspect your lover had just perfumed the place with a bowel movement.
It seemed the intensity of the party and Los Angeles and America was a little overwhelming for poor Zero. He seemed to be enjoying himself in the way that is possible while simultaneously drowning in a somatic flood.
At a certain point a number of us purchased and ate ecstasy capsules. I made the usual mistake of continuing to drink while the ecstasy was kicking in, so I didn't have quite the experience I normally have. I found myself sitting around chatting with a number of young women, most of whom were, it turns out, call girls. They all had the same basic demeanor: flattened but outgoing personalities, experienced-hardened attitudes, and a cheerful willingness to dish the shit given the opportunity.
There was also this scene where this one older ecstasy-enhanced gay gentleman who, upon discovering I was an artist, followed me around the party for a time telling me he wanted to be my "agent."
John hadn't been home when I'd left West LA so I called him and told him he should come, that it was turning into a rather good party. Eventually he arrived with his brother Joe as well as Fernando. He'd brought a couple pills of Adderall for me to take, which did much to keep the evening happening from my vantage point. The boys wandered around the party, mostly sticking with themselves. I should have introduced them to more people, but I was under assault from excessive inputs. Before long my hometurf contingent departed, heading to Café Dansa in West LA to dance the Salsa with anonymous sexy Brazilian girls.
For a time there was live DJ music, then somebody busted out an acoustic guitar for something a little more singer-songwriteresque. Later the DJ music returned, this time with a woman doing some singing on top of it.
At a certain point in the evening there were so many people at the party (well over 100) that it became something of a crowd control nightmare. People were all over the roof outside the loft and the neighbors were complaining. Bathtubgirl had to go out there on several occasions and order everyone back inside "or the police will come and shut us down!" People were compliant and did as requested. Many of them also began to leave. After about 1:30am there were only a few people left, mostly just Bathtubgirl and an eclectic group of gentlemen friends eager to serve her in various ways.
About this time John, Joe and Fernando returned from Café Dansa. I was in such a good mood by this point that it didn't seem the slightest bit unusual to just kick back and watch the various gentleman entertain Bathtubgirl as if she was a benevolent queen and they were court jesters. Most amusing of all were the antics of a certain Freddy Fantasy, a little mole-shouldered guy who had long ago shed his glittery silver disco shirt. On command, Bathtubgirl had him perform a number of performance-art-by-way-of-punkrock spoken word routines on subjects as diverse as the recreational smoking of "butt hairs" and the foul-smelling farts of a jail cellmate.
John, Joe, Fernando and I were still in a Friday night state of mind, so we went to the only other party-type-thing we knew was happening, over in the apartment building across main street. A couple of girls with massage credentials were giving low-key massages to a number of gentlemen friends in a dimly lit room. We went their ostensibly to "check things out" and report back to Bathtubgirl, but we ended up just sitting around kind of awkwardly, since we didn't really know any of the people we were visiting. As John later remarked, "What's so surprising is that they let us in there at all." Eventually we were joined by Bathtubgirl and Snow, who seemed very much in love again.
I was in no state for driving at this late stage of the evening, so I just left my Punch Buggy Rust in its sketchy parking lot and rode home with the boys in Fernando's car.
( An indication of the nature of Bathtubgirl's party was the fact that she managed to go through three of those big Arrow Springs water jugs in the course of the evening. She should have told people to bring their own water.)
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