Cajun Boy in the City recently and perceptively created an accurate analogy in which the NYC clubbing establishment Pink Elephant is Heath Ledger and I, Model Behavior am Jake Gylennhal whining, "I wish I knew how to quit you." This astute remark not only rang as true to my house-music damaged ears, but also reminded me to give Brokeback Mountain a second watch on DVD.
The truth is I’d like to quit Pink. I’d run into a lot less people I’d rather not see, my alcohol calorie intake would drop significantly, and I’d no longer have Bob Sinclair in my head 99% of my working hours. But as in dealing with any addiction, walking away cold turkey is rarely the best strategy. That’s why I’ve often wished a new Manhattan club, far from meatpacking or the 27th street strip, would open, providing me with a fresh, more private, and perhaps even less douchey location to waste my inebriated nights.
Finally, my wish has come true.
Sort of…
This Friday my friend Safari did the impossible – she took me to a club I’d never seen or even heard of that wasn’t a remake of another failed establishment. She described it as:
‘A new hotspot. Small. Intimate. Top crowd. Think Bungalow. Meet there 1 am.”
Naturally, I was hooked and Bartok and I began preparing outfits. Perhaps the best perk of writing this blog is that a great deal of social misconduct can be justified as “research.” So off we went and at around one thirty am climbed the rickety, filthy stairs which led us to this supposedly secret, new lair of treachery – the club upon which I’m bestowing the code name ‘The Inferno.’ Why? Because the activities taking place inside this undisclosed joint too closely mirror Dante’s description of the third circle of Hell.
When my eyes first swept across the club it appeared empty. The music sounded, as I’d describe, ‘lame.’ I’m not a big fan of large empty spaces when I’m going out. Breathing room is appreciated, but especially after one thirty I feel any place worth its salt should theoretically be rockin full of people. So I’ll describe my first emotional state upon entering the Inferno as ‘disappointment.’
The bar was void of human activity. The entire crowd consisted of six or seven tables in an elevated privet. Bartok, Safari, and I ascended the small stairs to mesh with our fellow party seekers. We said hello to our host, and around this time I was overcome by my second strong, reactive emotion of the evening, this one similar to a kick in the stomach – ‘horror.’ I was surrounded by dozens of baby models, some swaying back and forth in a seated, drug induced stupor, others performing lap dances, some grooving to their own queer beat, some spastically twitching as if being continually electrocuted by barbed wire. For those of you lucky enough to be ignorant of this phenomenon, I’ll explain that baby models are dangerously attractive girls, usually foreign, and always under the age of twenty-one (often under the age of eighteen) who hang out at places like Cipriani’s Upstairs and now the Inferno because of these institution’s extremely lax carding procedures. I wanted to open my mouth to scream but before I could manage our host (kindly?) stuck a joint in my mouth which I had to immediately focus on spitting out since I don’t smoke.
I was momentarily ‘wowed’ by the fact that this place was so chill and so clearly unconcerned with keeping their license that they were letting people smoke joints in public, until I noticed a man in a striped shirt doling out cocaine on his house key to the six baby models the surrounded him. Now I literally double taked. I mean, in the Old Fashion privet in Milan I once, repeat once, saw crazy Arabs do lines off their club table in public, only to be scolded by their bodyguards moments later. Even in Hollywood, Milan, everyone had the common decency to go inside the handicapped bathroom to get snow-blown. Here, keys of cocaine were being innocently passed around as if they were maraschino cherries. Had I taken a wrong turn up the creaky stairs and ended up in some sort of time warp ala Studio 54?
Me and my girlfriends shared a look of mutual shock before shrugging and pouring ourselves drinks. My first instinct was to have a Peroni and then high tail it out of there to attend some less novel location, like the city’s standard Friday night at Room Service. I mean, the DJ was playing 50 Cent, the place was empty except for the privet, the palm trees were faker looking than Bungalow’s, and the poor bathroom attendant was dressed in a joker costume (complete with multi-pronged hat). This just wasn’t my scene.
Three glasses of an anonymous brand vodka brand later, Safari, Bartok and I had somehow magically meshed into the crowd. The fact that the club was 80% women, 40% of which hadn’t celebrated their sweet sixteen, no longer seemed as bothersome as it has upon our arrival. Since there was no crowd surrounding the DJ booth, I gave him some musical instructions to which he was extremely receptive. The musical situation improved. At around two thirty, I again considered heading over to Room Service, the same moment in which our Room Service Friday night crowd strolled into the Inferno themselves. Wow. Maybe this place really was going to be something good.
I went to the bar and got the Inferno low-down from one of the Pakistani owners. It had been open about a month, but only for private parties and events related to fashion week. Jay-Z had been there on Tuesday, blah blah blah. You get the picture. They’d recently been letting ‘civilians’ in on a very limited basis – only people they could trust (probably a smart policy since the amount of illegal activity going on in there required two hands to count). The owner insisted he didn’t want anyone to know about the place. I admitted to him that in preparation of my arrival, I had googled the club’s real name and come up with nothing. And google’s a hard monster to hide from. So I promised the owner I’d write about my experiences at the club with the utmost discretion for the time being. Let’s not fool ourselves. In six weeks, this place will be the new 'The Box' and it’s name with be zipping through Manhattan like wildfire.
The Inferno theoretically stays open until six am (also illegal), but Bartok insisted we leave at around four thirty am to attend after hours, which was being held at a large man’s house nearby. This jovial after hours host was sporting a long white beard, wearing a kilt and had a yellow sash across his chest. Weird? Definitely.
Everyone piled into cabs and entered what appeared to be a federal building. That’s right: a federal building. Our host, Mr. King of Scotland enjoyed serving more drugs to baby models by the small square bar at the far side of his enormous high-ceiling loft. I got immediately distracted by his ping-pong table and began playing matches against fellow partygoers. I used to compete in New England level tennis tournaments, so like to think of myself as a kind of ping-pong princess extraordinaire. Unfortunately, it was dark, making it difficult to see, and I was drunk, making it difficult to focus. Somehow I still beat my most worthy opponent and was rewarded with a pair of chopsticks as my prize (it made sense at six in the morning). At one point in the night, Bartok and I scampered around trying to find the bathroom, yet every door we opened revealed only another loft-like space filled with Apple computers. Finally, King of Scotland’s assistant escorted us to the ladies room on the federal building’s main floor. It was soon after admiring the thirty, empty, glistening bathroom stalls and noticing the security cameras everywhere that Bartok and I decided to high-tail it out of there.
The next morning, piecing together details of the Inferno, she and I both concurred we’d officially been to hell and back. I’m appropriately worried since the club’s walking distance from my apartment. Let’s all think about how often I go to Pink and realize with this place I won’t even have to set foot in a cab to get there. Dangerous? Definitely.
