An absolute must-see if you've missed it. I'm not sure what part I like more:

-The "Party Animal" shirt
-The use of the term "Donkey Rope"
-The Alf puppet or
-Blowing a line with a human-size straw on roller blades.

You decide.

Prepare to be offended.

As I mentioned in a previous post, yesterday marked the club Pink Elephant’s third anniversary. And in typical Pink style, the miser owners of the establishment are milking the event for all it’s worth with no not one, but three nights of celebration – Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t try to stretch it out to a whole week).

I remain flabbergasted by the fact that Pink Elephant has existed for only three years. I feel like I’d heard about it since my childhood (shows I had a messed up childhood). And the club has already taken up foreign residence in several European and soon-to-be South American countries.

This is all extremely disturbing. If one club has wreaked this much havoc on New York nightlife (and on my life personally) in a mere 1,080 days, what will it be capable of in ten years? It has already attempted to become a planet. What’s next? Will it have a Chelsea 27th street clubbing monopoly? Will it shut down Marquee? Will there be Pink Elephant champagne? (They already have their own vodka.) Pink Elephant spas? Resorts? Games at Atlantic City? A Pink clothing line?

Dear God. Make it stop!

Despite the fact that the DJ whose music I want to make love to was spinning on Wednesday night, I showed up only for the Thursday segment of the celebration as “special gifts” were promised to all the tables from the “Pink Elephant family” according to the invitation. Who is the Pink Elephant family anyway? I picture a bunch of Scrooge-like accountants in a back office drinking scotch and using patrons’ credit cards to cut cocaine lines before they snort, cruelly sniffle, and then ring the card up for a seven thousand dollar charge. But hey, who knows? Maybe it’s even worse than that.

Knowing it would be hectic night, I arrived at 12 am sharp. This clearly wasn’t early enough as the door looked like something out of a comedy sketch: people tripping over one another, dodging umbrellas, bodysurfing forward in an attempt to get a word in edgewise with the unsympathetic doormen. There were throngs people outside the door from every angle, and literally no one was getting it. All we kept hearing was:

“Clear the sidewalk. Clear the sidewalk, please. I need my sidewalk clear. No. No. The answer is NO. Clear my sidewalk please.”

It was it’s own mini version of Hell. But soon we realized what had all of Pink’s bouncers’ balls in a knot; Rihanna and her remarkably unattractive posse were working their way into the club with bodyguards etc.

Gross.

When she passed, I really wanted to ask her for an umbrella considering it was slightly drizzling and she managed to produce a number one hit pop tune containing only the word ‘umbrella,’ but my friends advised me against it. Once she got through, the door laxed slightly and we were finally ushered in after I had my ID photographed with a digital camera. Apparently scanning IDs just isn’t enough anymore and now Pink can access my driving record (and I’m sure a bunch of other government records as well.)

Great.

The music was what I call ‘B Minus house,’ i.e. house music spun by someone who actually has no house music experience, just spent several summers being a DJ in Ibiza (NOT the same thing). It tends to be really thumping, unoriginal, and unpleasant unless you’re on ecstasy, in which case dancing to Raffi would feel like a unique pleasure. The place was also crowded to the point that I made it my own personal mission to never leave my elevated spot at the table for fear of being molested, trampled, and burned by flaming cigarettes poking out from the crowd in every direction.

The so-called ‘gifts’ tables supposedly received seemed to be these large Dom Perignon buckets of what look like green larva and Dom Perignon champagne stand holders made of plastic. Unimpressive.


Here's the green larva gift bucket from another angle complete with a photographer trying to snap a pic of Rihanna (not visable) and an woman oddly (inappropriately?) wearing a pantsuit.

The only part of the evening I found especially entertaining was also a horrifying example of how Pink Elephant will soon be a ride at adult Disney Land. That's this huge, fuzzy Pepto-Bism0l pink elephant in the DJ booth - who then ran through crowd.



I snapped this picture as one of the impractically enormous, child-size bottles of 5 grand champagne was making its way toward me.


Note that the pink confetti you see on the bottle was drizziling down on all of us for most of the evening. I spent this morning trying to remove the champagne soaked confetti from the inside of my purse. The stuff got everywhere.

Festive? Maybe. Fun? Absolutely not.

I knew the Linanimal’s solo trip to Amsterdam would be an irrevocable disaster from the get-go. My prediction was confirmed when she phoned me from the Rome airport and cheerfully announced that she had forgotten her passport.

“You what!??!?!” I exclaimed.

“I’m in some sort of security room. I think they’ll let me through though. I have my German identification,” she breathlessly broadcast.

From her tone, it was unclear if she was telling me this for my own personal amusement or because she was hyperventilating and desperately needed someone to talk to. I could never tell with her.

“You can’t travel without a passport. Even if you get through, how will you get back IN?” I pointed out. See. I was a smart fifteen-year-old.

“I just don’t want them to call my parents,” was Linanimal’s non-sequitur answer.

Who were this girl’s parents?

The Linanimal was sounding wackier by the minute. We hung up, and I never got confirmation that she had indeed made her flight and arrived in Amsterdam until several days later. Bartok and I were midway through our vacation in Florence (a vacation which deserves its own separate mini-series – a mini-series I’d write if I thought I could paste together any of those barely-memorable, frighteningly intoxicated nights, nights when the concept of unlimited alcohol was still a novelty…I think you the picture) when Linanimal called us shrieking, crying, barely decipherable, wailing things like:

“My life is superimposed on the ceiling. I’m so scared. The chair’s attacking me. So many colors. The window’s the devil. Waaaaah!”

It took us about forty minutes of Gandhi-like patience to get some straight answers out of her. The synthesized version is that she bought shrooms and thinking that a package full was a single dose, ate them all. Yeah. She’d ingested the equivalent of shrooms for a small house party all by herself. She was alone in her hotel room in Amsterdam, tripping, and freaking the fuck out.

Here’s a question for you all: What do you say to someone in that situation?

I credit Bartok for being thoroughly more helpful than I. She’s the one who got Linanimal to spit out story of what happened and suggested she throw up, much better advice than mine which was to “take deep breaths and close your eyes.” She didn’t want to close her eyes because doing so resulted in entering “a scary place.” I mean, what do you say to someone who’s in another country and thinks furniture is attacking them?

And here’s the second million-dollar question: How do you ever get this person off the phone?

It’s pretty difficult. Hence why Bartok and I traded off phone duty in front of Italian MTV for the majority of the afternoon. I wish I could remember more specifics, but I think in the end she puked. She called again several days later announcing that Amsterdam was fab and she’d seen the Van Gough museum. She’d also figured out that her parents would inevitably find out about her trip through her credit card and phone bills.

Duh.

You’d think as semi-professional delinquents we’d all have thought of that earlier.

Now I know you’re all currently musing that maybe Linanimal’s whole trip was a ruse. A prank. A way for her to entertain us while she spent winter vacation happily eating and laughing her ass off on her apartment floor. I considered the possibility. I mean, the entire trip was crazy and broke every school rule, not to mention international transit laws. But the truth remains that Linanimal returned to Italy with photo proof of her trip and several bras worth of narcotics that she never could’ve acquired in Italia. That’s right. She smuggled drugs from Amsterdam to Italy in her BRA. She then did shrooms (in the correct dosage) with many of our classmates, and everyone had a positive experience. I often regret not taking part as shrooms are a drug I’ve always wanted to try, and don’t think I have the nerve for as an adult.

For our purposes, the story of Linanimal culminates at the end of the school year party. She came shroomed out and naked, wearing only the German flag somehow stylized into a dress with safety pins. I think some teachers made her change.

After that, Linanimal ended up back in the States, then at St. Andrews in Scotland, then back in the States again, always with her devoted boyfriend from her hometown who she’d met right after we finished high school. In short, they’ve been engaged forever, not without some minor bumps, but those are other stories for another day, stories which I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling without Linanimal’s permission. And next month, Linanimal and her beloved are participating in a handfasting ceremony, which according to Linanimal is like a religious wedding ceremony but without the legal aspects because she needs to retain her parent’s current insurance in order to attain some sort of medication (see, she hasn’t changed that much). Yet at the end of the day, I think Linanimal is the only person I’ve met in this world that I can conclusively say has found true love. Someone who loves her with all her quirks. So wedding? Handfasting ceremony? I don’t think it makes a difference.

And you know what? I’m happy for her.

Women cumulate many groups of female friends over a lifetime: childhood friends, sports friends, high school friends, international friends, college friends, work friends, partying friends, writer friends – the list goes on and on. The mystery remains who in this colorful array of female acquaintances will be the first to get married? Move to a suburb? Have a baby? The answer to these questions is rarely who you’d expect.

On a notoriously long phone call with Bartok this past weekend; we noted that the winner of the marriage race is going to be someone we’d have defined as kids as an unlikely candidate. This is the story of Linanimal, an eccentric female friend of ours who attended high school with us in Italy.

Why the name Linanimal? While this works as a codename, this is in fact what we often called her years ago. Her proper nickname began with an “L,” and we called her “the animal.” These two concepts were abbreviated and the ‘Linanimal’ was born. Linanimal was a high school female version of your stereotypical class clown. Her goal seemed to be the identifiable ‘outrageous one’ in every situation. She strived to make people laugh, and especially to make her close female friends laugh, a task she succeeded in, whether it was signing her credit card receipts at the local restaurant with the signature “S & M is good for me,” sexually eating muffins, or doing obscene things with bananas in museums on school field trips.

I fear not all of this humor was planned on her part. The animal was on tons of whacko medication that none of us had even heard of. She did have a stash of Adderall that circulated the school during exam time, but most of the pills she sucked down weren’t even stuff an adventurous high school druggie would want to sample. I never knew if she was crazy because she failed to take her meds regularly, or if it was actually the meds that made her hyperactively irresponsible.

I guess I’ll never know.

Linanimal was somewhat of an international as she had previously lived in Germany and spoke the language well. In English, she was often difficult to understand as she was eating 90% of the time and usually had her mouth completely full. Despite this fact, she remained remarkably thin. We found her simultaneously disgusting, entertaining, and somehow lovable – like a pet bulldog. Her sense of adventure was unparalleled; she explored new places with an ungraceful vigor and pushed the envelope until we all squealed with discomfort. Ultimately, we adored her for how far she went each and every day to make us cry with laughter.

While Linanimal was attractive (at least when her mouth wasn’t catapulting forth crumbs), she seemed basically A-sexual. She took no romantic interest in Italian men or our male classmates, although she would often excitedly hump furniture for our amusement. When Linanimal dressed up and swiped on eyeliner she was undeniably hot. Her wardrobe was sassy for a fifteen-year-old’s and we shared clothes. Bartok in fact, still to this day has one of her black halter-tops that never found its way back to Linanimal’s closet. Yet even decked out in a black evening dress, the animal surrendered to her inner comedian, whether by flashing her leopard skin bra or throwing her high heels into a nearby Italian military camp.

The animal’s Italian host family had an apartment right in the center of the city, which placed Linanimal at the center of most social activities. If you wanted to stay out all night, go clubbing, get drunk, or generally misbehave, sleeping over at the Linanimal’s infamously messy lair was a must. On any given Saturday night, half our high school would be technically “sleeping over” at her place. The good news is none of our parents ever communicated with each other and therefore remained oblivious to the fact that “sleeping over at Linanimal’s” was code for indulging in every illegal activity known to teenagers. The bad news was that if you weren’t tight friends with the animal, you ran the risk of getting locked out of her apartment and wandering the city streets till dawn. The basic rule remained that Linanimal’s apartment keys were always left outside the front of her house in a large plant. Whenever Linanimal would leave a bar to go home, there’d be a general chorus from everyone at our school:

“Remember to leave the keys in the plant! Leave the keys in the plant!”

As Linanimal wasn’t stable and appeared drunk at all times, we’d chant this to her continuously as parents would give instructions to a small child. We always knew that on a whim, if feeling evil, she might take the precious apartment keys inside with her, rendering the rest of us homeless for the weekend. Stumbling up the steps of Linaminal’s apartment at five in the morning I remember all of us secretly praying, “please let the keys be in the plant, please let the keys be in the plant.” Seventy percent of the time they were, thirty percent of the time you ended up sleeping in the drained fountain in the nearby piazza Rialto and taking the five thirty am bus back home.

Looking back, I commend Linanimal for being in the business of outrageous fun. Some of my fondest high school memories involve her at the focal point. She was one of the few students with a laptop that played DVDs, which meant every school field trip (of which there were a lot) the ‘cool kids’ got to chill with her on the back of the bus watching films beyond our years like Pulp Fiction, the notoriously scary K.I.D.S, and Boogie Nights. If in class, she’d sit in the front of the room with her computer and we’d watch the movies on silent with subtitles.

Linanimal referred to our school principal as “MoFo” (the abbreviation of ‘mother fucker’) often to his face and had a flair for making Italians as uncomfortable as humanly possible by utilizing her weird faces, broken Italian, and unusual eating habits. She once screamed at the top of her lungs at a pricey restaurant when served fish with the head still intact. And her general outrageousness extended beyond school grounds. She had the nasty habit of purposely dripping candle wax from her apartment window onto cars parked in the street below, often ruining the vehicle’s paint job. Linanimal also got a kick out of cleaning her room by throwing garbage out her bedroom window. These things caught the attention of the Italian police but she eventually got out of jail time by paying some sort of fine, a fine of which she ultimately only paid half. Note: Everything in Italy is negotiable.

When winter break arrived, the school broke down into various groups of friends that decided to vacation together. Bartok and I set off for Florence and Linanimal was determined to assert her independence by traveling somewhere by herself. We weren’t allowed to leave Italy without hefty paperwork from our actual parents. But our headmaster MoFo’s pesky rules were not going to stop Linanimal from going to the one place that people like her should never be allowed to go.

Yep, you guessed it.

Amsterdam.

To Be Continued…

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.