Every once in a while you have an experience in your own hometown that’s so far from your personal reality that you feel like you’re in a foreign country. It happened to me a couple Thursdays ago at the Victor Hotel, when I stumbled into a benefit called Bar AIDS. Forty-seven clubs and bars were donating between 30 and 50 percent of the night’s proceeds to AIDSCare, a nonprofit that provides shelter, nutritional counseling, alternative healing therapies, and other kinds of support to underprivileged people with HIV or AIDS, and the Victor was participating.
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My friend Martha and I had walked into the West Loop club (which isn’t really a hotel but has a nice old sign that says it is) on a whim, just to get away from our usual haunts. A petite, orange-tan Ken doll named Mickey Sigler stood on the dance floor with a crowd forming a semicircle around him. Sigler spoke earnestly about AIDSCare and what it’s done for the hundreds of people it’s served over the past 14 years. It took the DJ several minutes to turn down his techno track, which obviously irked Sigler, who kept blinking and losing his place–and even then the attendees were whooping it up so loudly I could barely hear a thing.
I walked over to the bar in disbelief, watching rumps in ill-fitting garments hump other ill-dressed rumps. “I’m so horny!” I heard someone exclaim. Along one wall a couple were making out on a king-size waterbed with no sheets. A Viagra parody hit on Martha with a “Wow!” and, when that didn’t work, hit on me with a “Whoa!” and an invitation to go make out.
I never did set foot inside the Hummer, but I did manage to share my bedroom (and my bed) for two months with an ex-lover who’d returned early from a failed tour of Europe with his noise band. We called ourselves brother and sister, inspired by the main characters in Jean Cocteau’s book Les Enfants Terribles–a story about a seriously unhealthy relationship between two jealous, headstrong siblings, both of whom end up dying in extreme gestures of heartache. We fought like maniacs, often in public. The nadir was when I tried to pour bleach on his face. Or maybe it was when he threatened, the next night, to kill my pets.
