Make_____

The two of us joined the others at Tandem at approximately 11PM on a damp, mid-March Saturday. The wind blowing down Troutman Street was wet and still cold. We had numbed the long subway ride—we came from South Brooklyn via the G train, switching to the L at Metropolitan—with a Coke bottle filled three-quarters with Jim Beam. The remaining quarter of cola was allowed to remain. We were looking for Sherrie.

The backroom of Tandem was being zealously pumped opaque by a fulblast fog machine when we got there, the fog scatter-shot through with poison green, pencil-thin laser beams. A birthday party for a stranger was in swing. The birthday girl was drunk and friendly and introduced herself. She wore vintage-style lingerie made out of a sort of worn, faintly-snagged white satin. I say “vintage-style” but it may have been real vintage, because otherwise I don’t know why she would have worn that size—it bagged around her body, like a diaper worn with a romper-top. She danced with a lurch, tottering on her heels, but above her gaping white top the birthday stranger’s lips, painted pin-up red, wore an enviable grin. She didn’t give a fuck. ’Cause it was her birthday.

She had a balloon drop planned for midnight, and as our group danced in the blanketing fog, spangled with lasers, we were suddenly buffeted by falling balloons like a kind of extraterrestrial weather event. Pink rain on Venus. They were filled with air, not helium, as I guess all balloons used for balloon drops must not be, and so they quickly began to pop under the feet of the dancers, adding their offbeat, machine-gun percussion to the DJ’s blaring flow.

Our plan was never to stay at Tandem; crashing this party was our point of assembly. Once everyone arrived, got their buzz started and popped a few balloons, Sherrie led the group out the door and down the maze of Brooklyn blocks towards another party, this one hosted by the Inca Fetish.

Sherrie bounded ahead of us down the block. She was dressed in another white vintage piece, but a better and more flattering one than the unfortunately Gandhi-esque lingerie. She wore a crisp, hospital-white jumpsuit, translucent on her small frame. She wore it with Raggedy Ann pincurls twisted on her head. The white glowed faintly, reflecting back the blank glare of the streetlights.

Sherrie was the leader of a difficult to define arts’ collective—she wouldn’t like to say they did performance art, but its best stunts did fit in with what I know about the early days of performance art, the funny satire that skewered art world snobbery instead of perpetuating it. Like Joseph Beuys going around a gallery explaining the pictures to his dead hare. Something like comedy.

Her collective was mostly female (some of its members were in our group that night) and, as she explained, she thought of Inca Fetish as “the boys club to her girls club.” She had been playing some kind of art world flirtation game with them, some kind of collaboration mating dance, and this appearance at their party was expected, she conveyed in as many words, to seal the deal on making some concerted happenings.

The Inca Fetish who greeted us, about 10 to 15 boys, were all bearded, skinny, in their twenties, with a kind of hard, punk attitude. Despite currents of macho spurting through the air, they were dressed in women’s clothes. It’s unsettling to see wirey chest hair sprouting from a tight, lacey bodice. To see a dude’s junk making an bulging through a pleated skirt. There was something about their badly done, not purely buffoonish drag, that seemed sinister. An insult to women. A comment on women’s clothes, bodies and what those add up to. They were questioning whether there is more to women than the sum of parts.

Also we learned the dress-clad collective was on acid. Communally. Looking around the disarrayed loft where the party was being held, you could almost see the mass of their swirling hallucinations projected on the walls. They ushered us into the kitchen; the main table was an empty coffin up on sawhorses.

We sat in the dark main room and they showed us videos they had made. It smelled like smoke. I remember a few women lying sprawled back in dark messy corners. A flock of wheelchairs—rickety, rusting, some missing wheels—was their seating. Nonsense images flickered on the screen. I sat in a wheelchair, drinking a 40 ounce of malt liquor we had picked up at the store.

Sherrie flitted in between the bearded, tripping men in drag, but she wasn’t making any progress. She was thinking, clearly, no great collaborations of art are going to be hammered out tonight. So she rallied our group, pointing towards the exits. And it was then, in the hallway, that the party got truly weird.

The leader of the Inca Fetish, who had introduced himself earlier as Jacob, followed us out into the hall. He pushed Sherrie back. He held her pinioned against the wall. He was brandishing a cheap bottle of wine. He gripped its neck, cocking his arm back behind his head. Before anyone could react, he tipped the bottle over her head. An ocean of red booze flooded down. It covered her face, making her gasp. It drenched her white jumpsuit, rendering it see-through. Then he smashed the bottle at her feet. He yelled, “It’s art!” He disappeared into his room.

Minutes later we were outside in the cold night, trying desperately to get Sherrie into a cab. The wind was blowing even colder. It was 2AM. Sherrie shivered, huddled with us under the streetlights. Her sodden jumpsuit no longer reflecting the streetlight glow.