Three Packed Cups
Over the last month I watched more soccer than in the previous 46 years of my life. My office mysteriously acquired cable TV shortly before the World Cup began (hello, I have English employers), and my co-workers very kindly endured my non-stop critique on the varying hotness of the players, expressing bafflement when I told them that English footballer Wayne Rooney was becoming somewhat of a gay pinup idol. Yeah, I don't get it either. And he does look like Shrek. I also puzzled them when I vowed my soccer allegiance to Trinidad, but not Tobago.
For the Final, the Farmboyz, Vasco, David and I joined a extremely packed house at Chelsea's Gym Bar, arriving at the unholy hour of 1:30pm. I was already hungover and sleep deprived from the previous night, in which the Farmboyz and I visited the East Village's Boys' Room, the twink bar to end all twink bars, where we squicked out the young smooth baby fags with our creepy elderly hairiness. Ordinarily, you couldn't get me into a place like Boys' Room if I was being dragged kicking and screaming by kicking and screaming drags. But Father Tony has a unhealthy obsession with Amanda Lepore, who'd been advertised as the evening's hostess. However, Ms. Lepore merely made a 30 second appearance on the stage to introduce the evening's true MC, gay white boy rapper Cazwell, before she retired to the VIP room, disappointing Father Tony immensely.
Cazwell proceeded to work the crowd, exhorting PYT's to enter the evening's Go-Go Idol contest. The four contestants included an Amazonian chestally-enhanced female named Muscles, who looked frighteningly like Bridgette Nielsen and who thrusted her enormous DD-cup silicone fun-bags into the faces of startled patrons too slow to flee the stage's perimeter. One of the contestants was so shit-faced that he fell on his first two attempts to climb onto the stage. Ah, youth. This was the second strip-contest-esque event I'd been to in less than a week, the other being a July 4th wet underwear contest on the roofdeck of the Eagle, where contestant Rob won a sweet mountain bike, as much for his overall wet hotness as for the impromptu handlebar fellatio he performed on the mountain bike. Our lives, lived with dignity.
The Farmboyz and I fled the Boys Room to the Phoenix next door, where we were only one generation older than the patrons, which felt slightly better. At 3am, I startled the Famboyz by announcing that I had to leave at once, if I was meeting them for a pre-World Cup brunch in 8 hours. I don't know how I used to do it. They stayed out past 5am. And they were already seated at Food Bar when I arrived at 1130am. I don't know how they do it.
Apparently there are about 500 gay Italian ex-pats living in Manhattan and they were all jammed into Gym Bar by the opening kick. It was seriously, miserably, overpacked. A really crabby hungover person threatened to his friends that he was going to call the fire department. But I didn't. Hello, Gym Bar? It's called a doorman. Look into it. (Yeah, still crabby.) The crowd was extremly boisterous as everybody got their Sports Masculine on, even if they were doing it with Gucci sunglasses perched on their hairdos and Brazilian flip-flops on their feet. Interestingly, the biggest roar was elicited not by a rough tackle or a goal, but by a quick glimpse of President Clinton in the stands.
Pressed up against a wall with a shelf in my back and a nonstop crush of passersby elbowing and shoving me, I finally bailed when the game went into overtime, arriving home just in time to see French player (and Christian Dior model) Zidane get sent off for a head-butting an Italian player. The 16-second video clip of the head-butt is already the #1 most-watched item on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, Zidane is hot. Chips, bag, etc. But was anybody else rocking on that smokin' Argentinean referee with the salt-n-pepper hair? He appears to be a bottom, too.
