Bouncers, Cowgirls and Cross-dressing GoGo Dancers

Lately I have been listening to  my MP3 player as I go to sleep for the night. (Read my blog from 01.24.11 for examples of what I am listening to.) The other night I had one of my best dreams in recent memory because of this.

Having no discernable plot, my dream consisted of a rapid succession of random memory flashes dealing with clubbing exploits from long ago.  I was so elated by this impromptu reunion where one vision seemed to spark others. 

I will describe (to the best of my ability) some of what I saw:

My initial sensation was that I was entering some sort alien night club to interview for a bartending position. 

I was answering a very simple bartending question when all of a sudden I found myself amid a crowd that was forged out of an amalgam of places, events and people from my past.  I recognized settings and characters from three separate phases of my earlier life:  A) “The Cowboy Palace” where I bartended while attending college in Manhattan, Ks; B) “Blayney’s of Westport” a favorite hangout of mine in Kansas City and; C) “The Pyramid Club” a club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NY (aka Alphabet City).   

The doorman in my dream was a blend of a bouncer from the Cowboy Palace and one from the Pyramid Club. These two were quite similar on the one hand and complete opposites on the other. As one would expect, both projected the macho image required of bouncers. They were solidly built and sported shaved heads. But their baldness and physical stature were about the only things they had in common.

The bouncer from Kansas, a Viet Nam vet nicknamed Stony (for his lack of facial expression, not what you are thinking), usually wore a black Jack Daniels ball-cap, faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. As apposed to the New York City cooler, who sported a dog collar around his neck, black Doc Martens on his feet and a waist length army fatigue jacket over a pink leotard & tutu combo.

Back to the dream….

I had the feeling that I was in a subterranean setting much like Blayney’s of Westport, complete with low ceilings, subdued lighting and loud music. Although there was a stuffed buffalo head mounted on the wall just like “Buffy the Buffalo” in the Cowboy Palace.  The bartenders looked familiar, but in all honesty, I’ve had so many servers over the years that the ones in my dream were a melding of them.

As I looked around, all sorts of faces jumped out at me. One was of the person sleeping next to me and others I hadn’t thought of in years. Not surprisingly, my wife was represented in the dream by the image of a whirling dervish moving through the crowd.  Aside from my wife there was a cowgirl from the Cowboy Palace; a flight attendant from New York, and that cross-dressing go-go dancer that I mentioned in the title. Each new face was accompanied by a flood of memories surrounding that person. OK, its obvious why my wife would be in my dream but is probably better that I don’t go into detail about the cowgirl or the flight attendant. It’s complicated. (I might, on a one of basis, go into greater detail on these matters after a couple shots.)

But let me take a moment to explain the cross-dressing go-go dancer thing before anyone gets too bent out of shape:

Upon relocating to New York in the early ‘80s, a childhood friend put me in touch with a fraternity brother of his who was attending Columbia University to earn his MBA. This graduate student wanted to make sure that I saw the “real” New York, not the “touristy” run of the mill uptown experience, so he volunteered to show me around. The guide and I and began our night-spot tour somewhere in the West Village.  After a beer or two the guide said that it was time to move on. Our destination was in the East Village, so we jumped in a cab and made our way across the lower tip of Manhattan. The fashionable brownstones and shops of the West Village were replaced by rundown tenement houses and abandoned buildings as we worked our way east. I really began to question the sanity of this adventure when the taxi came to a halt directly across from Thompkin Square Park (an area that, in the 80’s, was populated by the homeless and drug-users.)

There it was,  The Pyramid Club .

Getting out of the taxi I was assured that it was safe, but different, very different. Approaching the door is when I encountered that bouncer wearing the pink leotard & tutu combo. He was scanning the crowd for those that he deemed worthy enough to enter. Somehow, despite the fact that I was all prepped out in khakis, a button-down shirt and a wool Harris Tweed jacket, I was let in. I’m sure they wanted m yuppie cash. The crowd inside was more punky than I was accustomed to; there were guys and there were girls. There were guys with girls and girls with guys. There were guys with guys and girls with girls, but, hey, you get the picture…this is New York City and I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

I was standing by the stool at the bottom of this picture

The club was dark, smoky, crowded and loud. A bar, festooned with Christmas lights stretched along the wall to the right of the door, with a dance floor and a bandstand toward the back. I made my way toward the bar and ended up standing between a blonde and a redhead, who were talking to the bartenders. The bartenders mixed them each a drink and then moved on to take care of other customers. The blonde and the redhead separated. One moved to the left end of the bar while the other moved to right. And then, to my amazement, they both placed their drinks down and proceeded to climb up on top of the bar. The crowd whooped as they began to dance. Nothing too suggestive or raunchy, they were just swaying to the band.

There I was, still attempting to get my first beer as the blonde (wearing flats, fish-net stockings, a leather miniskirt, and an unbuttoned jean jacket showing a just hint of black lingerie) danced on the bar in front of me. I tried shifting to the left or the right so I could catch the bartender’s attention but the blonde mirrored my moves. I couldn’t tell if I was being mocked or flirted with, I just needed my beer. Once served, I tried to get a better read on the situation: a crowded bar, a cold beer, live music, dancing, blondes. All was right with the world.  It was time to checkout those nice looking legs dancing in front of me. I didn’t want to seem too piggish about my ogling so I decided to go from looking at ankles and knees to making direct eye contact. So I took a sip from my beer, and being the gentleman that I am, I made it a point to look past the open jacket and aim my glance just above the cleavage area. 

 Sensing my glance, she tossed that blonde hair back, and looked directly at me. That is when I lost my Midwestern innocence…There it was, under that long blonde hair, below those smiling painted lips, the unmistakable outline of a frigging Adam’s Apple.  My world had been completely upended. I know that there was a great band playing that night but he only music my mind heard were refrains from two song:s  

“Holly came from Miami, F-L-A

Hitchhiked her way across the U-S-A

Plucked her eyebrows on the way

Shaved her legs and then he was a she

She says hey babe, take a walk on the wild side

Said hey honey, take a walk on the wild side

And the colored girls go

Doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo..

Hear "Take A Walk on the Wild Side" here

Well, I'm not dumb but I can't understand
Why she walked like a woman but talked like a man

Oh my Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola 

Well, I'm not the world's most masculine man
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola
Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola

Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola
Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola
Lola, L-L-Lola, L-L-Lola

Hear "Lola"  Here

I looked at him. He looked at me. He smiled at me. I shook my head from side to side.

He put on a pouty face, pursed his lips and then laughed. Needless to say, the Pyramid Club was not the best place to dance with strangers. But then again, maybe it was the best place to meet strangers, if you are into that kind of thing. Now I have always thought of myself as worldly and sophisticated, but if I’m dreaming about this thirty years later, it really must have left an indelible scar in my psyche.