Club Kids
This story first appeared in New York’s issue of May 14, 1988.
Zaldy Goco is a Tunnel Kid. Part Spanish, part Filipino, and part Chinese, Zaldy, 21, grew up in San Francisco, the son of doctors. At 18, he moved to Los Angeles to study fashion design at Otis/Parson’s; instead of going to class, though, he went to clubs — “crazy wild” places like Power Tools, Seventh Grade, Playground, and Dirt Box (“That was probably the best of them all”). Zaldy didn’t last long there — he “was asked to leave” school and moved back in with his parents for a year of settling down. Last August, he ended up in New York, to give school another try (this time at FIT).
Zaldy usually lives in Park Slope, but for this Saturday night he has a $1,100-a-night four-room, two-terrace suite in the Plaza Athénée. Actually, he doesn’t have it, his friend Kirk From California does, but Kirk’s disappeared for the night. And Zaldy’s not worried about how much the room costs, because Kirk’s father is paying the bills. Still, Cynthia, whom Zaldy met in L.A., and Magenta, a boy with a face out of a Kokoschka painting and an Eastern European accent, aren’t happy. “It was supposed to have a Jacuzzi,” complains Magenta.
Subtlety is not rewarded downtown, and Zaldy is dressed to kill: He’s got on high white-leather shoes, green tights, cutoff denim shorts stuck through with safety pins, a Kawasaki motocross shirt covered with logos for motor-oil companies, a floor-length fox coat dyed to resemble lynx, and a red baseball cap with ZALDY spelled out in two-inch-high Plexiglas letters over the brim. Magenta, also in shorts, has powdered his face and slicked his dark hair down from a center part; he’s got on a crushed-velvet coat and the high black shoes known as Dr. Martens. Cynthia, a bleached-blonde in basic black, has bright-red lips, pink-rimmed eyes, and a dead-white pallor. All of which looks great on Avenue C but isn’t quite right on 64th and Madison. The doormen, in their tailored, epauletted blue uniforms and white gloves, don’t even smile as we walk out into the still Upper East Side midnight and catch a cab for the clubhouse — the Tunnel.
This is supposed to be the dim age of New York nightlife (the name refers to the genteel, dimly lighted places that took over the scene in 1987). The club trajectory had run from the disco palaces of the ’70s, epitomized by Studio 54, the club that defined New York nightlife, through the disco palace of the ’80s, Palladium (both created by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager). In between, there were stops at scruffy downtown spots like the Mudd Club, which owner Steve Mass opened with $15,000, and arty downtown spots like Area, which re-created itself monthly according to theme. (It was the club you could never get bored with, but, of course, everyone did.)
“Two years ago was the age of the ultra club — the multimillion-dollar extravaganza,” says Anita Sarko, former D.J. in Palladium’s Michael Todd room. “But people got it wrong. They thought the high-tech part of Palladium was the future, but it was the Michael Todd room, the small, funky, intimate part, that turned out to be the future.”
And indeed, Nell’s came next. Clubs — the kind where you danced, anyway — were supposed to be dead, killed off by AIDs and the new gentility. Outrageousness — celebutante boys in chiffon dresses, girls in nothing but Saran Wrap — was out; conservative was in. The downtowners started wearing ADAPT OR DIE buttons to Nell’s.
In New York, though, club life is never really dead, and change is on the way again. (One sure sign: Howard Stein — who, after disco had crested, followed Studio 54 with Xenon — has now opened his homage to Nell’s, Au Bar, with a fake Stubbs painting and sofas flown in from England.)
Call it Neo-Disco, Youthquake II, or, perhaps, the Age of Innocence, since the basic elements of club life — sex, drugs, rock and roll — have been scrambled a bit. The emphasis is on the music — a new beat called “house” that mixes disco’s insistent rhythms with the breaks and layered sounds of hip-hop. The new clubs are mostly low-rent affairs, with little in the way of décor or special effects, and many of them are open only one night a week. And the drug part of the equation has been toned down; at least there’s none of the obvious use of the early ’80s. (“At this point,” says one veteran of the nightlife, “coke is considered a real fool’s drug.”)
Right now, Mykul Tronn is into hair spray. “I use Stiff Stuff and that grandma stuff—Aero Lak,” he says. “I used to use Aqua Net, but it really didn’t serve my purposes—it used to fall down when I danced.”
As for sex, the kids on the dance floors missed the sexual revolution altogether — they were too young.
And though acting — and dressing — libidinous is certainly in, most people say that’s as far as it goes. “They come, they dance all night, and they go home alone,” says 10-18’s Vito Bruno.
The new kids have left Nell’s and its clones to the Trust Fund Babies, the sons and daughters of New York’s rich and sometimes famous, who’ve been going out since the Studio days. The kids have created their own scene, complete with its own magazine — DV-8, a kind of junior Details, run by two NYU freshmen. (The magazine’s first issue included a feature entitled “Don’t Do Drugs, Do Hair Extensions.”) Rudolf, late of Danceteria and Palladium, gave them a new home in the Tunnel basement. And the Tunnel Kids gave themselves new personas and new names — Brenda-a-Go-Go, Oliver Twisted, Magenta, Brandywine.
Maybe it’s the crash. As one club owner says, “Suddenly, the yuppie saving-for-the-future thing doesn’t make much sense.” But more likely it’s simply that youth — like hope — is inexhaustible. “Pump up the volume,” says the song of the moment. “Pump up the volume. Dance.”
The Tunnel, one of the last big clubs, is not particularly hip. In fact, it’s overrun with the kinds of people clubs don’t let in when they’re really successful — people with careers, women with big hair. The place opened last year, when the dim age was at its height, and the basement started out as a Nell’s knockoff — faded Oriental rugs, overstuffed chairs, nondescript oil paintings. But the two are nothing alike. There’s no jazz combo here, no grilled-lamb sandwiches and French fries, no lean young men in bespoke suits, no Eurotrash. None of which bothers Zaldy and Magenta, who head straight downstairs and into the mob of kids — and these really are kids, many of them not old enough to drink or vote, though the club says it asks for identification from anyone who looks underage.
Cynthia, though, heads the other way, up a flight of stairs. “Do you want to know where the real party is?” she asks, pulling me along behind her. “The men’s room.” The white-tile room could have been built for either sex. In each stall, there’s a vending machine offering Colours condoms; the sink counter is stocked with enough hair sprays, gels, and lotions to open a salon. People preen furiously before the mirror, penciling their eyebrows in darker and darker and patting each errant strand of gelled hair back in place.
We don’t stay long, because Cynthia needs names. Rudolf wants her to throw parties in the club, and she’s got to build up her mailing list. (Being a party promoter is an adolescent’s dream job — you get to exclude the people you don’t like, impress your friends, and it pays from $500 to $1,000 a night. Her next event will probably be a benefit to help pay for the $700 Jean-Paul Gaultier dress she bought from the Dianne B. clothing archive. “People will pay for that, don’t you think?” she asks. “If I have a raffle and offer good prizes?”
So, taking out a pad and pen, she heads for the basement. On the stairs, Michael Alig, a slight young man with a skinny bow tie, red-and-black suspenders, and blacking under his eyes (if it weren’t for the football-player touch, he’d look like candidate Paul Simon left too long in the dryer), is offering drink tickets. He presses two into Cynthia’s palm.
Two steps down is Mykul Tronn, a party promoter. Tronn doesn’t drink or do drugs, and he says he has never picked someone up in a club (“I’m just not interested in sex. I don’t think people go out for it”), but he is obsessed with his hair. He has dyed it gray, white, and fire-engine red and at one point put streaks of fluorescent paint in it — he liked the effect, but it took three hours to get out. Right now, he’s into hair spray, and uses a can a week, molding his hair into a horn that projects from the middle of forehead. Since he’s also short and thin, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Martin Short’s Ed Grimley. “I use Stiff Stuff and that grandma stuff — Aero Lak,” says Tronn. “I used to use Aqua Net, but it really didn’t serve my purposes — it used to fall down when I danced.”
Tronn (his real first name is Michael and his real last name is Cooper, but both were “sort of dull and uninteresting,” so he changed them) has been going to clubs since he was 13, when his bar mitzvah party was held at Studio 54. Now he spends two or three nights a week in clubs — down considerably from his summertime schedule, when he’s out every night. Tronn’s mailing list has 700 people on it — he claims to have met 600 of them, whose names he gathered with the help of his mother and a celebrity friend. When he sees someone interesting at a party, he’ll go up and ask for his or her name and address.
“Ever since the third grade, I’ve been interested in discos and clubs,” he says. “I was really turned on by Saturday Night Fever. Actually, I wasn’t allowed to see it, but I was turned on by the idea of Saturday Night Fever.”
It’s 2 a.m.: Zaldy’s been at the Tunnel for an hour and a half, but he still has his fur coat on. And though he, too, is armed with a pad and pen, he hasn’t collected any names. What with dancing and saying hello to friends, he really hasn’t had time. Zaldy is something of a magnet for people in need of affection — he always seems to be holding hands with someone.
By now, though, he’s seen everyone there is to see in the basement, and it’s time to head to the World. Cynthia takes the front seat of the cab and starts talking to the driver, Boris, while Zaldy and Magenta sit hand in hand in the back. But at the sound of Boris’s accent, Magenta, who was born in Soviet Georgia, sits up and starts questioning him rapid-fire. Where is Boris from? Where does he live? At the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street, Boris stops to let us out. ” What do you do?” he asks Cynthia.
“I do parties,” she answers, closing the cab door.
When I first started going out, in 1984,” says James St. James, former celebutante and current World doorman, “someone told me that every four years there was a complete turnover. And it’s true. There’s a whole new crowd. It’s younger and about dancing and having fun instead of networking your way to club success.
The people who haunted Area and Palladium every night at least called themselves painters or writers or fashion designers, even if they really slept until three in the afternoon and only got up to go out again. But paradoxically, though the drinking age has risen, the relative age of those in the clubs has dropped — everyone seems to be 17. And few 17-year-olds can even pretend to have a career.
Meanwhile, the older generation — people who are over 25, say — have dropped from sight. James St. James says he can think of only a handful of people from Palladium’s heyday who still go out regularly. “I feel like a dinosaur at 21,” he says. “Dianne [Brill] will walk into a room and people will say, ‘Oh, she’s fabulous, who is she?’ And you’ll have to explain who Dianne Brill is.”
Brill and Sally Randall and all those other girls of the minute have become legends: Jonathan Bee, one of DV-8’s 19-year-old founders, asked if I’d ever heard of Lisa E. “She was infamous a year ago,” he said breathlessly,
as though talking about a ’40s film star. “They did a whole write-up on her in the New York Times.” (And strangely enough, though this moment has hundreds of kids who yearn to be fabulous, it has yet to create its own definitive boy or girl.)
“My only critique,” says Michael Musto, who covers the scene for the Village Voice, “is that many of [the new kids] are shamelessly self-promoting without having much to promote. They have a lot of flash but little depth — but then, that charge has been leveled against almost every club scene.”
“Let’s face it,” says one club owner, “a lot of these kids who are going out every night and dancing don’t have a lot on their minds — they’re air-heads.”
Gridlock. The entrance to the World is jammed with people (and even the lucky few getting in aren’t getting in, because the entrance, the coat check, and the rest rooms are within five feet of each other). In the last year, the dynamics of the nightclub door have changed: The day of the comp invitation is over, by and large, and people — even the fabulous people — are actually paying to get in. (The trend was started by Nell’s, which, because of its size, couldn’t afford to let half the crowd in free.) The clubs have cut back on their mailings and dropped their prices — most places, it’s $10 to get in on a weekend night. Which doesn’t mean the nightspots are losing money: Charging $10 a head, a club like the World, which holds about 1,300 people, can gross $40,000 in a weekend. But the clubs still comp some hard-core nightlifers, celebrities, and friends — and tonight, Zaldy is one of them, so we make an end run around the crowd.
I’m about to head up to the dance floor, where the whole room is moving to the house beat — Marshall Jefferson, Ce Ce Rogers — when Zaldy grabs my arm.
The place is suffused with sex. The boys take off their shirts and dance dripping with sweat, just as they used to at Studio.
“There she is,” he says, pointing at a woman with close-cropped dyed-blonde hair and a bra size that would astonish Dianne Brill. “That’s Nancy Zipkin.”
“Who’s she?”
“Her claim to fame is that she’s Larry Zipkin’s niece.”
“Larry Zipkin? Are you sure you don’t mean Jerry Zipkin?”
“Who’s Jerry Zipkin?” he asks.
I don’t have a chance to explain, because a bottle-blonde named Melanie has grabbed Zaldy’s hand and led him onto the dance floor. “Push it, push it good, push it real good,” goes the song by a pair of sisters who call themselves Salt-N-Pepa. Magenta and Cynthia head for the Crystal Room, where they sit watching the chandelier bob up and down to the beat. “It was better two years ago,” Magenta tells me. “I used to bus tables at the Limelight. All the stars used to go to Palladium.”
Why do the Tunnel Kids go out? “You meet a lot of people and make a lot of connections,” says Zaldy. “You’d be surprised how many people, when you finally get around to asking them what they want to do, they want to be a star.”
Magenta, who’s already modeled for DV-8, is one of them. Right now, he’s thinking of moving out of his parents’ house in Rego Park because they speak little English and can’t take messages when people call offering jobs. “I ran away before, when I was a skinhead,” he says, “but this time I want to get my own apartment in the city. I think I’m going to Japan or Europe anyway. With the look I give, I’ll do better there.”
No one goes to the Twilight Zone until 4 a.m. Flanked on the west by shuttered houses and on the east by the uniform towers of a housing project, the club doesn’t offer any special effects or high-tech accoutrements. It resembles nothing so much as a frat house for insomniacs. At 4:30 in morning, the kids dance under black lights, their white T-shirts turning a ghostly shade of purple, the planets and stars painted on the black walls standing out in Day-Glo relief. The boys dance with their leather jackets dropping their shoulders, using them almost as slings as they move. The girls are in skin-tight black, their skirts a good foot above their knees. They dance together or with the boys — no one seems to care about partners.
In one corner, a dark, narrow stairway — a black tube — leads up to a barroom with a sloping ceiling that is less than five feet high on the sides. Other stairs lead to a warren of small, dim rooms furnished with chairs and tables discarded by people who’d lived with them too long — the springs are shot, the upholstery tattered. Nancy Zipkin (who isn’t Jerry’s niece) is here. So are Michael Alig and Melanie and James St. James, in Day-Glo leopard-print Stephen Sprouse. I open a door to find 20 people crushed into a grimy cubicle. Zaldy is sitting on an unmade mattress, holding hands with a girl from the Tunnel basement, keeping two other people warm with his coat. The room’s two windows are covered with heavy black shades, lest an errant ray of the rising sun penetrate. It’s five o’clock in the morning, and time to go home.
The Trust Fund Babies go to Nell’s. Sure, they have dinner first at Canal Bar, and they might stop in at Indochine, Forty Worth, or Au Bar — all of them smaller than the Tunnel or the World — but they belong at Nell’s. Of course, the club was intended to mix uptown and down. Instead, it created a new concept: segregation by Zip Code. The 10021s sit upstairs; everybody else dances in the basement. John Flanagan, 22, with his shaggy blond hair and double-breasted blue suit, his sartorial perfection marred only by the white shirttail that hangs below the back of his jacket, is definitely a 10021. And so, on a Wednesday night, he’s sitting upstairs, eating French fries with Peter Davis and Elizabeth Lind, a blonde, birdlike girl. Peter and Elizabeth, both of whom grew up on the Upper East Side, are on winter break from Bennington. Bret Easton Ellis got it wrong, they say.
The Babies are members of Lewis Lapham’s “equestrian class,” connected by wealth, geography, 12 years of private schools, and what seems like ages of parties — at Studio, at Xenon, at St. A’s (the Columbia fraternity), at Area and the Surf Club, and now here.
John, like most of his friends, is doing an extended tour of duty in college: He should be graduating this year, but after stints at Boston University and Harvard, he’s decided to finish up at Columbia. Until Bruce Babbitt dropped out of the presidential race, John had been working for him — and for Bob Dole, because he couldn’t decide who he really wanted to win. Lately, he has been going out just three or four nights a week: Mondays to Heartbreak, Tuesdays to the Surf Club (his roommate, Nick Beavers, is a Surf owner), and Thursdays and Fridays to Nell’s. To put some order in his life, has been trying — with limited success — to eat breakfast with his parents four mornings a week.
Sure, the Trust Fund Babies have dinner at Canal Bar, and they might stop in at Au Bar, but they belong at Nell’s.
“We’re jaded, definitely,” says John. “How could we not be? We were given everything free so young.” Besides, things have quieted down, the three agree, though they’re waiting for Eric Goode of Area to open his new place. And no, they’d never go home with anyone they didn’t know. But then, since they’re Babies, there aren’t that many people they don’t know at Nell’s or the Surf. In fact, Peter says, he knows Mykul Tronn. They both spent one summer at Palladium.
Looking at his blue blazer with a silk square tucked neatly into the breast pocket, and his brown hair without a drop of hair spray in it, I express surprise. “What happened?”
“I guess,” he says,”I grew up.”
At 1:30 a.m., Savage is in its prime. Three nights a week, the place is just a disco, but Tuesdays, Susanne Bartsch transforms it into a playground for young nightlifers. Bartsch, who lives upstairs in the Chelsea hotel, saw the club being built and loved the tacky ’70s quality of it all — the maroon sectionals, the disco ball, the mirrors. When she had a falling-out with the backers of her Soho clothing store, she abandoned it and decided to do the club.
Her crowd, she says, is “into visuals,” and tonight the Savage dance floor is a circus: Cleavage is much in evidence, and so are eyebrows, painted over with black pencil, drawn an inch above the normal height, or outlined with zippers to add a surreal touch. The Underwear People dance in corsets or merry widows, their thigh-high stockings held up by garters. The drag queens dance in the shortest skirts of all, way beyond micro-mini. There are ripped, shredded, and faded jeans with knees and behinds exposed; baseball caps with chopped-off brims; shorts rolled up and attached by little suspender straps to thigh-highs; stretch bustiers attached by the same straps to tiny stretch skirts. The place is suffused with sex — except that everybody says no one is having it because they’re too afraid of AIDS. Still, you can feel it in the air, everyone’s so touchy-feely, and the boys take off their shirts and dance with the sweat dripping off them just as they used to at Studio. As they haven’t in years.
Bartsch leads the pack, dancing on a speaker (her favorite spot), wearing cutoff shorts, white leggings, red suspenders, and a frayed and cropped jean jacket with holes in the shoulders. Her long, ringleted wig is topped by a clear-plastic cowboy hat. Zaldy is also on the dance floor, and as I pass by, he introduces me to Kirk From California, who has moved out of the Plaza Athénée and into Zaldy’s place for the rest of the week.
Downstairs in the lounge, three men in suits are watching reruns on television. One of them turns his attention from the tube, trying to chat up two girls young enough to be his daughters. They stare at him, stupefied.
Back in the Tunnel basement, on a Friday night. The party is being thrown by Sticky Vicky, O.J., and Kenny Kenny. I never quite meet the first two, but Kenny is wandering around in a 120-gallon foam cowboy hat — if it weren’t for his false eyelashes, he’d look as though he’d just come from a Cowboys game. The Underwear People are out in force tonight, as are the Tunnel Kids.
Michael Alig is working the room in a Catholic-schoolgirl’s plaid jumper. He started out as a busboy at Danceteria; now he throws half a dozen parties a month at the Tunnel (he’s also working with Rudolf to reopen Danceteria). The scene right now, he says, is “missing something, and I hate to say it, but I think it’s probably AIDS that makes me feel that way. Even if it’s not the fear of getting it, it’s just there.
At Savage, the Underwear People are out in force, dancing in corsets or merry widows, their thigh-high stockings held up by garters. The drag queens dance in the shortest skirts of all, way beyond micro-mini.
“But this whole crowd, they’re just too fabulous to go home with anyone anyway,” Michael says. “The first thing
they’re worried about is how they look. These people are basically into their appearance. They work to buy clothes, or they go into a store and steal them from the Gaultier department. Sex is the last thing on their minds.”
Mykul Tronn, hair shellacked into a lethal weapon, is in the same spot as last week, handing out invitations on the stairs. Zaldy has gone western, wearing brown-suede chaps studded with silver coins under his fur coat.
On the dance floor, a boy with a flattop haircut and a shocking-green fake-fur bolero under his leather jacket is doing the “Time Warp” again, while a dozen or so kids have put their arms around one another’s shoulders and are dancing in a shuffling circle. A Latin boy dances with intense self-absorption. A drunk girl in low-cut black approaches, stuffing her recalcitrant left breast back into her dress as she parks herself in front of him. Without lifting his eyes from the floor, he shifts away and continues dancing by himself.
Zaldy’s first class of the new semester begins at nine this morning, so at 1:30 he decides we’d better leave. But Magenta has replaced Julie Jewels, the buxom girl who usually works the entrance to the basement, so we have to wait for him.
His blue bandanna making the sharp planes of his face stand out even more than usual, Magenta perches on a stool, lifting the velvet rope from its gold-metal stanchion, putting it back again. He lets a bald man in a red bra and corset pass. The boy in the chartreuse bolero approaches and Magenta lifts the rope. He hesitates at a blonde in a tight black dress but lets her in when she flashes her invitation. Then a young man with short dark-brown hair walks up. Magenta looks at him — jacket, tie, black shoes, drink in hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, “it’s a private party.” And for one brief moment, Magenta looks like a very happy Tunnel Kid.