Nov. 12, '98 – All I did was go to a candle party. This means an upper scale Tupperware party where the sales-lady is selling quality candles and candle props. Thomas arrived with his girlfriend at the candle party. What a surprise. Oh, Hi, Thomas. Hi! He’s as surprised as I am; we had no idea we had a mutual acquaintance.
So with the past encounter behind us, let me mention that it didn’t pan out that way, and while I have no first-hand knowledge I know that Ivy ended up bailing on the commitment when she became a hostess in Japan (due to Thomas’ persuasion to give it a go), which we Pacific Rim girls know is a Japanese advertising euphemism for importing western lap dancers and the like. There she acquired a lesbian lover. I heard that Thomas was devastated, went on a total cocaine binge and blew all their savings. I saw Ivy after all this had transpired while she was having a fling with one of my former best friends, Marid the Black belt hard-body. The spin-offs from that I do not want to get into. I passed Thomas once this summer at a bus stop and while we recognized each other we did not speak.
Back to the Candle party, or what happened after. Thomas arrives at the candle party with a new girlfriend named Laura, who has the innocent quality of seeming underage, implicitly safe territory. Conversation at the candle party, and the party party after, was not too large. Mainly involved casually getting familiar and it was a long time before “Tom” was involved at all. But we did arrange for him to try out for a dancing job where I work. [My new job was as a (clothed) silhouette dancer performing one story above the dance floor in what was then the most popular club in town (its launch was recent), and paid $25.00 an hour. Got the new job in October, but management was a beast. I was responsible for trying to source them with new dancers being the first, and ended up as staff with two of the women I’d been the class goat with back at fifteen, sisters named Jewels and Sahra, only now I was far better than they were, the difference of expertise in improv.]
Talked about my “art” theory, talked Environmental Tech with Dean, a former classmate. We are at Dean and Denise’s apartment; Denise is a Tech grad. It’s down to them, Tom and his girlfriend Laura, and me, and we’re going out. Dean’s driving. Because both of the prospective nightclubs we considered attending were running at $6.00 a head, the notion was dropped. So we went to Tom’s apartment downtown, which turned out to be not such a bad idea. (-In London Flats.)
I knew Tom had a mirror-ball if I had ruminated about it; he had told me about his light show the first time we talked, with Ivy. So yes, he has a mirror-ball, and a black light theme show and glow in the dark stars, so I am in my cultural milieu. Incidentally Dean and Denise had the same stars, and these were a large variety, double the size or more of the old ones. Dean and Denise had done constellations. Last night I was a Jewels’ for her 26th Birthday and Jewels had the same stars, and had done a fantastic job.
This takes more tying in than you might think. It’s very funny to walk into Tom’s having been drinking because for me it is a heavy dose of nostalgia. Nothing beats my Dad’s, and you see all these derivative like spin-off’s. Me I just get nostalgic, I actually mentioned it. I always knew that nothing was going to beat my Dad’s when it came to “setting”, that was one of my problems, knowing that it was only downhill from there.
Thomas is a painter with work currently up in two places, including Urge, which is the short name of a tattoo parlor. -So his work in on most of the walls. I already knew he was a painter so I am interested in checking this out. His pictures all sort of have a modernistic dark side. I mean the artwork is not modern, it’s conceptual fantasy without identifiers, no symbols or abstractionism. His view is modern in that it has a modernist dark side. His major theme is sort of a unique among the masses of happy cookie cuts but his creature has a twist. He shows a field of daisies, where a beautiful flower that bears almost no relation to the smiling daisies (except colour) has risen from the field and is flying with a purpose and identity but the flower looks like a predator with many tiny teeth. His main theme is a female in a modern bent with fashionable platform boots, a fantastic body, blank eyes and interlocking metallic teeth that would be 4 cm long in real life. I noticed that the smaller parchment paintings of the girl had excerpts of the creation from Genesis painstakingly painted as script above her figure. The largest paintings in the room were of this creature and one showed her taking a bath with cuts on her body and gave a call number. The number of course had 666 in the middle. There was large blue neon writing above that and I asked Thomas what it was. He responded that it was Japanese, Ivy had showed him, and turned to me and said that he thought it meant “Hello There”. (Oh Hi to you too.) On one of the scripted depictions, the girl was put beside the number 777. I had to laugh at that point. The odd one out was a painting of a sun with a sad face and a tear coming out of its eyes. It was being consumed by an intergalactic demon. So from my perspective boy was that one ever loaded.
Thomas and his girlfriend had just won a costume contest at The Limit last Halloween, which is the club across their street, the one I hung out at when Rumors moved there three nights a week. Thomas designed his own costume; he went as his demon. Denise and Dean asked him what the mask was, it was over three feet long and it was red with many teeth. Thomas responded that he didn’t know exactly, that it was a consuming demon of some sort. I already knew that. Oh, you made the costume? I already knew that too. His girlfriend dresses as Leeloo. In case you don’t know the thematic implications of this, let me mention that Leeloo is the central character in the movie Fifth Element, she is the fifth element. Fifth Element is an amusing action glam comic book of a movie starring Bruce Willis and , but it was written by a sixteen year old Luc Besson and it has a rather simple plot base attuned to the idealistic purity of that age. The club knew and they were all chanting her name. Leeloo is the protagonist who must save that known universe from an all-consuming dark entity that is the inverse to existence but has consciousness, and has re-arisen. It leaves in its wake nothing. Leeloo has been specifically designed to destroy it, but she must arrive at a specific conjunction at a specific site on earth. Before she does, and after various misadventures, she absorbs earth history and undergoes a profound crisis as to whether it is justifiable to save “life”, seeing has the history of life has included a long string of horrible suffering and warfare between one another, unremitting savagery. So at the last minute Leeloo is prepared to pull the plug, until the action hero comes out of the blue, because she is questioning, why do it when there is no love, I cannot love, and he tells her he loves her. And so the universe is saved.
The other bits included a computerized trivia game that was highly amusing which I got to win. I had $9000 (of course) and Dean and Denise were in debt. I even gave two answers away. (Dean came out saying “Rahab knows everything”.) -That and getting frightened by The Jerry Springer Show, which Tom and Laura watch regularly for amusement. Car ride home: I find out Thomas is a year older than I am, whereas Laura is eighteen. –Surprise, surprise. Perhaps after the last one he wanted someone he could control somewhat for his own safety. I also learn that his last art show included him and Laura having sex on stage as the climax for the evening. What a postscript; also philosophically loaded, but that would take too long. There’s a reason why when I encounter him he’s always hitched, and he is honorable about it, contrary to appearance. He turned down the dance job, when we found out the only way he’d get one is if he danced with me.