Thanks for your patience, everyone. I’ve been out of the office this week—deeply immersed in my field work.
And it landed me in the New York Times. Honored to finally be a cool kid.
I showed the article to my psychiatrist—she’s kinda the ‘cool aunt’ figure in my life right now. She said, “You look fucked up...but the babe is hot.” So I think that’s a win.
Now I’m playing catch up, though. And it’s time to regain a bit of balance in my day-to-day.
But until I can get my act together, you’ll have to make do with this Rich Girls party recap from my friend Chris.
Chris is a veteran media mogul who turned his natural charm and insatiable appetite for debauchery into a career reporting on celebrities at the Daily Mail.
Over his years in media, Chris made enemies with Malia Obama and friends with Tucker Carlson. Through some sort of fall from grace, he ended up at the same company as me last year. More on that later.
About the Authors
Chris is vaguely 40 and non-vaguely gay. He wears oversized glasses, rolls his eyes every time he gets an email notification, and regularly refers to his body as a “dumpster fire.” Chris talks at 2.5x speed and owns three colorways of the same Prada loafers. We solidified our friendship when I sent him this automated prank call and he flipped a shit in the office.
Chris didn’t study writing in school. He’s a self-taught artisan—a man of his craft.
I did study writing. My major was called History & Literature, and I wrote about counterculture and music history. My thesis covered the D.C. hardcore punk scene that spawned straight edge culture in the early 1980s.
When I graduated, I was surprised to find that it was hard to get a job with no marketable skillset. So I decided I’d be a writer. I hadn’t done math or science in four years so in a way it was the only option.
When I say I wanted to be a writer, I’m not talking about a ‘writer’ writer like Joan Didion or Brock Colyar. I was ready to take (almost) any job that would take me. I was both particularly offended and particularly relieved when my application to write for a mindfulness yoga workout app called Oboe Fitness was rejected. I really couldn’t get an interview anywhere. Cough cough.
So I let my dad loose on the college office of career services job portal. He found a media company looking for a medical reporter. I have nothing resembling medical training, but the gig seemed kinda a little bit almost tangentially related to something I might actually like to do someday. So I fired up LinkedIn ‘quick apply’ and put my name in the hat.
When I say “media company” I mean “website.” And this website was 100% exclusively about cancer.
I had no applicable experience beyond family members’ deaths. But I think we all have that. My grades were good, though, and from a distance, I can look like an upstanding young man working to enact positive change in the world around him. To a degree, I am. But at that moment in life, I would have been more accurately described as a floundering wash-up looking for any 9 to 5 that could justify moving to NYC.
For now, I’ll call the website Cancer.com.net. This protects the company’s anonymity and protects my ability to extort hush money from them down the line.
They offered me the job. It seemed like as good of a starting point for a career in media as any. I’ll probably die of colon cancer someday, so it was also a good incentive to start my research early. I decided that maybe my ignorance was actually a strength—who better to stand in for the uninformed general public than my dumb ass?
On my first day, the CEO ripped me a new one for reading up on cancer and trying to establish some basic literacy on the topic. “I don’t pay you to sit here,” he told me, fuming. “This isn’t college. Learn by doing.” He said that work should feel “like drinking from a firehose.”
I soon found out that I was not reporting on cancer research at all. “I have no interest in medical studies,” the CEO liked to say. He just wanted clickbait.
“Strategy”
In the UK, anybody in a pinch can sell their personal medical horror stories to the press. So I spent every day from 9 AM to 7 PM rewording articles from The Sun and publishing them to our website. The pieces were hidden from the site’s official “news” section, though, so you could only find them if you knew what to search. They were just feeding the Applenews algorithm and raking in clicks.
Cancer is a drag, but I tried to make the job more interesting by writing headlines that hit hard. A few clips from my time at Cancer.com.net:
“My freak pickle-ball accident ended in a cancer diagnosis.”
She thought it was her watermelon allergy—it was cancer.
Professional clown has his penis removed. Penile cancer.
The CEO was understandably shady about the business model. Pretty sure the point of the sensationalist content was to keep the site’s traffic at a place where he could continue to scam well-meaning donors, telling them he was making life-saving medical research accessible to the general public. The mission statement sounded good to me when I applied for the job, so I’m not surprised that it worked on others. Quite an ugly thing for me to be involved in.
But that’s how I met my friend Chris, here.
Despite being the site’s most prolific writer’ Chris was unceremoniously fired while awaiting test results for (ironically enough) brain cancer. Chris declined his firing, refusing to leave unless they could give him a real reason. He continued joining Zoom meetings and showing up to the office uninvited for at least a week and a half.
Why Chris? Why now?
I spent 6 months at Cancer.com.net, and Chris and I put in a lot of hours together. Most Mondays, I’d invite him to see Harrison Patrick Smith DJ at Home Sweet Home.
When I moved to NYC and started writing clickbait about death and disease, Harrison’s Monday residency (before he got promoted to Thursdays) was the only thing that made me feel ok about starting the week. I’d head over after work, toss back a few rum & cokes, and take full advantage of the reliably empty dance floor. I loved listening to Harrison’s music, and I thought it was pretty cool that he could trigger the fog machine whenever he wanted.
Chris never came along, but he always bragged about his own misspent youth—including one noteworthy night at Home Sweet Home. If you look hard enough, you might spot Chris in one of the foundational artefacts of first-wave indie sleaze. He was at Home Sweet Home the night the Virgins shot their music video for “Rich Girls.”
If you’re a student of the moment, you might remember that Sasha included “Rich Girls” in the Starter Packs of NYC indie sleaze post. Pretty cool historical crossover.
When my name ended up on a flyer for a party Harrison was DJing called “Rich Girls,” I invited Chris back out of his early retirement.
Chris missed Stella Rose. The party started at midnight, and at 1:46 AM, he texted me that he’d just woken up from a nap: “The party goes til 4 right?” Ok ……legend.
The party did go til 4 AM. And when we got the boot, everybody hung outside for another hour. Hope I’ll see you at the next one : )
Now, Chris’s review …
(interspersed with pics from his glory days)
The youths are out in full force in post-COVID NYC, and they all want to know one thing: “Are you going to Malice K at Baby’s?”
My crew terrorized the Lower East Side for the better part of the mid / late aughts. Any given Sunday would find us staggering from Home Sweet Home to Sweet Paradise to Welcome to the Johnson’s to Beatrice Inn. We’d end at Cabin, or the greatest nightclub in history: LIT.
There has been little in the way of cultural revisionism among the youth of today. I learned this last Saturday night when, after a five-hour nap, I arrived at The Broadway. Located in a haunted house on the border of Bushwick and Connecticut, this place has everything: warm drinks, stale air, poor acoustics, and no fewer than six hosts.
The FDNY-determined capacity of no more than 74 persons seemed to be of no interests to the 150 denizens milling about on the first floor. This club finally answers the question: what if an old lady did live in a shoe?
It is that sexy shoe smell that greets visitors to The Broadway. I turned to the two young ladies next to me and made a comment about the smell. The two then proceeded to shout directly into my mouth for a solid 30 seconds. I could not make out much of what they were saying, but I did catch the moment when one yelled:
“YOUARESOFUNNYTHEREISLIKENOSMELLTHOUGHBECAUSEOKEXACTLY.”
I was preparing to run away when the two lively Lovatics did me a solid and scurried downstairs, no doubt to obliterate their olfactory system once more in the ladies’ room.
Ridiculously attired in the world’s thickest hoodie, I then crammed my way into the bar area to get a lay of the tropically-temperatured land. That’s when I saw the lovable dipshit who conned me into doing this so his lazy, alabaster ass could sleep in.
Guests chatted with those in their pre-determined cliques and absolutely no one else. They only paused occasionally to throw a fuck-around-and-find-out glare at anyone who came within a foot of their firmly established territories.
The sartorial sensibilities at the Broadway were markedly different than those of my youth. Men of the aughts were required by law to dress like sad Morrisey if they hoped to enter any club below 14th street.
The boys of today offered proof that the younger generation is indeed more diverse. There were boys dressed like Fabrizio Moretti and Alex Turner while others looked like the drummer from The Strokes and the singer of the Arctic Monkeys. “Are you going to Malice K at Baby’s,” a dead-eyed Fabrizio asked a coked-out Alex. Before he could answer, a scuffle broke out nearby as another overserved Fabrizio stumbled into the territory of a rival clique.
Cooler temperatures prevailed on the second floor, where a sparse crowd gathered for The Dare’s DJ set. On the dance floor, I watched Robin Tunney and Fairuza Balk quietly share a tender kiss. It disappointed me to learn that every female is still dressing like a cast member from The Craft (the 1996 film not that garbage MTV reboot). But it warmed my cold heart to see that these women of today were not making out for male consumption. Well, not counting the old guy staring at them as tears welled in his eyes. The spell was quickly broken, however, by Neve Campbell, who swooped in to ask the young lovers if they were heading to Baby’s on Wednesday to see Malice K.
The heat eventually forced me outside, where my guide for the evening and I were joined by two young ladies. Both treated me with that special brand of politeness normally reserved for the uncle still living in your grandparents basement. Being an old person, I wondered if I could somehow set up my guide with the very attractive stylist (her words) and the Helmut Lang model lookalike (his words). “Are you going to Malice K at Baby’s,” she asked my guide.
I did not hear his response. At that same moment, an unspeakable act of violence took place just a few feet in front of me—the second female elected to inform me that she was born the same year that I graduated high school. She then paused and asked, “Are you going to Malice K at Baby’s?”
I excused myself to buy a Mountain Dew at the deli with promises of being right back. I of course planned to Irish goodbye. That proved to be a challenge given the 10-minute wait for an Uber and my refusal to hop on whatever subway serves the outer-outer boroughs. So I returned to the haunted house and stood outside with my Mountain Dew and Misty Slim 100s, watching as the cool kids filed back inside. A young man in Punky Brewster accessories was the last one standing when my Uber finally pulled up. He gave me a knowing nod as I made my exit. My nostalgia got the best of me by the time I arrived home; after applying my face mask and taking my various pills and supplements I lay in bed and put on some music. “I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour / But heaven knows I'm miserable now.”
LOL