(elion paz)
It’s Sunday night at 10, when most New Yorkers are curled up on couches, wiping take-out from their lips and flicking the remote. But not Rachel Singer. She’s wincing in pain as a hairstylist stabs her head with bobby pins. The stylist is affixing what looks like a wedding cake —a two-foot-tall column of lace — onto Singer’s head. She takes a sharp breath as the stylist, her friend Adam Maclay, pricks her scalp again.
“If I want a dramatic look,” she says, more to herself than anyone, “I’m going to have to deal with some pain.”
Singer is a club kid, and Sunday night is her time to shine. No take-out and channel surfing here. It’s about having a look, making an entrance and forcing people to take notice.
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As another friend, makeup artist Lysette Drumgold, paints blue and pink circles over Singer’s eyes, she explains that dressing up fills a need in her. “I think I’m just trying to shock myself,” she says. And it doesn’t hurt if she shocks everyone else while she’s at it.
Club kids are back — after a grisly death and a 13-year hiatus, they’ve returned to the nightlife scene covered in more glitter than a Christmas tree. In the early ’90s, club kids were the freaks and outcasts who took over downtown nightlife where Andy Warhol left off. Led by the enfant terrible Michael Alig, they marauded through Limelight and Tunnel with face paint and fright wigs.
They went on “Geraldo” and dressed like lunatics and invited all the mistfits in the world to leave their dysfunctional families in Kansas City or Des Moines and come form a new one in NYC. And that’s exactly what happened, until 1996, when Alig killed his drug dealer in a heroin haze, cut up his body, stuffed it in a suitcase and threw it in the East River. Months later, it washed up on Staten Island.
Within days of his arrest, club kids were pariahs. Some got real jobs. Some went deeper into drug stupors. Others simply went back home. But a few — the smartest, the sober, the most glamorous, like Swiss beauty Susanne Bartsch, busty blonde Amanda Lepore and elegant Irish raconteur Kenny Kenny — never stopped dressing up and going out.
Recently, they say, a new generation of club kids has begun slipping into their heels and lining up for Sunday’s Vandam party at Greenhouse, Wednesday’s Big Top party at Carnival, which opened two months ago, and a handful of other fabulous events.
Singer was 14 when she first started hitting Limelight. Lately she’s been spotting folks she hasn’t seen since 1997, right after the scene crashed and burned.
Some say the revival is a response to the recession. Others point to Lady Gaga, who is really nothing more than a club kid with a great set of pipes. Or Facebook, which disseminates every outrageous look to thousands within seconds. Or perhaps even that Alig is getting out of prison this fall.
“It’s come full cycle,” said Desi “Monster” Santiago, an Alig minion who consulted on Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.
“The original movement became overloaded and people got tired of it, but now they’re ready for it again.”
Still, these neo club kids aren’t the same as their forebears. Lady Gaga has shown the world that being a freak with ambiguous but oozing sexuality isn’t taboo — in fact, it sells millions of records.
“The old club kids used to wrap themselves in Saran wrap and head out for the night,” says 21-year-old Carnival regular Jordan Siegel-Traxler, originally from Dallas. “Now it’s all about fashion.”
Siegel-Traxler has been in the city for a year and briefly worked the Carnival door to ferret out the who’s who. On a recent Wednesday, he’s wearing Rick Owens jeans, a corset, nude fabric trim over his eyebrows and Louboutins on his feet. “Louboutins are sort of the uniform for many of us,” he confides.
Lepore agrees: “In the ’90s, Michael Alig had more of a punk-rebellious look, and now the kids are more fashion-driven. It’s a bit more sophisticated.”
On Sunday night at Vandam, Bartsch dances on a banquette with her hair pulled into a tyrannosaurus rex-like spike. Next to her a man named Vanity Society sports a clown look, with red glitter tears dripping from his eyes. A man with a headpiece constructed of bamboo and tiny lights bops next to them.
Singer waves hello and is immediately pulled onto the couch, where she and the others become a living, gyrating piece of artwork for a moment or two. The cameras flash. The dancers pose. By tomorrow this time the shots will be all over Facebook, encouraging other would-be scenesters to buy their first pair of fake eyelashes.
Suddenly the crowd parts as underground singer Kayvon Zand and his entourage saunter silently into the room. One holds a feathered black parasol over Zand’s head. The five of them are dressed in a Goth/Spanish widow look— all black lace, latex, crinoline and mantillas.
“I would describe the look as a macabre ceremonial couture,” says Zand, 23, who has become a nightlife personality since recently moving from North Carolina.
The group make their way to a table, where they sit regally and survey the crowd, allow for photos and let people kiss their latex glove-covered hands. No dancing tonight, Zand says — tonight is all about the look. He couldn’t, he says, dance in latex anyway. “You don’t want to ruin your look,” he says. “The last thing I want to do is appear human.”
If fashion is the drug now, Ecstasy and heroin were the drugs of the old days. The heroin would eventually turn Alig — by all accounts a sweetheart of a kid — into a junkie demon.
“It was just like ‘Star Wars,’” says nightlife expert Steve Lewis. “Michael started out as a sweet person who only cared about others and turned into a junkie who only loved himself — like how Anakin Skywalker went to the dark side and became Darth Vader. The junkie mentality took over all the good parts of his personality.”
Critics wonder if the new nightlife scene will succumb to the temptations of synthetic highs once again, but those on the inside say the city has changed too much for rampant drug use. Sources say people dealt drugs openly at Limelight and the other clubs owned by nightlife kingpin Peter Gatien, who has since pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges and was deported to his native Toronto. Now, says Kenny Kenny, the police presence is too strong and club owners have learned from Gatien that they’d better be on the books or they’ll soon be on the street.
“There used to be a drug culture that was pretty outlandish,” says Kenny Kenny. “Ecstasy was sort of legal when I started working the door at Limelight.”
Anyway, says Kenny Kenny, the frantic need to get high and tell everyone to go to hell isn’t quite at a fever pitch anymore.
“Before, a lot of us were really angry. When I was young, people would spit on me when I walked down the street because I was gay. Almost everyone I knew then had been thrown out of their homes. The drugs gave people courage to say ‘Let’s go out and f – – k this place up.’ But we don’t have that much to rebel against anymore. We don’t have that same nihilism.”
So what brings them out to Carnival and Vandam in outfits that took days to plan, headpieces that hurt their necks, heels that could break an ankle?
Maclay, the hairstylist, says it best as he finally gets the physics right and manages to force a column of antique lace onto Singer’s bruised scalp.
“I’m at my happiest right now,” he says. “I’m doing what I love. This is what I wait for all week.”