"My feeling exactly." He was guiding me toward the flicker and flash and the storm of sound. "You need to get a feel for my party. It's a party I throw every night, and you may find it addictive."
Some straight lines are just too easy.
So I ignored it and said, "I'm hoping we can sit down and talk, Tony."
"Please call me 'Anthony,' Mike. You're comfortable being called 'Mike'?"
"Have been for some time. Can we talk now?"
He shook his head. "I'll be on the door for another half hour at least. You run a tab and I'll take care of it. In an hour I'll meet you at my office. Just tell any one of my security guys that you have an appointment."
Then he waved and disappeared back into the darkness, illuminated briefly when he opened a door onto the street to resume his duties—he had people to crush and others to elevate. The way those Italian heels elevated him.
When I made it to the flashing lights, and was no longer solitary but one of a crush of people, I still felt encased in darkness. Light was a pulse, timed with the booming bass beat of the deafening disco music—yellow, blue, momentary baths of color in a cavern carved by occasional green laser lights. Cigarette smoke swirled, but the ventilation wasn't bad, and busboys in athletic shorts and running shoes and nothing else were keeping the bottles and glasses picked up and off the packed dance floor.
The bare-chested busboys were part of a bisexual motif—for every nude male statue there was a female one; for every bartender in a hot-pants toga, there was a waitress in a miniskirt toga with a neckline to the navel. I'd heard the term sensory overload kicked around, but never understood it before. I just stood there like Dorothy getting a load of Oz for the first time.
Around me were bizarre towering hairstyles, tuxes, bikini tops, spandex, gold lamé, masks, body paint, glitter, hard hats, athletic T-shirts, pointed collars, berets, sunglasses. Above it all loomed a giant silver man in the moon with a gold coke spoon with glittering lights in its bowl near the moon man's Bob Hope proboscis. Below was a sea of partying souls on a central raised plexiglass dance floor, hands waving as if to heaven as they writhed like the damned, washed in that throbbing red and blue illumination against a painted backdrop of Pompeiian pillars.
The crazy joint did not seem to have tables, other than in a V.I.P. section behind a gossamer-type screen, home to comfortable booths and nonstop champagne. Among the pampered elite were Truman Capote, the mayor of New York, and various models whose faces I'd glimpsed on fashion magazines when I was picking up True and Guns & Ammo at my favorite newsstand. Mirrored bars were at left and right, and the bartenders were muscular young males in vests and no shirts, doing dance moves as they served a frantic nonstop customer onslaught. The only quiet in the storm was the stage—it seemed to have been abandoned for the records the d.j., high in his omniscient booth, was spinning.
I did find tables and booths upstairs, in the balcony, but they were filled with necking threesomes, fornicating twosomes, and the general funky smell of sex. The great ventilation didn't seem to be able to take the edge off that. I was able to find a place at the front rail of the balcony to have a look down at the self-absorbed dancers—many had no partner—whose fluttering hands suggested a revival meeting run amok as they immersed themselves in the repetitive, senses-numbing music.
From my vantage point, I caught some interesting items. For one thing, the bartenders seemed to be dispensing pills and coke vials as much as drink tumblers and champagne glasses. This perch made that obvious, but they didn't seem to be hiding it particularly. I could also see the cash registers at the nearest of the two bars. Starting at about ten-thirty, at staggered intervals, the cash drawers were emptied into garbage bags, and the register tapes were changed.
Clearly a skimming operation Vegas might have envied.
Anthony Tretriano and his curly Nero hair and his black tux and floppy red bow tie had taken his d.j. booth box seat at this coliseum of decadence and was now interrupting the thudding, mechanical songs with celebrity announcements. Most of those he introduced were the kind who were recognized by a single name and he had a kidding put-down for each of them.
Funny thing is, there was never applause. Just smiles of recognition. Maybe Club 52 was too cool for clapping. But probably not the clap.
I had been here before, in this space, even in this very balcony, long before it was the trendiest club in town. This had been a theater, or anyway a radio and television studio, its traditional seating long since ripped out. CBS Studio 52—that's why a club on Fifty-fourth was called 52—had been home to Jack Benny, Captain Kangaroo, and countless game shows, What's My Line? To Tell the Truth, The $64,000 Question.
The $64,000 question I was mulling was whether that stage was still used for anything. Like a black hole, the proscenium where so many mainstream entertainers had performed was a void in the midst of flashing lights.
Then the recorded music was cut off and dead silence filled the room.
Little Tony's voice burst forth: "She's Manhattan's favorite Latin, my children—everybody's favorite pink taco..."
Lots of laughter at that.
"...Chrome!"
This time the room did erupt in applause.
On the wall behind the stage, a rainbow of neon tubes finally illuminated the stage as the star performer strode from the wings with a wireless mike in hand and all the confidence that could fit into one tall, curvy, leggy frame. A backup band was revealed as well, but just a drummer on a riser and one guitar player and a guy at a synthesizer. The sound coming from speakers all around conveyed more instruments than were up there, and whether they were miming their performance or not, I couldn't say.
But Chrome was singing all right.
She had a strong alto that cut with authority through all that disco noise and made her delivery of this updated "Boy from Ipanema" appealing. Against the now-alternating neon slashes of yellow, pink, blue, green, her bronze flesh made the white of her teeth startling, her almond-shaped eyes big and brown and lavishly lashed, her nose pert, her mouth moist and ripe and scarlet red. Exuding a charisma that seemed to shimmer around her, she stalked the stage in pink platform heels carrying long, almost masculinely muscular legs that climbed all the way to the fringe of her shocking pink dress.
If you could call it a dress—it was skintight with a cutout that exposed her supple midsection, navel and all, and a V-neck that did its best to contain those firm D-cup globes. I hated the thud thud thud of that disco beat, but her strong voice and her confident manner, and the rhythmic bounce of her bosom, won me over.
Of course, in that place a star performer was just so much window dressing. Nobody in the balcony stopped necking or fucking to watch Chrome, and the dance floor remained filled with Holy Roller hand wavers lost in their own narcissism. Come to the cabaret, my friends, and why not? Liza had.
Chrome and I did have a moment, or maybe I just imagined it. As I stood in the balcony, twelve kinds of sex behind me in a living Hieronymous Bosch tapestry, I thought I saw her look right at me, and hold my gaze, and smile, before she moved on down the stage on those magnificent, endless legs.
She did only half a dozen songs, and was gone. No encore but Tony praised her over the sound system and the applause rang, just like in a real nightclub.
When I left the city a year ago, this had been an empty theater, out-of-date studio space the TV network had been trying to dump unsuccessfully for many months. Now it was the most famous nightclub in town, maybe in the world. And it had all been the doing of that punk Little Tony.