![]() ‘ No, I like’ some team from Florida, I can’t remember. So that’s my team? Why, are you a Cowboys fan?’ ‘Yeah, but geographically closer to the Texans. At least I know I’ll be babushka-viable, after I hit the wall. Or Petra, who has seen things dangerously beyond her ninteen years in Berlin nightclubs, you know they’re serious over there. Olga, from the Volga, daughter of an old-school oligarch who fell out of favor with Putin decades ago. I’d play dress up, if I could just buckle down and hone my accents a bit more. You look simple, but devastating enough.’ That men in this city so often perceive me as Ambiguous East-ish European, it feels like a recurring gag, to have a major trait of yours assumed so consistently, exotically wrong. I don’t remember if I returned the question, or if or what they answered. ‘ Totally knew from your outfit!’ they say. Am I still vegetarian if I don't digest meat? I be social with my immediate tablemates for a bit. Which, I mean, understandable, given half of it will be purged later anyways. Usually at comped promoter dinners, dishes were served family-style and without regard to anyone’s preferences, and the kitchen often sent out the cheaper food, or what hadn’t been ordered much that evening. Just a plate, of pieces of meat, put on display, passed around a table, of pieces of meat, put on di- no cheap analogies I stop myself and heap a few portions onto my plate, eliciting another M comment: ‘ I would have never guessed you ate meat.’ Starting to like this guy. M thrusts a plate of grilled chicken my way. And everything is already priced into those markups. We’ll all tango through these tripwires for fear of collapsing the superimposition into any one legibility which may paint us in a bad light. Strings are attached to everything, and everyone wants to feel like they’re the ones pulling them. My beauty is priceless, so I will go uncompensated for it. The rich spend, the wealthy spend nothing. The night is to be rife with such ambivalence, I’m told. Girls and promoters dance around this silence: By accepting the invitation to dinner, she is in a social debt to the promoter, but what, exactly, is expected of her? In exchange for dinner, girls are implicitly expected to spend time at the club with a promoter…The uncertainty over exactly how or when repayment happens can make a gift more burdensome than a clearly delineated market transaction. Treating girls is the basis of the VIP economy. The one-two punch is by design, the book warns me: Tonight, it’s Baby Brasa, followed by TAO Downtown. Or maybe the bartender handles it while he’s shaking the drink. Though I’d hate to be the busboy stuck spending his afternoons blowing these up. ‘ Hey, can we pull up a table for her?’ The flamingo’s cute. ![]() I awkwardly satellite at an adjacent empty table for a few minutes, until another waiter M can bark at comes into range. A friend called just as I was crossing Seventh Avenue, there was a bomb threat a the NYU dorms. ‘Perfect timing,’ one of our promoters, M, greets me as I arrive an hour later than was asked.
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