I walked into Manhattan’s Rawhide one night with four blond supermodels on my arm, and we danced until we were soaked. It was a room where desire moved in the open air and nobody apologized for a body, where sex was just weather and everyone was welcome in it. The models loved it, because for a few hours no one wanted anything from them except to dance. That was the gift of those places. They did not ask you to be useful or presentable or legible. They just let you in.
I was never the man working the door. I was the guest, the frequent — and I mean frequent — guest, the kind of regular who has a life measured in rooms. I welcomed myself to the city over and over from inside Splash in Chelsea, where the odd one out could arrive alone and, within a song, become the hot child in the city. I spent nights on the 18th floor at the Boom Boom Room in the Standard, a room that offered an honest view of both heaven and hell, where anyone and everything went, everything everywhere all at once, the way New York used to be.
