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Last night started with a trip to the Steampunk Haunted House. I'd never been to a haunted house before, other than one my school did when I was a kid and all I remember about it is being in a dark room and having my hand plunged into a bowl of what I later found out was peeled grapes in water. So imagine my pleasure when the burly security guy who reminded me a bit of a strip club bouncer informed us that the actors will not touch us and if we touch them we will be ejected immediately.
Patty and I were at the head of our group of ten. I was worried I wouldn't be able to see (my night vision is really bad - thank you, celiac disease) in the dark and told her she would have to lead. But then it wasn't that dark, and the first stuff we encountered was confusion about trying to figure out what way to go and a creepy dude in a gas mask, who had a hand-held light that illuminated the entire corridor. He turned it on and off and curried down the corridor in the black before turning it back on again, but there was so much ambient noise that it worked perfectly. It was like a combination of Blink and The Empty Child and it was AWESOME. Patty and I followed it down the hall with eager curiosity and I have never felt so much like Jack Harkness in my entire life. No, really.
The rest of the thing was totally cool too, and after we got herded into a few rooms, we were no longer in the lead, which sorta made me mildly cranky in a "we were better at this than you all" way. But the thing was visually stunning, sometimes scary, often hilarious (giant spider cannibal sex was not expected!) and eerily beautiful in two sequences -- one in an old theater filled with gas-mask wearing zombies strolling across the backs of the seats and one in what I think was a two-story high garage with a giant half-mechanical-spider woman singing a 1940s-ish song. Patty and I were in the back by then, and random actors kept sneaking up on her and puffing in her face. I never saw them, but she would squeak and scoot closer to me sometimes. At the very end the actors joined hands to make a coral to get us out of them, and one girl, confused in the dark, accidentally took Patty and I's linked hands for a moment. It felt like a sad secret.
When we left, it took a minute to get our bearings so far under the Williamsburg bridge, and as Patty and I chatted about the experience and kissed (I was being a smug bastard), suddenly she started screaming, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, move move move!" and I thought she was trying to fuck with me, yelped myself and jumped towards her.
"There were rats! Well, there was one rat, and then I saw another and another and oh my god!"
She was pointing at a massive pile of trash bags, and so much, I thought, for my moment as intergalactic time-traveling bisexual superhero. Felled by rats.
Next, it was on to the candlelight ghost tour at the Merchants House Museum, which despite having lived in New York all my life and my interest set, I'd never been too. This was odd in that it combined a couple of very still actors pretending to be ghosts in some of the showpiece rooms (that other than candles had not been decorated for Halloween), a lot of information about the history of the house and hauntings there, and a couple of genuinely odd moments. Certainly I've been in places before and played the "hey, someone died in this room, because I can barely stand to be in here" game when I didn't even know that about the history of the house, and these rooms had that same pressing coldness to me (although Patty said she didn't feel it), although it was more benign than some of the spaces of that ilk I've been in (um, I have an ex whose family lived in a house in Philadelphia and he had two rooms up in an extension of the house that was built in the 1930s that were his rooms, and I couldn't be in those rooms along without completely panicking for my fucking life and years later I found out a little boy had been raped and murdered in the non-functioning bathroom off those rooms in like 1939. ANYWAY).
For me, the big highlight of this tour was just getting to be in a grand house like this in the manner in which it would have been seen at the time. My heart breaks over and over again in such houses, which feel right to me in a way I cannot articulate beyond the part where they are beautiful and fine.
The only real downside of this tour was that it was a little too crowded and people in it were annoying it "was that part of the tour or was that real?" they asked about a couple of weird things that did happen (the sound of a woman crying that I didn't here that freaked someone on the staff out, and a chair that skidded across the room which was SINCERELY weird but I assume was in fact part of the tour). Asking it made them seem like plants (although they weren't) and sorta interrupted my personal investment with the whole thing to want to smack them repeatedly.
Then, we went to dinner at a new to us restaurant, which from the outside we thought looked very Richard and Alec (Patty and I met through Swordspoint fandom, and as such, it's worth noting she is a scholar who is taller than me, and I fight with swords and am older than her, yeah?). We opened the door, and there's a Parisian chanteuse dressed like Marie Antoinette with spiders in her hair singing little 1950s jazzy beat sort numbers while an Asian guy dressed like a caveman plays the keyboards.
I looked at Patty. "You still game?"
"Sure. Why not?"
So in we go, to this surreal, communal experience of people asking other people to take their pictures and the keyboardist's friend from another country that doesn't do Halloween touching all the cobwebs on the ceiling and a bizarre little rendition of Happy Birthday for a group of nine that came in late, and couples canoodling in the corners (which is to say, Patty and I might have crossed the bounds of propriety from cute and romantic to get-a-room as we waited for our Russian/French food to arrive).
Occasionally, Patty leaned over to me to sing her horrifying Internet discovery of the day, Chimpanzee, Riding On a Segway (if you watch this video, I promise you will never forgive me). I responded with horror and singing back at her along with whatever song was being performed at the time, which I often knew at least vaguely ( o/~ April in Paris.... o/~ ) or could marginally fake.
God, it was fucking perfect. And they have deadly vodka infusions which we did not indulge in last night, but we think we might want to organize a group outing there soon. But it was one of those discoveries that was very much "we're only telling the cool kids where this place is" lest it be overrun.
Trying to get the F back up to my office, we realized the F was no longer running uptown and we eventually took a cab, but not before seeing someone collapse with alcohol poisoning on the other platform. He looked bad. Pale and grey and wrong, and his friend sat with him as the MTA guy locked up that side of the platform, and I thought that was a bad plan, because really someone should call the EMS (which I think had been, but not in a priority way), and they might need that route to get down there quicker.
This afternoon, coming into work, I saw a group of men yelling at a man slouched in a doorway. "Get up! Get up!" they screamed at him. His eyes were open but he was unresponsive and lying in a his own piss. He was either out of it on heroin or dead. The men continued to holler at him, and I was able to ascertain services had already been called, so I did not stay. I think he was dead, and I think that is why the men, who did not seem to know him, all hollered so fiercely.
Patty and I were at the head of our group of ten. I was worried I wouldn't be able to see (my night vision is really bad - thank you, celiac disease) in the dark and told her she would have to lead. But then it wasn't that dark, and the first stuff we encountered was confusion about trying to figure out what way to go and a creepy dude in a gas mask, who had a hand-held light that illuminated the entire corridor. He turned it on and off and curried down the corridor in the black before turning it back on again, but there was so much ambient noise that it worked perfectly. It was like a combination of Blink and The Empty Child and it was AWESOME. Patty and I followed it down the hall with eager curiosity and I have never felt so much like Jack Harkness in my entire life. No, really.
The rest of the thing was totally cool too, and after we got herded into a few rooms, we were no longer in the lead, which sorta made me mildly cranky in a "we were better at this than you all" way. But the thing was visually stunning, sometimes scary, often hilarious (giant spider cannibal sex was not expected!) and eerily beautiful in two sequences -- one in an old theater filled with gas-mask wearing zombies strolling across the backs of the seats and one in what I think was a two-story high garage with a giant half-mechanical-spider woman singing a 1940s-ish song. Patty and I were in the back by then, and random actors kept sneaking up on her and puffing in her face. I never saw them, but she would squeak and scoot closer to me sometimes. At the very end the actors joined hands to make a coral to get us out of them, and one girl, confused in the dark, accidentally took Patty and I's linked hands for a moment. It felt like a sad secret.
When we left, it took a minute to get our bearings so far under the Williamsburg bridge, and as Patty and I chatted about the experience and kissed (I was being a smug bastard), suddenly she started screaming, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, move move move!" and I thought she was trying to fuck with me, yelped myself and jumped towards her.
"There were rats! Well, there was one rat, and then I saw another and another and oh my god!"
She was pointing at a massive pile of trash bags, and so much, I thought, for my moment as intergalactic time-traveling bisexual superhero. Felled by rats.
Next, it was on to the candlelight ghost tour at the Merchants House Museum, which despite having lived in New York all my life and my interest set, I'd never been too. This was odd in that it combined a couple of very still actors pretending to be ghosts in some of the showpiece rooms (that other than candles had not been decorated for Halloween), a lot of information about the history of the house and hauntings there, and a couple of genuinely odd moments. Certainly I've been in places before and played the "hey, someone died in this room, because I can barely stand to be in here" game when I didn't even know that about the history of the house, and these rooms had that same pressing coldness to me (although Patty said she didn't feel it), although it was more benign than some of the spaces of that ilk I've been in (um, I have an ex whose family lived in a house in Philadelphia and he had two rooms up in an extension of the house that was built in the 1930s that were his rooms, and I couldn't be in those rooms along without completely panicking for my fucking life and years later I found out a little boy had been raped and murdered in the non-functioning bathroom off those rooms in like 1939. ANYWAY).
For me, the big highlight of this tour was just getting to be in a grand house like this in the manner in which it would have been seen at the time. My heart breaks over and over again in such houses, which feel right to me in a way I cannot articulate beyond the part where they are beautiful and fine.
The only real downside of this tour was that it was a little too crowded and people in it were annoying it "was that part of the tour or was that real?" they asked about a couple of weird things that did happen (the sound of a woman crying that I didn't here that freaked someone on the staff out, and a chair that skidded across the room which was SINCERELY weird but I assume was in fact part of the tour). Asking it made them seem like plants (although they weren't) and sorta interrupted my personal investment with the whole thing to want to smack them repeatedly.
Then, we went to dinner at a new to us restaurant, which from the outside we thought looked very Richard and Alec (Patty and I met through Swordspoint fandom, and as such, it's worth noting she is a scholar who is taller than me, and I fight with swords and am older than her, yeah?). We opened the door, and there's a Parisian chanteuse dressed like Marie Antoinette with spiders in her hair singing little 1950s jazzy beat sort numbers while an Asian guy dressed like a caveman plays the keyboards.
I looked at Patty. "You still game?"
"Sure. Why not?"
So in we go, to this surreal, communal experience of people asking other people to take their pictures and the keyboardist's friend from another country that doesn't do Halloween touching all the cobwebs on the ceiling and a bizarre little rendition of Happy Birthday for a group of nine that came in late, and couples canoodling in the corners (which is to say, Patty and I might have crossed the bounds of propriety from cute and romantic to get-a-room as we waited for our Russian/French food to arrive).
Occasionally, Patty leaned over to me to sing her horrifying Internet discovery of the day, Chimpanzee, Riding On a Segway (if you watch this video, I promise you will never forgive me). I responded with horror and singing back at her along with whatever song was being performed at the time, which I often knew at least vaguely ( o/~ April in Paris.... o/~ ) or could marginally fake.
God, it was fucking perfect. And they have deadly vodka infusions which we did not indulge in last night, but we think we might want to organize a group outing there soon. But it was one of those discoveries that was very much "we're only telling the cool kids where this place is" lest it be overrun.
Trying to get the F back up to my office, we realized the F was no longer running uptown and we eventually took a cab, but not before seeing someone collapse with alcohol poisoning on the other platform. He looked bad. Pale and grey and wrong, and his friend sat with him as the MTA guy locked up that side of the platform, and I thought that was a bad plan, because really someone should call the EMS (which I think had been, but not in a priority way), and they might need that route to get down there quicker.
This afternoon, coming into work, I saw a group of men yelling at a man slouched in a doorway. "Get up! Get up!" they screamed at him. His eyes were open but he was unresponsive and lying in a his own piss. He was either out of it on heroin or dead. The men continued to holler at him, and I was able to ascertain services had already been called, so I did not stay. I think he was dead, and I think that is why the men, who did not seem to know him, all hollered so fiercely.
