First Posted 12 October 2007

Another Day, Just Like The Last

Current mood:melancholy

I toss. I turn. I watch the telly but, I get no release. Mr. Sandman does not slip into my room and take me to dreamland. I drift off only to startle myself awake again and again, ready to go. Go where? I don't know. I get up, use the loo and then stumble down the hallway to the kitchen to get a fresh cold bottle of water. I use Atlantic City tap, always have. It's the best in the country, years and years of taste tests have proven this assertion but, I don't need tests. I grew up here, I know it's the best. The famous New Jersey Pinelands provide us with an aquifer unrivaled by those "mountain streams" that you see touted on those packaged bottles. Even in times of regional drought, we never go thirsty. We never want for crisp, clean, delicious water. There is a reason why we are called "the garden state".
I go back to my room, once again banging into the door frame. I haven't a clue why I can not seem to gauge distances anymore. I bang into walls, door jambs, tables, chairs all the time. I think to myself, "I can walk around the Studio Six in the dark and never fall, never hit a barstool or wall, always know where and when to lift my foot for a step, all of this incompleat darkness but at home, I still, STILL, bang into things." I fall back onto the bed, moving around the too many pillows I have to make a comfy nest and curl back up, waiting for slumber to finally arrive.
I never set my alarm because...well...I have no need to. I drifted back and forth from sleep and finally, regrettably, get up with the mounting light in the sky, thick with heavy clouds. I turn on the morning news and watch the handsome newpeople tell me the events of the day before and the "THIS JUST IN" stories that they feel I need to know RIGHT NOW! I watch the Philadelphia news because, I just can't bring myself to watch our local news. It's akin to a high school A.V. club putting together a fake broadcast in order to be graded on it. Believe me, NBC NewsChannel 40 would get nothing more than a C- on a (very) good broadcasting day. I do love that our little "mayor" problem has made the news all over the world. As long as Atlantic City is mentioned, it's a good thing, I guess.
I begin to watch the morning shows and decide that I'd rather kill myself so, I get myself showered, dressed, pack up my little shoulder bag with a book, mp.3 player and a data disk of Cafe entries and photos among the other things I like to have with me on my jaunts and off I go, down the streets of the city and up onto the boardwalk. The sun comes flooding out of the storm laden skies, promising a beautiful, if windy, day. I haven't been up on the boards at this early hour for quite some time. At least not from this end, meaning the I-just-got-up instead of the I'm-on-my-way-home end. The shop owners are just arriving, putting out their wares, rolling up the security doors, drinking a big cup ofStarbucks/Dunkin Donuts/Wawa coffee. There are municipal lorries and police cars, driving slowly down the boardwalk, doing whatever it is that they are doing. I notice a truck from the Army Corps. of Engineers is parked by Bally's Casino and some of the "corps." are there with strange equipment walking out onto the dunes that are supposed to save our beaches, although if the oceans rise with the melting polar ice, we'll need to save more than sand. It all looks high-tech so, I stop and watch for a minute. I quickly realize that I haven't a clue what they are doing so, I duck into a shop and get some fresh-out-of-the-oven soft pretzels. Did you know that we eat more pretzels in the Delaware Valley than the rest of the country...combined? I did.
I get to the club offices and see Tiffany. She's finishing up the closing of the office, shredding paperwork, getting the various services shut off, the deliveries ended, packing up the financial statements, stealing the leftover alcohol (kidding!), whatever one does when one closes a business. I am just there to use the computer since it's still hooked up to the Internet. We talk about our future plans, gossip about the club closing and such. She tells me nothing new, well, nothing I didn't already suspect. She didn't know what was happening until maybe an hour before they shut the doors but, she did have an inkling that something was amiss. I mean, she does our day-to-day operations so she saw the writing on the wall. But she, like all of us, was still surprised that we shut so abruptly. I was trying to get her to pop open a bottle of champagne but, it was a bit too early and we didn't have orange juice for a proper mimosa.
I surf my MySpace, I check out this site and that. I go to "Homestar Runner", my mostfavourite Internet cartoon and laugh my head off at the recent "Strongbad Emails". It takes a certain kind of humour to enjoy Homestar Runner and his merry gang. As I am sitting there in the office, Tiffany deletes the Studio Six MySpace page. Before she does, though, she laughingly remarked that people were still requesting to be a friend of the Studio Six. Imagine that. I quickly go to my MySpace friends and delete the Studio Six from my roster. The Studio page was the first "friend" I had listed. I set her up with an account on AOL so she can have access to the Cafe. Hi Tiffany! Welcome. You'll find some juicy gossip in here!
I decide that I need to get the hell out of there, it's just too depressing, as much as I love her. I am tempted to run over to the club, just to see what they have done but, I realize my memories should remain the way they are, when my life was intact. I leave the office and notice the streets are full of water from a recent rain shower. That's funny, I think, the skies are cloudy but, the sun is out as well. I begin my walk home by going through the casinos and by the time I make it through them and travel past Boardwalk Hall (did you know it was the largest building without any central roof supports in the world for decades after it was built? I did) when the clouds darkened the skies and the rain began pouring down. It was incredible, the water just came down in torrents. I found an overhang and stood under it, soon joined by several shoobies, and we waited out the storm together. Once the winds blew the rain cloud away, I began my travels again only to have to find shelter once more after I passed the Tropicana Casino. Only this time, although the rain came down again in buckets, the sun was shining like a beautiful summer day. It was very, very odd. I did stand there, looking up, watching the water droplets as they fell from the sky, each reflecting the sun and sparkling like diamonds as they fell to earth. It was magical. Soon, though, the deluge turned to a light drizzle and I finished my walk down the now slick and reflective boardwalk to my penthouse, putting on my rain beaded sunglasses as I walked.
I get home and putter around the flat, trying to decide what to do with myself. I amslowly, and I mean SLOWLY, going through things again, A box here, a drawer there. I am trying to shed this skin and start anew. I like that analogy.
After my afternoon living-room-library session, spent watching the skies rapidly change from rain clouds to sun to clouds again through the front windows and reading a fascinating book called "What Are The Seven Wonders of the World?" (It's a compendium of lists, starting with groups of three like, "What are Newton's three laws of motion?" , and, "What are the names of the three Furies?" then it builds from there. Who are the four horsemen, what are the five pillars of Islam and so forth), I gathered my strength and got changed into my gym clothes and made my way to the gym. The winds of change were intense and I had forgotten how hard it is to pedal a bike around the island under these conditions. It was like going uphill the entire way. By the time I make it to the gym, I am worn out. I see some new faces, new "gym boyfriends" to avoid eye-contact with. Along with all my other problems, I must confess that I am in serious need of some intense human contact, and not just a friendly hug and peck on the cheek. I want to tumble for somebody, bad! I find myself staring longer than is socially acceptable so I concentrate on my workouts and the mirror. "Hey, I don't look so bad myself", I think, as I check out the V-shape I am seriously sporting.
The drive home was great, the winds that blew hindered my progress to the gym are now behind me and I fly back down the mile stretch and through Chelsea Heights. I make a snap decision and stop by to see my father and step-mother to tell them the news in person about my recent troubles. They were too happy to see me although a bit distressed about my situation. I told them about the new club. I raided their ice-box. I sat an chatted with them and then made my leave.
After my protein shake and a great dinner of Mommie Dearest's leftovers, I watched a little telly and, once again...

I toss. I turn.

First Posted 11 October 2007

Letter To The Editor

Current mood:frustrated

The closing of the club was finally printed in The Press of Atlantic City, of course I can't find the link. As you can read, I didn't like the article:

Dear Editor,

I must take The Press of Atlantic City to task for their recent article concerning the closing of the Studio Six/Brass Rail. With all due respect to Councilman Shultz and his partner, Gary Hill, they were FORMER owners of the club. Yes, Mr. Shultz built it, and Mr. Hill was a phenom of promotion and their voices should be heard concerning the closing but, they sold the property and are happily ensconsed in their new home reaping the multimillion dollar benefits of their real estate venture of quite a while ago. The real news is the staff (and some of us have worked there for decades) who were summarily thrown out on the street without any warning, without any sort of severance, even without a simple "thank you" nor an explanation as to why we were losing our jobs from the "new" owner. There were bartenders there who are putting their kids through college, remodeling their homes, doing what everyone does to make a living, put food on the table and clothes on their backs. Now we were sent scrambling to find jobs in an over-saturated market at the end of the tourist season. Any long term resident of the area knows that October is the beginning of the end, job wise, and no one is hiring again until April. A simple stroll along the boardwalk will show you how many of the beach bars are gone, restaurants are shut and business hours are shorter. The Press of Atlantic City did another nice job of parroting the press release given to it by people who haven't a clue what's been going on there, who were not involved with the day to day operations of the club instead of finding out the REAL Studio Six/Brass Rail, from those of us who were still there, giving it's patrons the time of their lives for these past decades.
I have worked there in one capacity or another for nearly thirty years, as a promoter, performer, barporter, bartender and even a stint as the assistant manager and I, for one, can say that the closing of this club should not have been given the slight, eight days after the fact, that your paper gave it (although I will say putting it across from the obits was a nice touch). I cannot tell you how many people came up to me and said, "Mortimer, I was talking about you to my Mom and she told me she used to watch your shows back in the day!". This place served not only a segment of the community, but GENERATIONS of this community who came there together to enjoy themselves, meet new people and feel comfortable and happy! There are not many nightclubs that can call themselves a "neighborhood club" as you would say "neighborhood bar". The Studio Six was such a place. There are not many places where parents and now their kids come together to have a good time. I dare you to surf MySpace and not find several pages of people with pictures of themselves in the Studio Six. It was pervasive, it was home, it was unlike any other club in the city. It was a grand old lady of a nightclub and it's passing has been felt deeply and with great sadness throughout the east coast and across the country by a vast multitude of people, as my many voicemails and emails of condolences will attest.
I remember telling the new owner that he didn't just buy a business, he bought an experience.
It's a shame that now, that experience will never, ever, be had by anyone. Ever again.
The Studio Six has done a bloody lot for this community. It should be given some measure of respect by the community and it's paper of record. I don't think it was.
I will never forget the Studio Six/Brass Rail. And neither will legions upon legions of people who were lucky enough to walk up those steps and trip the light fantastic! Or, in our case, trip the light...FABULOUS!

Sincerely,
Mortimer Spreng, Bartender, Studio Six/Brass Rail
Atlantic City

First Posted 9 October 2007

My Life In Exile: Day Six

Current mood:crushed

The week-end came and It. Was. Fabulous! The tri-birthday celebration party we were throwing was a major success! So good that when I got to work on Sunday, I had to askwhen we shut the night before. They told me it was at eleven-thirty in the morning, which meant that I had only three and a half hours sleep before starting my shift in the Rail on Sunday night. Ugh! The fact that I was so busy that I didn't even know what time we shut is a very good thing!
Sunday was a slow start but, things went well and we were very busy for the drag show and the strippers. It was a great weekend! I went home and crashed into my usual Coma Monday, totally ignoring the increasing phone calls that were ringing my mobile off the nightstand throughout the day.

Tuesday came.

My gods, Tuesday.

My entire world fell apart on Tuesday. My entire life. My life for the past twenty-seven years. The centre of my life.

The incessant phone calls and messages (twenty-three messages, sixty-three missed calls) were a clue that something was amiss. Something big. Something HUGE! But the first voicemail, from the club's office manager, was a nice call thanking me for letting her know that the employee paycheck sign-out book was missing. That was it. So far, so good.

The next message buckled myknees. It was Miss Patti telling me that, as she was speaking, they were boarding up the club. My club. My world. I literally fell to the floor. The next message was from Miss Tene telling me to ring her, NOW! I couldn't listen to the rest of them, I just rang Tene and she told me...told me...

Oh my gods, it's so hard to write this next sentence. I still am in total shock.

She told they shut the club for good. The ENTIRE complex. Everything.

I don't know how I didn't just pop a blood vessel in my head right at that moment. The next thing I knew, I was dressed and walking on the boardwalk, all I had were fifties and hundreds in my bloody wallet (I said it was a great weekend) and I couldn't get a jitney, which won't break anything over a twenty. I was on my mobile the whole way, talking to everyone, my GM, the office manager, Miss Patti, Miss Tene, EVERYONE!

They shut down my beloved club.

I get to my usual exit from the boards and walk down the street, trepidation and fear gripping me. "This can't be happening. This can't be true.", keeps ringing in my head like a mantra. I pass the Carnegie Library and my legs get tighter, they feel like lead weights, it takes every effort of will to keep on walking, to make that final half block walk down the street to the parking lot next to the club, to see the end of...everything. I pass the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial park. I pass the pawn shop. I pass the boarding house steps and then I see the parking lot. There's a Coca-Cola truck parked in the lot. For some reason, even though I know we don't use Coke products (our cola was spelled with a "k", forchrissakes), this tips me off that yes, indeed, it's true. I pass through, under the porte cochere and I see my first real sign that yes indeed, my nightmare is true. They boarded up the hotel doors.
My legs began to shake. I round the corner and there's Joey the Hatt and his boyfriend, loading their pick-up truck with his music. Twenty-two years of music, records, CD's, equipment. I begin to hyper-ventilate, the shock is wearing off and the reality is setting in. My eyes well up when I look over and see the Brass Rail windows and side door are also boarded up. I talk to them and see the look of shock and awe on Joey's face, mirrored in mine, I'm sure. I go to the front of the club and my heart broke in pieces. Shattered. Irreparable. There were plywood boards nailed up over my doors to the Studio. There were plywood boards nailed up over the doors to the entrance to the Brass Rail.

They shut down my life. They boarded up my life.

I pull out my camera, just to document this...this...hell wrapped in plywood, and take photos of the club from the street. Thank the gods I brought my camera. My camera that I found at the club, go figure. I then remembered that I left my "drag bag" in the dressing room, I needed to get it. I run upstairs through the side door, the idiot workman standing there tries to tell me...ME!...how to get in the club to get my things. "My blood, sweat and now tears built this bloody club, I know where MY dressing room is, asshole", I think to myself but I say a simple, "thank you" and run upstairs to get my bag and for one last look. I walk by the bar, where I have worked for more than a decade, which looks the same and then I round the corner and pass the DJ booth and look in. It's completely torn apart. All of the equipment is gone. All of it. I enter my dressing room and think to myself, "This was not a snap decision. They knew for a long time they were shutting the club down. You can't dismantle this kind of equipment that quickly without having it preplanned". I grab my bag and take some final shots of my little dressing room, my little world for more than ten years where I spent so much of my life getting ready and getting fabulous and going on stage to entertain the crowds. I make my way out, taking one last shot of the station where I worked behind the bar, blinking through the tears that are falling on the camera viewfinder. As I am walking down the deck steps, I pass theflatscreens and plasma screens that were hanging all over the club. They are lined up along the wall wrapped in quilted covers, ready to be loaded on a truck. "Oh yes", I think, "they knew all along they were going to fuck us over."

Outside, I stand with Joey, he and his boyfriend finished loading up the truck and we just chat. I begin to joke about the situation, my coping mechanism kicking in. I told him that I am going to get a big cardboard box, put it under the porte cochere and serve drinks from it as a make-shift bar, he'll use a boom box and play music, we'll have Miss Tene sitting at the corner of the entrance, just for show, and Joey G. will spin flashlights to the beat. We'll make our own club, right there on the remains of the Studio Six! We joke, reminisce, and chat for a bit more and then hug. Long bear-hugs, saying good-bye to each other but knowing that we are really saying good-bye to the Studio Six, using each other as human representations of our best friend, our home, our life for so bloody long.

I make the trek home, stopping at Evo for many, many dirty martinis. Ketel One, of course.

I stagger back to the penthouse, bumping into people I know along the streets of Atlantic City all asking me the same thing, "What the hell happened?!?". I have no answer. I don't really know. I am in a dense fog although it's a bright and sunny beautiful day. My mobile rings incessantly, I answer each call, have the same conversation with everyone. I get home, finally, and literally collapse on my bed and pass out.

My beloved club is gone

First Posted 20 September 2007

Stepping Out Of Reality, For A Moment

Current mood:contemplative

I was walking along the mile stretch, once again on my way to the gym. I barely noticed my walk through Chelsea Heights, I had put The Cure on my mp.3 player and was just enjoying the music of my youth. The cooler weather seems to bring out theGoth in me. I found myself, several times, singing out loud, probably off key and far louder than needed and had to stop myself out of embarrassment more than once when I suddenly looked up and saw people staring at me in disbelief along the way. As I rounded the housing project, the last buildings before the bay gets in the way, I noticed the sky. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

It was...astounding.

It was as if I walked into a Claude Monet painting. The sky was brilliantly coloured, tangerine, baby blue, dark blue, orange sherbet, yellow highlights, the clouds stretched into the horizon dappled by the paintbrush of that French master of colour and light. Honestly, it was exactly like his paintings only, I had to imagine the telephone poles as the Poplar trees the lined the Epte. Believe me, it didn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to feel myself strolling along the banks whilst the master painter created this scene, just for me.

There are times in my life, no matter how blue I feel, no matter how unhappy I have become, that I will happen upon a scene such as this and my heart, my soul, my very existence will soar up to the heavens and I know that beauty, love, life and true happiness actually exists in this world. That beyond all that we humans can conjure to destroy, to hurt, to hate, Mother Nature can still inspire awe, and love, and beauty and wipe away all that we mere mortals do to ruin things.

I remember when I saw Mars and Venus and the full moon over the still Atlantic ocean at dusk a few years ago. I was literally moved to tears at the beauty of that sight. The heavens aligning in perfect harmony, the colours, dark blue and purple in the east with a few of the brightest stars shining in the darkening sky, orange and yellow in the west gleaming off the wisps of clouds as the sun was setting and between the boundary line, the moon and the gods, brighter than all, sitting like jewels over the sea.

It was bliss. True bliss to witness this spectacle.

The storm I wrote about, recently, that was another beautiful moment, one that took my soul to new, terrifying places, terrifying and magnificent.

I got to the gym and worked out, noticing how busy it was in there and smiling to myself. I took my time at home getting ready, I took my time walking to the gym, and because of my tardiness, I got to see something spectacular. And no one there had a clue.

Today, was a beautiful day.

First Posted 11 September 2007

Six Years (Repeated from AOL Cafe)

Current mood:contemplative

Over the years, I have avoided most of the 9/11 tributes that are all over the telly. It's just too much. I was there, in front of the television, watching it as it unfolded that horrible day, I didn't need to see these shows that brought up all those feelings. I would watch the technical shows about it, though. The reasons for the collapse of the towers, and things like that. The science behind what happened, not the psyche.

Last night, though, there was a show on Discovery Times Channel called "The Falling Man" that I'd seen the commercials for and I was intrigued, enough to make an effort to see it. It was about those who jumped from the towers, more specifically the one famous shot of a man falling head first against the backdrop of the World Trade Center that was published and quickly buried. I remember the reports of that day, of people jumping and it just seemed unimaginable. Outrageous. Shocking. And then, I remember that suddenly, the reports stopped, as if no one jumped. As if it never happened.

They did tentatively identify the jumper but, inconculsively. Which, as they stated in the piece, it's better that he stands for all the poor people who made that horrible, soul-shaking decision:

You have one choice, just one. What would you do? Burn alive or jump to your death?

I confess, I cried a lot watching that program. It was heart-wrenching. It was spell-binding. It was necessary. At least to me. I felt that it needed to be said. Those who jumped to their deaths needed to be heard. Because we focused on the heroes, the firemen, the police, the stories that made it seem a little better to swallow, we tend to forget that someone, some hateful lunatic, made people just like you or me, decide to jump out of a window of the World Trade Center and plunge to earth, to die.

It was a powerful hour and a half of television. And yes, it was hard to watch. I needed to watch it. I needed to remember