I have failed to turn off my computer long enough to hook up the cables so I can transfer Friday's party images from my new digital camera to the hard drive. Is this addiction or what? There just never seems to be the perfect moment to extract myself from browsing or making icons or writing. I meant to do it this afternoon but I had to go drink beer with the usual suspects at Tommy's Joynt. Tommy's is a funky old bar and restaurant on Geary and Van Ness, gaudily painted outside and biker bar-ish on the inside. John and I met up with Jay Kinney, Bruce Townley, Candy Strecker, Matt Householder, Kent Johnson, Stacy Scott, Rich Coad, Gary Mattingly, and John Sulak.
It's strange to think it but I've known all of them for 15 years. Everyone except Sulak used to live in the city. We were San Francisco science fiction fandom back then. We used to meet twice a month at a tiny bar called the Travel Lounge, and also established a party every third Saturday. Having a regular party was great; you never knew who would turn up at it from all over the world. The Third Saturday parties were finally discontinued in the mid-90's when Jim Khennedy joined the Peace Corps and moved to Moldova. The Travel Lounge is now Martoonie's, a chichi swing bar, and none of us would be caught dead in it. Most of the original group are still in the area, but have moved out from the jangled intensity and high prices of the city, so it's oddly comforting to see them all together again even briefly.
Sulak is someone I met in a club in Hell's Kitchen. It was 1984, and I was living in Washington Heights with the Nielsen Haydens. So was Scraps, now that I think of it. He and I slept on their living room floor at night, each wedged in where we could find a bit of space among the chairs and tables in that crowded little apartment. It was stinking hot, as New York is in the summer, so I went out every night to bars and parties in search of air conditioning. The guy I was dating at the time, Jeff Schalles, was in a band and got a gig at this hole in the wall on the lower west side. I showed up early to have a drink and take a break from the heat. Sulak and I got to talking while waiting for the band to go on, and of course it turned out he knew Matt and Candy in San Francisco. Of all the guys in all the bars, right? Now he lives out here and writes freelance. He'll be rooming with Jeff Schalles at the Worldcon next month.
I told you it's a small world.
