Bash Compactor: Cool Hand Lucas
There’s nothing like a good New York City cocktail party. You arrive before your late dinner; you have a few drinks (preferably hard liquor); you schmooze it up with the hot, the powerful, the surprisingly nice and the inevitable handful of snobby bitches and a-holes that make up any crowd in town. Cocktail parties offer networking opportunities, canapés and the chance to show off your outfit. Then you beat it before you get too bored or hungry to stick around any longer.
That was my reasoning when I went to the weekly party thrown by magazine editor and gadfly Mickey Boardman in the Club Room of The Soho Grand Hotel. My arm candy for the night was two of my cute friends, brought with me as bait. After all, the guest of honor was gay porn king Michael Lucas, an all- American success story if I’ve ever heard one. Lucas moved to the U.S. in 1997, became a citizen in 2004, brought his family over from Russia and built a porn empire, the largest in New York. His bestknown film is the legendarily expensive gay porn flick Michael Lucas’s La Dolce Vita, the horny tribute to Federico Fellini’s masterpiece; it cost $250,000 and won 14 GayVN awards.
We arrived at the hotel and traipsed through a film crew in the industriallooking lobby—Sarah Jessica Parker was shooting there, but her equine visage was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile we found the party where other horsy body parts were being celebrated. The Club Room was oh-so-clubby, lit by a roaring fireplace and furnished with plush sofas and prints of male movie stars like Lee Marvin and Peter O’Toole. “There’s a bottle of vodka over there,” one of my friends whispered, going to get us a glass. Meanwhile, not one to be shy, I introduced myself to Boardman and the others flocking about—a few dozen people were lounging around. “Are you Michael Lucas?” I asked, approaching a handsome, dark-haired man wearing a natty striped shirt, sweater vest and tweed jacket ensemble. I’d never watched any of his porn and wanted to know more. “Do you ever feel funny showing your penis to the world?” I asked. With a smile and a sexy Russian accent, he replied he never did. “I’d love to be in one of your porn flicks. Granny bukkake is very in nowadays,” I joked. Lucas never skipped a beat. “Ever been to Rue de St.-Denis in Paris? That’s where the grandmother hookers work,” he purred. I admitted to Lucas that my real professional obsession is photography, and asked, staring into his chocolate eyes, “What’s your secret passion?” No, it wasn’t the piss sluts in Piss & Boots or Men in Suits, his new flick about hot men frolicking in haberdashery, or even Men in Stockings, his flick featuring dudes in torn black pantyhose getting down to business. “Politics. That’s what I’m really into,” he proclaimed. “I like being involved in the world.” I asked him if he liked New York. “I love it. I lived in Paris, too, and liked that, but New York is my home now.”
As I left, I realized I’d achieved the objective of the typical cocktail party: new contacts. Who knows, I thought, maybe I’d get some free porn out of the deal. Or maybe it would be the start of a beautiful new career. Michael, call me!