Bash Compactor: Pop Culture

The first time I did poppers, I was staying in a hostel on Sunset Boulevard. I was broke, depressed and not at all famous, and so I wanted to get super fucked-up. There was this big, hairy Canadian dude staying in the room next to mine who spent his days sitting in studio audiences for $15 and the rest of his time following me around like my ass was made of candy.

After a few failed attempts to have him buy me drugs, one night he followed me into my room and presented a bottle of Rush. “You just sniff it,” he said and I did, sniffing like I had a sinus infection until I felt a wave of nauseous confusion smash my body. It caused me to fall backwards onto my bed, which the Canadian took as a cue to join me. He lunged at me and I ran out the room and out of the hostel, onto Sunset, crashing into walls and falling onto the sidewalk. I’d never missed New York more.

Poppers are funny like that. So, last Thursday I asked photographer Ruth Bayer how she got the idea to do an exhibit that was poppers-centric.

“That’s easy, I used to live in San Francisco,” she said. “I’d go clubbing and saw loads of men doing poppers, and it was so amazing how their faces would change completely in those first 30 seconds.”

Bayer’s exhibit and accompanying book had a launch at [Envoy Enterprises] on Chrystie Street. The portraits are simple, just faces under bright light, each photo a new face and a different reaction, a young freckled model with halfway opened eyes, a bearded bald man with a flushed face and a guy who looks like a stoner version of Screech all hung up on the white walls of the gallery. People funneled in, checking out the photos as DJ Mike Grimes played records. Beside the DJ, a stool sat in the corner of the room with a single bottle of Liquid Thunder poppers on top. As the gallery became crowded, the DJ found his way over to the stool, grabbed the bottle and sniffed. Bayer, seeing this, flew over to flash a few shots, adding to her collection.

Misty Roses performed, a man with a microphone singing weird 1950s pop music that sounded like a cross between lounge and Mike Patton.

“Were inspired by the non-rock ‘n’ roll pop of the ’50s and ’60s, soundtrack music, Brazilian Bossanova,” said the band’s Robert Conroy. He later explained to me that he’d been asked to be a model for Poppers but decided that, being sober, he could not.

Little Annie performed last, reading two of her short stories about ex-lovers, dope sick mornings and the old days of New York City that we all long for.

Outside, conversations transpired about John Waters and the sculpture of a bottle of poppers that he’d made. Somebody brought up how Rush, the foremost manufacturer of poppers, had gone out of business. A sullen silence followed.

Still, with Conroy singing his weird retro-electro music all alone in the corner of the gallery and Annie stammering through an old-school heroin short while the kids in the audience passed around the bottle of Liquid Thunder, there was an overwhelming feeling that maybe old New York wasn’t gone after all.

The buzz from the evening, unlike amyl nitrate, lasted as I walked home through the East Village. I felt like someone who’d just moved here, seeing the city for the first time—it seemed pretty great.

“I’d like to think New York’s best days are still ahead of it,” Annie had said to me, and I took in a deep whiff.