THE TOOL BOX

A NIGHT INSIDE THE UPPER EAST SIDE'S ONLY GAY BAR By Mark Peikert For a certain demographic, the Upper East Side has become synonymous with The CW's teen soap opera Gossip Girl over the last year. For another, it will always be the chilly setting of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. But as outlandish as the television show can be and as dated as Wolfe's satire now is, there is one important aspect of life on the Upper East Side that rings true in both: all of the characters do their hard-core partying downtown. After all, even people who don't go in for the cachet of snagging a table at Butter or celebrating their birthday with drinks at Socialista rarely venture uptown on the 4/5/6 trains. "I don't know anyone who goes to the Upper East Side unless they live there," says nightlife stalwart John Russell, a fixture on the gay bar scene. "People live there, but they don't live there." And nowhere is the difference between living and living on the East Side more noticeable than in its sole gay bar, The Tool Box. Located on Second Avenue just south of East 91st Street, the closest gay bars to it are more than 30 blocks south: The O.W. Bar and The Townhouse, both on East 58th Street. Of course, part of The Tool Box's appeal lies in its low-key, neighborhood bar vibe. Open for almost 20 years (and in its current location a few blocks south of its original home, for two years), The Tool Box is not generally a bar where one starts one's evening. Instead, it feels like more of a cozy place for one last nightcap before returning to one's apartment-a few blocks away, most likely. I recently found myself at The Tool Box for the first time in my NYC bar-hopping career on a weekday night for the purposes of writing about it. Not interested in dealing with sudden evasions when I revealed my true purpose in drinking there, I opted instead to pretend that I was a recently relocated naïf from Texas and proceeded to chat up everyone who wandered across my path. Needless to say, none of the customers' names used here are the ones they gave me in our conversations. Open from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m., The Tool Box straddles an odd line between homey and cruise-able, with Bingo on Sundays and go-go boys on Fridays. The only sign that a gay bar lies behind the metal door is the tattered rainbow flag taped to the wall above the sidewalk. Occupying two floors, the first floor is little more than a particularly wide hallway bisected by a bar. Toward the back, the space opens up a bit, but it feels just as cramped thanks to the presence of a pool table. But downstairs is a different story. As one descends the staircase, one is confronted with an area that resembles a particularly fraught waiting room. Chairs line a wall facing a TV playing gay porn, offering drinkers a place to sit and wait for someone interesting to arrive. Should that occasion occur and the attraction turn out to be mutual, it was explained to me, the bar-goers can proceed into one of the bathrooms at the other end of the room from the stairs for a little one-on-one time. Or three-on-three time, as one customer mentioned while reminiscing about the last time he'd been downstairs. A regular I'll call Daniel helped explained the strict segregation between upstairs and downstairs, which [caption id="" align="alignright" width="201" caption="Upstairs, the bar is more casual and chatty, while the downstairs area tends to be favored by those looking for a love connection. Photo By: Dan Burnstein"][/caption] plays out like a 21st-century gay version of the British class system. "I almost got into trouble the other night," he said, "because a cute guy from Memphis was sitting two seats away from me at the bar, and he unzipped his fly and started playing with himself. So cute! But that's downstairs stuff. You go downstairs if you're looking for sex." No doubt the porn that also plays upstairs on two TVs helps customers get into the appropriate sexual mood-though just a few feet away from one TV showing a man happily applying a suction pump to various parts of his anatomy was another TV playing the classic music videos of everyone from Donna Summer to Whitney Houston. At one point, while the porn actor utilized the pump upon himself with increasing frenzy, Liza Minnelli's camp classic "Losing My Mind" started blaring from the other end of the bar. Whether this increased or decreased patrons' libidos remains unclear. But for anyone who wanders in for a quick cocktail, the attitude that gay men seem to reserve exclusively for backrooms and anonymous encounters is limited to the downstairs waiting area, where arrogant smirks and hooded eyes remain de rigueur. Upstairs offers an entirely different feeling. During my Monday night info-gathering trip, most of my fellow drinkers, an ethnically diverse group, were in a surprisingly friendly, chatty mood. Despite a happy hour that lasts from 8 p.m.-when most other bars are ending theirs-until 10 p.m., The Tool Box remained obstinately quiet until almost midnight. Men wandered in and settled down at the bar, chatting with the bartender (who seemed to know almost all of them) and occasionally striking up conversations with one another. One or two resolutely avoided interactions and made frequent reconnaissance missions downstairs. Invariably, they'd return and huddle in the back of the bar, idly sipping their drinks and watching porn in between glances at the door to appraise any newcomers who might enter. Some men, however, were less interested in subtlety and remained convinced that directness netted more results. In response to my question of why he'd stopped by The Tool Box that particular night, semi-regular Laurence calmly replied, "Well, I just wanted to have a few drinks and hopefully have an encounter with an attractive younger man such as yourself." But when his advances became even more blatant and I gently rebuffed him, he became slightly angry-helped, no doubt, by the $9 Fuzzy Navels he'd been drinking for the last few hours and fond memories of his threesome downstairs. Most of the customers at The Tool Box that night were regulars, including Daniel, who'd been helpful in explaining it means to go downstairs at The Tool Box. When the bartender reminded Daniel that he'd vomited on the bar a few nights before, Daniel gently corrected the story. "No," he said. "I threw up on my knees." But those men who form the core of The Tool Box's clientele also serve as an infrequent conundrum to the owners. According to patron Jeremy, who claims to have attended one himself, the bar periodically closes for a night to play host to a safe-sex orgy. "It's a problem, because it's a neighborhood bar and a cruisey bar," he said. "So they have to walk a very fine line, because no trolls are allowed. And how do you turn people away who are literally paying your bills?" But a few days later I talked to manager John Puerra, who claims that those days are long over. "There used to be orgies, and that's when the cops started harassing us," he said. "So we made the downstairs a lounge with a TV and two bathrooms." If the downstairs area is truly now just another place to sit, drink and watch porn on a big screen TV, it seems to have escaped the notice of most of the customers. Both Jeremy, the man who claimed to have attended one of The Tool Box's closed-door orgies, and his friend Thomas made several trips downstairs to peruse the talent, while men waited there in silence, seemingly impatient for a quickie. But the biggest tip-off that The Tool Box isn't a major destination on gay bar tours was the lack of females for most of the night that I drank there. Even Splash, that bastion of gay clubdom on West 17th Street, has its share of women sipping drinks served by bartenders in skimpy underwear. At The Tool Box, the first female didn't make an appearance until almost 1 a.m. But even she, accompanied by a gay friend, lived in the area. In fact, of the people I chatted with, I was the only New Yorker who didn't live on the Upper East Side. And other than the lone woman, I was easily the only person in my 20s. None of this surprises Diana Bertolini, an Upper East Sider for five years who's never even heard of The Tool Box. "The vibe [in the neighborhood] is still mainly yuppies, former frat boys who work on Wall Street, and the kind of women who date them," she says. "The bar scene on the Upper East Side caters to that crowd. I do see some gay men around, but they're usually the domestic partnership type, two well-dressed men pushing a baby carriage." And that yuppie vibe extends itself to the customers at The Tool Box. Most were in the requisite leisurewear for middle-aged men: khakis and polo shirts abounded, along with shorts and muted Hawaiian shirts. There's none of the outlandishness of downtown gay bars like Easternbloc, where men in drag and glitter stop by to utilize the stripper poles. All downstairs antics aside, some of the conservatism of The Tool Box can no doubt be traced to its no-nonsense name, but some of it also likely stems from the aura of the Upper East Side as Manhattan's home to the wealthy. After all, could a low-key neighborhood bar in any other part of Manhattan get away with drink prices at ranging from $6 to $10? Of course, the Upper East Side has always been seen as the bastion for the rich, which precludes the wild and raucous bars that made Greenwich Village's reputation in the 20th century. Not that there haven't been gay bars in the neighborhood previously, such as Harry's Back East in the late 1960s. But those days are long gone, and now new gay bars open and close with distressing regularity even in proven nightlife hotspots, such as Chelsea and the West Village. And despite manager John Puerra's wish for a little friendly competition, the prospect of a flourishing gay scene in the still-unproven Upper East Side looks unlikely. After all, the long-open Tool Box is still there, and it seems to be more than enough for anyone in the neighborhood to satisfy their cravings for sharing gay porn and a few cocktails.