“This is the New York we want to exist in. This is why you live in New York.” – Matt Starr
In 1989, the “Club Kids,” wild-styled nightlife creatures immortalized in the film “Party Monster,” threw an outlaw party at a McDonald’s in Times Square. The NYPD soon shut it down, as they did other outlaw parties in a subway station and on the then-abandoned High Line tracks. Now, the well-connected literary world It Boy Matt Starr is bringing back that outlaw energy, and with no visits from the fuzz.
At a multi-leveled Burger King on the corner of Liberty Street (the largest BK in NYC!), Starr’s “Perverted Book Club” delivers the same off-grid, guerilla energy as an outlaw party. Over 400 people show up, cramming the top floor to the point where a petite brunette toting a Strand Bookstore bag, almost faints (she chugs water and stays for the show).
This is the 4th Perverted Book Club Starr, a poet and co-founder of Dream Baby Press, has staged. With co-founder Zack Roif, Perverted Book Clubs have popped up at Blue Door Video, a sex shop in the East Village and at a Sbarros in Penn Station. Starr has become pals with the Burger King’s managers Myra and Daveen who sports a Santa red velvet blazer. “We bring in a lot of business, but it’s not just that,” Starr says. “This is the New York we want to exist in. This is why you live in New York.”
Things are a bit behind schedule. It seems Lukas Gage, the breakout star of “White Lotus” – who got married by Kim Kardashian to her hairdresser Chris Appleton on reality TV (the couple divorced months later) – is running late. I spot the fainting girl chomping on a Whopper. “It’s like Vaudeville,” Starr explains. “We have two simple rules. You can’t read off your phone. I find it insulting to the audience. And it has to be fun and exciting. It doesn’t have to be crazy and perverted. When you are in a room of 400 people in fluorescent lighting and you read horny things, it stops being horny and it becomes very funny.” The Perverted Book Club has done a love letter themed collaboration with Valentino and opened for a Broadway play. There are hundreds on the wait list for tonight (events are announced on Dream Baby Press’ Instagram). Starr insists he is keeping it all indie. “I want to keep doing them at Burger King. It’s become our headquarters,” he says. “But I don’t like turning people away. Can I find a venue that has 800 people, but also still has that New York specialness?”
“It’s probably really cringe as young people would say. I’m going to do it anyway.” – Candace Bushnell
Lukas Gage is still MIA. Starr starts the show, dedicating it to the late Rob Reiner, inviting a “rabbi” in a Burger King cardboard crown and tinted aviator glasses to light a menorah and then reads from his book of poetry Mouthful. The line-up is impressive. In front of a huge inflatable gingerbread man, Sex and the City scribe Candace Bushnell announces she is doing a scene from her one-woman play. “It’s probably really cringe as young people would say,” Bushnell says. “I’m going to do it anyway.” Bushnell then dramatically recounts an awkward threesome when she first moved to Manhattan. Guests hike their iPhones above head, recording Bushnell, who looks spectacular in a short black leather skirt and thigh-high boots. Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz, recites salacious sections from her podcast Once Upon a Time in the Valley which chronicles porn star Traci Lords’ roller-coaster career in adult entertainment. Carole Radziwill, famous for her stint on “The Real Housewives of New York,” choses Jenna Jameson’s 2010 memoir How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. “When my first book came out, it made the New York Times bestseller list,” Radziwill informs the audience. “Guess who was on top of me? Jenna Jameson. I know there’s a joke there somewhere, but I’m not smart enough to figure that out.”
“Where is Lukas Gage?” Maren Frey, who wears Chanel ballet flats and is a student at Barnard, asks me anxiously. Maren’s dad, A Million Little Pieces author James Frey is one of the headliners, but she is antsy to meet movie star Gage, who still hasn’t appeared. By the waving gingerbread man, “Girls” star Jemima Kirke shares excerpts from her sex advice column (why not bonk your boss she reasons) and poetry. Rob Franklin who wrote Great Black Hope, Interview Editor in Chief Mel Ottenberg and Cat Cohen all do readings. Then, up the stairs comes Gage with what looks like dried blood around his mouth. He squeezes through the crowd and Starr hands him a mic. “Everyone is giving me really worried looks,” the actor says. “My face is OK. I just ate pussy for the first time in five years.” The crowd claps, then Gage adds, “Nah, I just died tonight for my movie. Spoiler alert.” Before he leaves, Gage mentions that someone, somewhere at Burger King has copies of his memoir I Wrote This for Attention for sale.
“James Frey wrote his piece earlier that day. It’s called Santa Claus is Cumming to Town, the tale of a well-endowed Saint Nick from Norway and the scores of happy women he visits on Christmas Eve.”
The night closes with Frey, the aptly dubbed “literary outlaw.” His daughter Maren confesses she hasn’t read her father’s newest novel Next to Heaven, about key party orgies with pink cocaine in a tony New Canaan-like town. “I just can’t,” she claims with an eyeroll, reminding me of children of movie stars who can’t watch their parents in sex scenes – I mean, how cringe!
Frey wrote his piece earlier that day. It’s called Santa Claus is Cumming to Town, the tale of a well-endowed Saint Nick from Norway and the scores of happy women he visits on Christmas Eve. It’s a perfectly X-rated ending to the fourth Perverted Book Club. Ho ho ho!
– PETER DAVIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AZZI JACOB and MATT WEINBERGER
