[Note: Bambi was a dear friend of mine who died a few years back, beating a lot of life math to live to about 70; this post is far from defining who she was. But as I was telling someone this story a few weeks ago, I thought I should write it down.
For a better and more thorough take on Klubstitute, check out Alvin Orloff’s book Disasterama! He was there at the start. I just went sometimes.]
Klubstitute was the most creative performance night I ever saw. I wandered in somewhat randomly after seeing it listed in one of the free weeklies under open mics. I thought it was a regular poetry open mic, and I could not have been more wrong. This is also the place where I met Bambi Lake.
Klubstitute was a club night at a bar called The Crystal Pistol. I shouldn’t have to tell you it was a gay bar, but I will tell you it was not like most gay bars, even in San Francisco. It was darker and weirder. Imagine if John Waters had been the singer for the Sex Pistols instead of Johnny Rotten, and punk had evolved from there—it was half the décor and half the clientele, almost all boys like most of the punk scenes, but replace the standard homoerotic subtext with overt homoerotica.
Klubstitute was run by a crew called the Popstitutes, which was half band and half performance art group led by the very charismatic Diet Popstitute. They all used the Popstitute last name and their first names were Remix, Bad, Tyler, Xeon, and a bunch of others I don’t remember. But they all looked cooler and smarter than I was and their clothes were more like costumes. I felt like the most boring dude in the place, and I probably was.
“Everyone in here but you and me are dying,” Bambi told me. She was exaggerating but it was much truer here than in most of America. “Everyone here but you and me is going to die of AIDS.”
I didn’t know what to say to her. This was our first conversation.
While we were talking, an older gay Republican type who dressed and looked like George Will came in and the queer punk boys were milking him for drink money, which he had and was more than willing to spend on the barely 21s with the spiked belts and Manic Panic mohawks. Back then we all had a baggie of drugs or a couple of pills but no one had cash for the bar.
“You shouldn’t bring your sad little poems in here,” she warned. “No one wants to hear it. You don’t have problems. They have problems.”
While it was not entirely accurate, it was valid. I have no way of saying how many people in the bar that night were HIV positive, but it was a relatively high percentage, compared to the rest of the country.
Back then, people got sick and were dead six months later. The physical deterioration came fast and quick, you were positive but fine and then you were on death’s door soon after. There wasn’t any time like a middle period that I know of, where you were just a little ill. Sometimes you saw someone lose weight very quickly and then they were gone, or you wouldn’t see someone for a few months and then just hear they had died. It was a death sentence.
There were some who were determined to go down in a blaze of glitter. They knew their life expectancy was like a truckload of old dynamite going down a dirt road, and they were going to party hard until it came. There were some who didn’t want to be around anyone, who went back to their families far away to fade out beyond the social scope—not this crew—they were going balls out until the last days. Unfortunately, this is also the crowd I enjoyed doing drugs with.
One night, while doing lines of cheap meth (you could snort it back then, it was different) with Frankie Glitter Doll, he said, “I could die any damn day, what’s your excuse?” referring to my never-ending appetite for drugs laid out in front of me. But back to Bambi and Klubstitute.
Somehow, while being in an extremely high risk group, Bambi was negative. The best explanation for this is not medically viable, as far as I know—I think there’s just some people who can’t contract HIV, and this is only an anecdotal guess with no medical information behind it—the only reason I think this is because the chance she didn’t have it is just too small. Fuck it, though, I don’t want to sound like some kind of crazy freak who thinks he knows the “truth” about viruses—too many of them around now—but it’s just the guess of someone who’s good at math and horrible at gambling, which is another story.
Bambi also broke down gender politics and the social hierarchy of the arts in San Francisco. I believed every inaccurate word and paranoid theory she told me. Looking back on it, she was trying to get me on her side, like when you’re the new kid at school, there’s always someone who wants to be your friend right away, because they have alienated the entire student body either through their own actions or by the cruel mass distastes of the American teenager. Over the years I witnessed her piss off the most tolerant of people and ruin connections with clubs, bars, and theaters that we all desperately needed as performers, and eventually our own relationship ended as well. But being the new guy in town, and not even old enough to be in the bar, it was great to have a friend right away.
Unlike what Bambi told me, the people who ignored her didn’t have it in for her nor did they secretly hate her, they had all been burned at some point and chosen to act as if she didn’t exist. Her Mean Girl politics did more damage to her than all the imagined secret cabals against her. It took me years to find all this out. No one wanted to tell me because they didn’t want to stir the freak-out pot thinking I might tell her what they said. I was going to find out the hard way like they had.
Klubstitute was fun art in an era dominated by dark and transgressive aesthetics. Other venues featured performance art acts of self-mutilation and manifesto poetics—if you didn’t have actual talent, you could always staple dollar bills to your chest while reciting the dialogue from Wall Street, and finish it off by sticking a six-inch replica of the Statue of Liberty up your ass. Fake blood was cheap and considered rookie-level to using pig blood (I think this was fake, too, in retrospect) and only using your own blood was considered true. It was the time of Boyd Rice and Lisa Suckdog, when screenings of autopsies and real-life death collages showed between bands, and if you didn’t want to see the newscaster shoot himself in the head on camera, you “couldn’t handle it.” I was into some of that scene—the best of it was amazing—but on the amateur level it was rarely viewable, but the yuppies that came out to the South of Market clubs paid to see a man get fisted by a bondage nun while reading poems about the Catholic Church and by god, that’s what they got and talked about at the water cooler on Monday.
Diet and company went the full other way. There were fantastic and exuberant drag acts working out their new numbers, camp and cheese and whatever else you would call it, lip syncs and catty monologues. My favorite was a troupe called The Sick and Twisted Players, who put on parodies of famous films right there in the back of the bar, the first one a gender-swapped version of Carrie with Danielle Willis playing the John Travolta role. You celebrated your time on Earth however you wanted to, and if that meant doing your best Chrissie Hynde impersonation, that’s what it was.
Like all amazing art scenes, it went on longer than I thought it would and not as long as it deserved to and is sadly out of San Francisco’s memory for the most part. As it broke up, the people involved started other clubs and nights, became bands and DJs, started small businesses and spread themselves out across the country; but for a while, it was a highly-concentrated place for so many talented people.
The bar is now a cutesy cocktail place called The Beehive. I don’t care how well they cleaned it, I still don’t think that it’s safe to eat in there after what I’ve seen. There’s no way I could order the mezcal fondue from the same spot I saw a young man shoot a load of cum, freeze-framed in the strobing black light. However, I must give them credit for naming one of their cocktails “The Crystal Pistol.”
To this day, Klubstitute is the most creative and honest art event I’ve ever been to, and it was very formative on my writing. Not that I haven’t worked transgressive and dark, but I don’t have to live there. And even in those standup comedy years, I didn’t talk about anything fake just to get a laugh. I still perform knowing that Diet’s ghost might be watching.
Excellent piece. You really conjure wonderfully specific memories of that time and place. I was like you, dabbling at the edges of transgression, dipping a toe in, nursing an infatuation from afar with Danielle Willis, our second-tier West Coast wannabe-Lydia Lunch. Good stuff! Only note--that famous footage was of a city councilman not a news anchor putting the big pistol in his mouth. Everyone used that at some point--the Butthole Surfers, Neurosis, probably Sonic Youth. Ah, the wild ‘90s...
I second that. Bucky manages to conjure up vivid images of the San Francisco I moved to fresh out of college.