reading live with WBE on valentine's day
and getting mogged lowkey
Last night, on Valentine’s Day, I attended Worst Boyfriend Ever’s live event in NYC. I didn’t know I was going to be reading on stage. At least, I wasn’t sure.
I found him in the backroom of the bar and said, “Hey... so am I reading today or what?”
He said, “Well... how bad do you want to?”
“9 out of 10,” I determined. I’d already rehearsed my story twice.
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I don’t know...”
I stared at him. “You literally asked me to read.”
“I want the event to be good,” he said. “The stories have to be funny.”
So I told him which story I had in mind and he said, “Oh right, that one’s funny. You’re good.”
His pupils were about the size of Jupiter.
“It’s the Adderall,” he explained. “I’m gonna go and make them even larger.”
“I don’t think that’s physically possible,” I replied.
“Also,” he continued, “I’m going to rail a line of coke on stage. Don’t tell anyone.”
“My lips are sealed.”
I asked the pretty, dark haired girl sitting next to me what she thought of the demographic in the room.
“There’s more girls than I expected.” she said, “and the guys are somewhat better looking, too. I thought this was going to be the Pervert Convention.”
The backroom was packed, around 60 people crammed into the size of a small studio apartment. Classy string lights draped from the ceiling and the stage was backlight by a soft yellow glow. The audience sat on chairs or on the red carpet floor, or stood shoulder to shoulder by the door. The ratio was about 3:1 White to Asian, about 2:1 male to female. I counted three black people.
WBE sauntered on stage and announced: “This is me, guys. This is my face, this is my voice.”
He was 6 foot, white, decently good looking with distinct autistic/creepy overtones — no different from when I met him last summer. Today, he was wearing a white button down and black pants — very Valentine’s appropriate. He told the crowd he was high on cocaine.
The first story he read was “Slut Review: Katie from Hinge.” He sped through at a tachycardic pace, barely pausing to breathe, making zero eye contact with the audience. He stopped the show twice to hurl books at hecklers/people talking too loud. When he got to the part where he describes himself as ‘physically gorgeous’, he raised the book higher, covering his face, as if embarrassed. Honestly, he kinda butchered it and within minutes, 10 people had left. But when he returned to the stage later in the night, he’d found a better rhythm.
He finished the first story, then said, “Okay, time for a couple guest readers. Is there a Danny Li in the house?”
Yes, there was.
I took the stage and my mind went blank. I forgot literally everything I was going to say. It’d been over a year since I last performed on stage, and my nerves were fried.
“So last summer I broke up with my girlfriend-” I started. The crowd burst into applause.
I continued. “I broke up with my girlfriend and went to Europe for a month. My first stop was Amsterdam. Has anyone here been to Amsterdam?”
One guy hooted from the back.
“How’d you like it?” I asked.
“Drugs!” he yelled.
“Right! There’s drugs and also some other stuff. So I did something in Amsterdam that I had never done before, and haven’t done since… and the title of this piece is, “I didn’t not fuck a hooker in Amsterdam.”
Laughs.
And then I was in The Zone. Comfortable, engaged, reading in rhythm. Pulling attention, getting laughs when expected. It reminded me of lecturing in front of my pre-med class — before I got fired last fall. It felt good.
After I read, other guest readers took the stage. A girl spoke in the perfect present tense about dating multiple guys. A dude with long hair and a soft spoken voice — some Twitter personality — described attending Aella’s ‘cuddle puddle party’. The notorious Dan Baltic — bald, bearded, slightly autistic with a surprisingly funny low and dry monotone — read his piece on Zoomettes. (Lately, him and Walt Bismarck have been disputing who actually invented the term.) Finally, Child Of Divorce took the stage, telling a funnier version of my hooker story, where a homeless guy chases him through the streets of Amsterdam. Touché dude.
Before WBE took the stage again, I got to meet his readers, some of whom said they read my blog too. (Hi Chris. Hi Lana.) This was a trippy moment for me — I’d never actually met my readers before.
Honestly, before now, y’all were just numbers to me. This was the first time I put faces to the crowd and felt like, hold on, I’m actually writing to real people with flesh and blood and minds and impressions of their own — and it blew my mind a little. But I guess that’s what Valentine’s Day is really about, right? Connections, love, whether it be a lover to another or a writer to his readers. Connections. I’d kinda forgotten that.
Anyway, WBE got back on stage and ripped a line of coke off his book, right in front of the big black bouncer. Then he read about the sex he had while circumnavigating the USA in his van, described his sexpat trip Asia, and ended the show with an engagingly impassioned rant on how women are ‘bowling pins’ who only fall for guys who treat them like shit.
And that was that.
Read the previous installments of this saga:
Thank you for writing up the event. I was very curious but it didn’t feel like an appropriate valentine’s activity as a couple.
deemed the most tragic yet engaging event in pubkey history... but comparatively, maybe not.