One night in Brooklyn

Tattoos, skinny jeans and garbage bag dresses worn with boots. Some guy carves the wrong way up Bedford Avenue on a human powered trike. A girl walks by in 12-inch platforms and short shorts that show about 2 miles of leg. An overweight redhead in a turn-of-the-century nurse uniform dyed light magenta. Strange mullet-mohawks on androgynous people, uncombed. One guy has a digital camera, which seems like a good idea, but he's taking pictures of buildings.

A flyer haphazardly attached to a light pole, seemingly within the past hour, indicates a free party starts at 6 some 10 blocks away. It is 6:30, despite the promise of an "art show" with "new friends" I decide to continue heading north. There is a bar that serves 32 ounces of beer in Styrofoam cups. The bar has been around longer than most of its patrons have been alive. Bikes are everywhere, and its difficult to find a free place to lock mine. Fortunately my dirty white shoes and stripped-down single-speed bike allow me to pass through undisturbed, as if I belong there. Maybe I do.

Later at The Trash Bar we watch a questionably talented band make up for their questionable talent with an array of costumes and wigs. One band member informs us that we should come to their show next week because "they will have dancing girls." Sinclair is there in his natural state, which is drunk and weird. He dances for the entirety of the set. It is like jumping jacks by an epileptic. Later his friend tries to make out with a shelving unit stacked with books in the corner. After the set, we retire to the many seats that appear to have been removed from late-model minivans and SUVs.

Over cigarettes outside we are "invited" to an after party at the band's apartment/warehouse. It is a huge room with other small rooms constructed therein. The large room could have housed manufacturing equipment, which it probably did in some earlier incarnation. Now it contains the smaller rooms, most of which are raised above the floor -- high enough for anyone who is not freakishly tall to walk underneath comfortably. The rooms are constructed of plywood and two-by-fours, but seem sturdy anyway. There is a white cat that is willing to be petted for a time by strange hands, but eventually jumps and claws, like it has an internal timer.

At one point a bearded man takes a saxophone off the wall and attempts to play it. The valves do not work correctly and no one seems to know how long it has been hanging there. Sinclair takes over the DJ station to our chagrin. He doesn't see the world like a normal person, at least partially because he is colorblind. His drunk has worsened to the point where he can only make sense of music if he plays two songs at the same time. After several minutes or hours of this, we force him to leave with us. He is abandoned when we are sure he cannot find his way back to the party.