remember everyone talking about it like it was some lost arcadia.”
“Well, yeah. It’s just that it was such a happy place. Not that there weren’t other places, but I don’t know if we were ever that happy again. This was the day they knocked it down.”
She took a step closer. There was sound to the film, although you had to be standing right in front of the speaker to hear it.
A man in the crowd saying, “It was the biggest place, it was the best place.”
Another man: “It was our Studio 54. No, wait. It was our moon. It was our moon!”
Another: “Is someone going to tell him about the Bearded Lady? Someone explain about the Bearded Lady.”
And there, dear God, were Yale Tishman and Charlie Keene. Charlie with his open bomber jacket and pins. Yale in an oxford shirt, hopelessly preppy. So incredibly, impossibly young. Had anyone ever been that young? Moving easily, their limbs loose, faces full. And there now, right behind them, was Nico. His hair tousled in the wind. Fiona held her breath.
Yale saying: “I keep waiting to find out it’s a joke.”
Charlie to the camera: “This is where I brought him when he was new to the city.”
Yale: “I couldn’t believe it existed.”
Charlie: “You want to know the state of this city, you want to know whose pocket city hall is in, look at this. You think this isn’t political? You think this is an accident?”
Yale: “They had these glitter cannons, and they’d—one time, the cannons shot foam stars. I don’t even know how they did that.”
Nico: “I’m still hung over from the closing party, and it was four days ago.”
His voice.
It traveled down her neck and arms.
The building, small and undefended.
A voice off camera: “It’s mob bosses tearing this place down.”
Another: “Well. I don’t know.”
Charlie: “They’re making a bloody parking lot.”
Yale: “Watch.”
But nothing happened. A shot of the building, just standing there. Static.
Nico: “Now. Look.”
The wrecking ball swinging, colliding. Not the topple you’d expect, not a skyscraper’s collapse. Just a cloud of obscuring dust and, when that cleared, a hole.
Then another.
Someone shouting “Whooh!” as if out of obligation.
A slow, awkward minute of wrecking ball, and faces reacting. Yale’s face. Charlie’s face.
Fiona felt Julian take her hand. She’d forgotten where she was, forgotten the gallery and the museum and all of Paris.
The film cut forward; time had passed.
The building, destroyed. The entire place downed, the dust clearing. People leaving.
The sound of wind.
Charlie’s voice: “Better be a hell of a parking lot.”
Yale: “Oh my God, look.”
Yale on his knees, digging in the gutter.
Yale surrounded by the remaining people, showing them something in his hands.
Yale showing the camera: a handful of dust.
“There’s glitter in it!” he said.
A man Fiona didn’t know peered over Yale’s shoulder. “That’s not glitter. Where?”
It just looked like dust. Yale turned and smeared it down Charlie’s shirt.
Yale and Charlie and Nico laughing hysterically. Charlie rubbing the dust between his fingers, sprinkling it on the sidewalk. Nico rubbing it into Charlie’s jacket sleeve.
A man smearing it on his cheeks, a woman saying, “That’s asbestos, I’m sure.”
Charlie, laughing still, giddy: “We’re gonna take it home with us!”
A shot of the gutter filled with dust. True, there were glints of light there, but they could have been tiny shards of fiberglass. Surely they were. Fiona tried hard to believe it was more than that.
Nico’s voice one more time, disembodied: “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Campo!”
The gutter, and a long silence.
She expected the film to end right there, but instead, as the laughter died down, the camera lingered uncomfortably on a man collecting his long black hair into a ponytail. On a mother walking by through the last gawkers, pulling her young son by the hand. On Yale and Charlie walking off down the sidewalk, so clearly a couple—inches from each other, but not touching. Around them, a silence as big as the city.
Then the whole film looped again. There they all stood, the Bistro whole. Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
While these characters and their lives are fictional, I’ve stuck as closely as possible to actual places and public events, taking liberties only when necessary. A few of those liberties: In order to avoid writing about real people, I reimagined Chicago’s gay press scene; none of the publications mentioned here are real. While the fictional Brigg Gallery shares some characteristics with Northwestern’s Block Museum, it is not the same place. The Wilde Rumpus was not an actual theater