The Great Blizzard of 2004
Notes on Cocaine Christmas
The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.
I tend to talk a lot about the idea of “Cocaine Christmas,” and I always have to mention that the idea of Cocaine Christmas is 100 percent aesthetic and not doing coke on Christmas. Cocaine Christmas is, in no order whatsoever: the movie version of Less Than Zero, the office in Scrooged, Todd and Margo in Christmas Vacation, the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, Harry Ellis doing enough blow at the Nakatomi Plaza Christmas party to call a terrorist “bubby” and calling himself Hans Grueber’s “white knight” before getting killed in Die Hard. And in it’s most modern incarnation, it’s Melania Trump giving a tour of the White House decorations that looks like it should have a soundtrack by Goblin produced by Giorgio Moroder. It’s also, for reasons I can’t totally figure out, these two people having dinner overlooking the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in this 1991 Courvoisier ad.
So, in no way, shape or form am I advocating using cocaine. And, as a Jew, I’m also not telling you or anybody how to celebrate the birth of your Lord and Savior. Instead, I’m here for celebrating the sinister, soulless side of the holiday. It’s not my holiday, but I like Christmas. I like all the ideas of good cheer and being nice for a day, but I also really love this cold, spooky, soulless side of the holiday that as a non-celebrator, I guess I’m just able to embrace a little bit more.
But beside the actual look and feel of Cocaine Christmas, in 2004, there was an actual Cocaine Christmas held in, yes, Williamsburg. The then-center of all things cool and sleazy Brooklyn. I don’t know anybody that lives there anymore and I try not to get out that way unless I have to, but in 2004 it was my stomping grounds. I used to feel really weird saying that, but, as we wrap up 2021 on a slew of negative bits of news, something that haunts me like Jacob Marley’s ghost is that the retro cycle has stopped on my time. When I say my time, I mean my 20s when I was young and dumb and careless and had more hair and no money. I mean the aughts. It’s been happening, but as I’ve been noticing, a very specific part of the aughts that I really thought was dead and buried is back. And it somehow relates to Cocaine Christmas.
If you’re like me and you get all your news from Throwing Fits memes (that’s a joke, of course: I get all my news from Throwing Fits memes and Sussmans memes), you’ve probably seen the uptick in jokes about 2000s indie sleaze coming back. And if you’re like me, you’re probably screaming inside, going “NOOOO! Why me? It’s so soon! I’m so young! It’s not my time!” But, the sad truth is that the retro cycle comes for all of us. And I as I sit here a few days before the 25th of December, I’m reminded of my own little weird Christmas story from that time. One that I’m only writing in hopes of maybe filling your holiday with what I can only imagine is some sort of much-needed cheer as everything feels kind of gloomy right now. So here it goes.
One day you’re 23 and DJing the Diesel store on Union Square a few days before Christmas. You are hungover because the night before you were celebrating a friend of a friend getting to write a 50-word blurb about an off-off Broadway play for New York Press. You’re expecting money, but the store pays you in…store credit. You try to sell the $100 store credit on Craigslist for $90, but nobody bites. You decide to sell stuff to Beacon’s Closet to try to get back that $100, but they give you $25 for four full trash bags of clothes. Deep down, you knew that would happen. And the worst part is that even if they’d given you a hundred bucks, you’re still actually $175 short of rent and the first of the month is coming up. So you call the bar you sometimes bar back at and you ask if any shifts are available. Your boss tells you no, but the DJ/Suicide Girls model they had on Christmas Eve got asked to do some burlesque thing for a rich guy’s Christmas party in his mansion on Long Island that you think sounds a lot like an Eyes Wide Shut situation, but you don’t mention that. You say yes. Oh my good lord, yes. Then you realize that in order to make at least $175 plus another 25 dollars for black cars to and from your apartment with your four milk crates filled with records and the little box of 45s (you only spin vinyl), you’re going to have to make sure there are a lot of people in the little bar, because they pay you a percentage of the ring. You need to make sure the bar makes at least a thousand dollars so you can pay rent. A thousand ten and you can also get an egg and cheese after you get home around five in the morning. So what do you do? You come up with an idea! You call it “Cocaine Christmas.” You convince your roommate who you don’t really like and who will confirm your suspicions that he’s shady when he ditches out of the rent in two months, leaving you and your roommate to find somebody in his place and you end up going with a guy who goes to that audio engineering school in the city. He has a pet iguana—the replacement roommate, not the one you currently have and don’t like, you actually end up missing that shady bastard when the roommate with the iguana that replaces him starts smoking crack. In the meantime, you ask the roommate you have now to help you design a flyer because he has minimal design skills and a better computer than yours. He makes you a vaguely 1980s punk looking flyer with your specific demands: “Cocaine Xmas” at the top, the picture of Bianca Jagger riding a white horse into Studio 54, the name of the bar, your DJ name (At the time it’s DJ Diamond Knights. Really clever) and the sort of genres you’ll play. You list them as such:
Sleaz-e soul
Dirtbag disco
Fucked up funk
Mindless punk
Bing Crosby and David Bowie
Other assorted stuff
As a payment for the flyer, you tell your roommate you’ll get him drink tickets knowing he’s broke and also, like you, has nowhere to go on Christmas. You print up one single flyer on your shit copier, walk to the copy shop in the “Williamsburg mall,” make 100 copies of the flyer with two on each. You hastily cut them, and you run out and start putting them up and taping them up anywhere you can put flyers. You get rid of all 200 flyers in under an hour then go home and start calling any friends or people you work with at any of your four jobs, and you leave a lot of voicemails telling them about the event. You’ve done all you could. All you can do is hope.
On the night of the big event, you make yourself some ramen. The carbs will help you through the evening. You’ve given up trying to have cool hair because you don’t quite have a Jewfro, but it’s not far from it. That, and you’ve started noticing that it’s thinning a little in the front. That’s troubling, so you put on a fitted Yankees cap that you aren’t quite sure where or when you acquired it, but whatever. You get your best vintage Western shirt. It’s red. You think about putting on a black skinny tie, but you decide against it. Your pants are a pair of your ex-girlfriends jeans from Old Navy because it’s 2004 and there are basically only four pant sizes for men: traditional, baggy, boot cut and whatever you’d call the sort of fit carpenter jeans are. You like something a little skinnier. In a few years time, you will come to hate skinny jeans and the fact that everybody wears them after you’d been wearing them for a few years. But for the time being, you take what you can get.
You call Northside. They say ten minutes, but the guy is there in three. You schlep the four crates of records and the little box of 45s down from your apartment on the third floor. 15 years from now, you will wonder how you kept in good shape with all that drinking, bad diet and lack of gym membership or fancy exercise bike in your home, then you remember the record schlep was something you did almost every other night of the week. You get in the black car. The guy is playing some sort of music that has lyrics in Spanish. it’s an incredible beat.
“This song is great. What is it?” You ask.
The driver looks in his rearview, gives you a thumbs up and just replies, “Yes!”
It’s 9:55 when you arrive at the bar. Your whole schtick is to get there just a few minutes early, quickly load in your four milk crates full of records and the little box of 45s in, walking through the bar like a rockstar who is about to blow some minds with your selections. When you load the final crate in, you take out a record and you put it on. A real thumper. Lately you’ve been into “The Magnificent Seven” by the Clash or “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan and Rufus. Then you mix it up for the next several hours. You aren’t there to make people dance; but if they want to, that’s totally cool. You are the vibe master. You are there to control the flow. This is your art, and God help anybody who dares request any single track.
That’s how the night normally goes. The one problem on this night is that there’s a line out the door and it takes you a little longer to get your stuff in. As you’re bringing the final crate inside, you ask the doorman, a very large man named Phil who is a student at Gallatin when he’s not kicking drunk trust fund babies out of bars, what the deal is with he line.
“Something called Cocaine Christmas,” he replies. He’s as confused as you are, except for different reasons.
You don’t know how to take this news. In all your years of setting up punk shows, comedy shows, literary readings, house parties and DJ nights, flyers have always seemed to be sort of a waste of money. Just a thing you put out for peace of mind. Yet it seems that somehow or another a few people heard and then a few more and then a few more and all of those people had nothing else to do on Christmas Eve, so they showed up to the bar they saw advertising something called “Cocaine Christmas.” There are people you’ve brushed up against at parties, like the Brazilian heiress nobody likes but who pays for everything, so people tolerate her; there’s that guy you saw get 86d from Union Pool after he got stealing the tip money on the bar to pay for his drink; there’s another guy who was in an electroclash band that put out zero albums but somehow had their photo in Spin and the Fader two years earlier, so you think they’re famous; there’s two people you read about on Gawker and at least one girl you recognize from an American Apparel ad, the company that you think might be secretly sponsoring your party since every other guy in the place is wearing one of their V-neck t-shirts. It’s just a sea of Julian Casablancas haircuts, Member’s Only jackets, bad mustaches and there’s one girl dressed up in what looks to be, yes it is, a Confederate soldier uniform complete with the ol’ Stars and Bars on the top of the grey hat because this is the Bush 2 era and hipster racism is all over the damn place.
The place is packed. Standing room only. There are people that you heard came from the city—The City. They came from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Who has ever heard of such a thing?
You play all kinds of good shit and the crowd is living. The one bartender, a 30-year-old who always tells you the time he saw Echo and the Bunnymen was the height of music (he might not be wrong) who is getting his law degree, is slammed, but handling it. There’s one bar back, but he’s high. You play “The Number One Song in Heaven” by Sparks because it’s over seven minutes long and you, a proud member of the bar back brotherhood, can’t stand seeing all those glasses piling up, so you help clear a few tables. You know the song is ending, so you jump back behind the booth and put on “The Step” off the first !!! album because that song is six minutes and it gives you a little chance to collect yourself.
All night you just spin hit after hit and the crowd just doesn’t go away. And what’s wildest of all, you’ve got all the energy you need because you’re in your early-20s and you aren’t yet embarrassed by drinking Vodka Red Bulls. The crowd, on the other hand, has definitely taken the theme of the night seriously, and the line to get to the bathroom is so long with couples and sometimes three or four people in there either having sex, doing drugs or, most likely, both, so people just start openly start doing cocaine, which makes you a little nervous. Not because people might take pictures of this and post it on social media, because, remember, this is 2004 and social media isn’t even a consideration. No, you’re just worried because you don’t want to go to jail. You also don’t want the sketchy Polish bar owner having you killed for getting his bar license revoked by inviting countless, possibly underage, possibly children of very rich people, to do cocaine in his bar. Things really get a little crazy around 1:30 when you’re playing “Sympathy for the Devil” and some girl takes her shirt off and all she’s got on is one strand of red tinsel she pulled off the Christmas tree the bar has up in the corner window. You look at the girl and you think, “She either looks like Karen O or Liza Minnelli in the ‘70s,” but then realize, oh no, now there is nudity. The entire party feels like it’s going to descend into some level of hell saved for those that sin on the birthday of Jesus, but then, mercifully, it starts to calm down. You start playing music that reflects that vibe. “The Model” by Krafterk and one of the three Bowie songs you don’t have a problem playing because they guy had so many phases, it’s fine to play Ziggy Stardust stuff, ‘70s Thin White Duke stuff and maybe one of the ‘80s pop songs that people might talk shit about but deep down everybody loves. Years from that moment, you’d get sick of using the word when you’re a writer, but, damn, the vibes in the bar really turned around. People are having a really good time. It starts thinning out, people seem to be chilling out and just enjoying being around other people. At some point, the bartender mercifully turns down the house volume and yells for last call. In that split-second of silence, some stick-thin guy in a My Bloody Valentine shirt and a really nice blonde helmet of hair with bangs that stop right above his eyebrows starts screaming the lyrics to “White Christmas” at the top of his lungs. A few people join him, then a few more. All of a sudden, almost the entire bar is singing along. You do also, thankful you don’t really have to do much to follow it up since the bartender is going to turn the lights on and kick people out soon.
Not long after, it’s just you and the bartender. He poured you both a glass of the expensive Scotch. Probably Johnnie Walker Black because, again, this is 2004 and people don’t know shit about craft cocktails or what a Negroni or French 75 is. Most of them couldn’t tell you the difference between bourbon and what you’ve got in your glass. You are one of those people. The bartender raises his glass. “To Cocaine Christmas,” he says. You both take a sip and he gets up to walk to the register. He comes back and hands you $300. The ring total was just a few bucks shy of $1300, but he rounded up and gave you some money out of his tips because “people are extremely generous when it’s Christmas and they’re coked up.” You thank him, finish your drink and go home. It’s 5 AM when you get there and you’re so jacked up from at least, but no less than four Vodka Red Bulls, that you decide to go for a walk. You end up at a diner where you don’t think about price and just order whatever you want. That Paul McCartney Christmas song that you normally hate plays on the radio, but for once you don’t mind it. You’ve got your rent money and more. It’s a Cocaine Christmas miracle.
The next day you wake up, you’re 41, it’s a pandemic and you really wish you could do something like that right now, just without everybody doing cocaine. You think next year, baby—that will be our year. For all of us. But for now, all you can do is wish everybody you know and those you don’t a happy holiday and hope they’re safe and healthy. You always take what you can get and realize maybe the soulless part of the holiday isn’t the only thing that appeals to you.
Damn. It was a MOMENT IN TIME. Loved this. Wishing you a very Tod & Margo Christmas!