Special Orange Juice

Stack 17

“What is that?”

“Orange juice. Special orange juice.” He said with a smile.

“Ohhhh…”

Last week, I told you how I became a DJ by accident, and how that one nervous yes turned into something I hadn’t planned for and wouldn’t trade. This week, we stay at The Max. There’s enough story in those walls to fill a year of Saturdays, and I’m just getting started. I promise I won’t tell that many stories about the place, though.

Before I go any further, I want to give this stretch of my life its proper framing. People talk about high school or college being the best days of their lives. For me, it was 1989 to 1991. I won’t say they were really the best days — I’m not sure I’d want to relive all of them — but they were some of the most fun, and they left a mark I’m still finding in unexpected places. Three things were running full speed at the same time during those years: the club, Red Red Groove, and my personal life, which was spinning off in directions I didn’t fully understand until much, much later. We’ll get to all of it. But today, we start with the personal, because without that context, the rest of it doesn’t make sense.

So, Troy.

By the time we were well into 1988, Troy and I had settled into a genuine friendship. To understand how that happened, you need to understand something about Troy. His primary goal in life, as best I could tell, was to sleep with everyone who walked through the doors of The Max. If you came in, you were on his list. He checked me off his list pretty early. And then, just like that, we became friends. Nothing more. Just friends.

I kept hearing people mention Troy and John in the same breath, the way you mention people who are together. I asked Troy about it once, and he said, “Not anymore.” He said that for a solid year, all while picking up a different person every night with John standing nearby. John didn’t seem to mind, unless it happened to be someone he didn’t like, which was its own kind of interesting twist. So, I took Troy at his word. They weren’t together. Fine.

Then one day I called, and John answered the phone.

Oh. They still live together. Roommates, I figured. I was so naive it’s almost funny now. But they really were something like roommates — separate rooms, separate lives, except for the club work that bled into every waking hour. I just hadn’t connected all the dots yet. In my defense, I was nineteen.

Around Christmas, Troy decided to take a vacation by himself. And I found myself at loose ends. I was still technically living in that apartment, barely seeing the girl I was renting a room from, and feeling kind of disconnected from my family. Not because anything was wrong between us — my dad had once told me that most kids pull away from their parents somewhere around this age while they figure out who they are, then gradually work their way back. That’s really all it was. I was just finding myself, in the most literal sense of the phrase. I spent most of that holiday stretch alone, which was fine.

Then there was champagne. And somehow, I wound up at John’s house.

What followed was one of those transitions that happens so naturally you almost don’t notice it. There was snow, or something close to it, and we spent a few days inside watching movies and not going anywhere in particular. Then we started venturing out to eat, came back, landed on the couch again. When the weekend came, we did the usual club prep, worked the night, and at the end of it, we got into his car and went home. The following week, I started joining in on the shopping runs, the supply orders, and all the daily machinery that keeps a club running. Just like that, I was part of the operation. It really was a quick induction into the cult.

I never went back to my apartment after that. Well, that’s not entirely true. I went back about a week later to get my guitar and some clothes. The guitar had magically disappeared. Luckily, my keyboard was still at Dad’s house. So, I decided not to make an issue of it and kept moving.

Then Troy came home from vacation.

He walked in, and we were on the couch watching TV. He looked at us, offered a half-smile like he already knew what had happened, said hello, and moved on. No scene. No confrontation. Just a quiet read of the room and a decision to let it be. Looking back, I think he might have been relieved. He and John had been circling something for a long time, and maybe my presence gave everyone an easy way to reshuffle without having to name what was being reshuffled. After a day or two, it was a non-issue. Troy and I got along well living together. It just became the three of us, which sounds stranger than it actually was.

Where I was standing, almost overnight, was inside a 24/7 club operation.

If that phrase conjures images of nonstop parties and free drinks, let me correct the picture. Twenty-four seven club life means you wake up, go to the bank, go shopping for bar supplies, come back and stock the bar, fix whatever broke the night before, work on the lights, clean the bathrooms, handle the books, deal with employees, and then work the actual club during the hours it’s open to the public. Troy and I weren’t employees in the traditional sense. We were there around the clock, and that was essentially how we contributed to the household. We were full-time in every meaning of the word.

It was a strange life, but it had its own logic. John had been in this world long enough to know exactly how it worked. Before The Max, he’d owned Zippers, the premier disco in the area. He’d learned through years of trial and error how that community functioned and what it needed, and he’d built something that delivered it. His mentor, a radio station owner, had taken him under his wing years earlier and changed the shape of his life. John was, in his way, doing the same thing for Troy and me. He had a real expertise in audio and ran an AV company called Light and Sound on the side. When the club finances got tight — and they did, more often than the flashy exterior suggested — he’d get on the phone, sell a sound system to another club, and we’d go install it and come home with several thousand dollars in a day. Clubs aren’t always as profitable as you would think. People see the cash coming through the door and never think about the bills on the other side of it.

Anyway, John was also deeply invested in image. He wore a diamond ring and a Rolex, and it was rare to not see him in a heavily starched shirt directly from the dry cleaners — not because he was swimming in money, but because he understood something fundamental about the world he operated in. If you didn’t look successful, people wouldn’t believe in what you were selling. He drilled that into us. For the gay community of that era, he’d learned, image wasn’t vanity. It was currency.

I absorbed all of it. And at nineteen, with ambition in my veins and a DJ booth waiting for me every weekend, I was happy to let it reshape me.

It was also genuinely exciting. I was an aspiring musician who wanted to be famous, and suddenly, I was meeting locally famous people left and right. Big fish, small pond famous — but I didn’t know that yet, and I was impressed. Bar owners, club promoters, people who moved through that world like they owned it. Looking back, a lot of them were just caught up in the same delusion of grandeur that the scene itself manufactured. But every now and then, something real happened. I remember one night partying upstairs with Glenn and Alex of The Village People. They were completely down to earth, happy to talk, generous with their time. I asked for advice, and they gave it. Moments like that made it feel like I was getting myself into something promising. Maybe I was. The jury is still out on that one.

Looking back on all of it, it was also the beginning of what I now think of as my snob period. I had absolutely no right to be high and mighty about anything. I grew up poor and, technically, I was still poor. But when you live inside that world around the clock, it gets into you. I was naturally shy — genuinely, almost painfully shy — and I’d started accidentally using alcohol to smooth the edges off that after the first night Troy gave me a drink and winked. I didn’t know why he was winking. Troy had a system. Since The Max didn’t sell alcohol, he’d sneak in a plastic squeeze bottle of vodka and mix what he called special orange juice for his friends. Vodka, OJ, a splash of Sprite. In return, we all tipped very well. John would have blown a fuse if he had known what was going on. We all assumed he knew. He didn’t. Well, not at that point. So, at nineteen, I’d have a few of those special OJs while DJing and be feeling no pain by closing time. I wouldn’t call myself a drunk during that period. But I had been introduced to my worst best friend and was leaning on vodka more than I should have been. Plus, we were trying to create a party environment. Being a little lit while playing records loud enough to shake the building, watching people dance — I can’t tell you what a high that was. Better than anything else I found in those years.

That was the world we were building, the three of us, heading into 1989. Strange and loud and fun and complicated. And underneath all of it, Red Red Groove was starting to take shape. John decided we should throw a party — a proper one, with John, Troy, and me behind it. The featured performer was Raghenna, a very popular drag queen who called Tulsa home. Raghenna was great and very nice and accommodating to Mike and I, and I remained friends with Reggie until his death a few years ago. Red Red Groove was her opening act. That was our introduction to the world, and it gave us an almost instant small following in town. It was the perfect launching pad, and it wouldn’t have happened without John’s support. He believed in the band before there was much of a band to believe in. That story is coming. It deserves its own time.

There’s more to this chapter too. The image pressure, the control, the nickname John had carried since his Zippers days that I’d eventually understand all too well. But that’s a story for next week.

For now, just know that I was nineteen years old, living in a bar owner’s house, DJing on the weekends, starting a band, and convinced I had figured something out.

I had not figured anything out.

More road ahead next week. Make yours a good one.

Jeff

Audio credits: Intro/Outro music: New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle / True Faith

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