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Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov

The dress-code choices were listed on the invitation: leather, vinyl, fetish glam, uniform, formal, gothic, drag, storybook/fairy tale. Hmm. Maybe a nice Metro-bus uniform, I was thinking.

But of course they don’t rent those at the costume place. So I opted for a leather skirt and a leather jacket that I already owned, hoping that together they added up to enough leather to get me into the annual Fetish Ball. And if they didn’t, maybe I’d get by on the premise that it was kinky to be so warmly overdressed on an 85-degree Saturday night in June.

As I strode boldly into the Hollywood Athletic Club, I was immediately pulled aside by two large, unfriendly security men, who proceeded to search every inch of my purse before throwing away my 8-ounce bottle of Evian. Was I a victim of profiling because I was fetish-impaired?

Inside the club, a hurricane of recorded music blasted from enormous amps. There were different rooms to visit, each and every one so loud that it felt like my DNA strands were unwinding and the sequence of my genomes was being shuffled. Unsure of what to do with myself, I sat down on a couch, like a leather-clad Margaret Mead, and watched as the happy fetishists poured through the front door. Well, maybe happyis a poor choice of words. I began to hear an odd kind of parade commentary running in my mind: Oh, look, the orthodonture contingent has arrived. And it’s a very nice turnout this year for the Gas Mask People.

Quite a few of the costumes were disturbing. What do you say to an adult male in a diaper? I don’t generally carry a bottle of talcum powder around, and failing that, I was out of topics completely. This went double for the giant sad-eyed panda with the black angel wings.

“What are you supposed to be?” I tried shouting over the music to one 60-ish guy in a harness and some sort of asymmetrical crown. “King Neptune,” he screamed back. “I have a fish fetish.” Then he dangled a fishing line with a dildo at the end of it in front of me. Interesting technique, I thought. Maybe he’s planning on clubbing the fish with it.

By now, the velocity of the bass vibrations was so intense that it felt like a sound-wave stake was being hammered right through my heart. Apparently the idea of conversation was a fetish that didn’t interest anyone except me. It was certainly out of the question for the mystery human, breathing through a tube, shrink-wrapped between black latex sheeting like some kind of oversize, poorly labeled piece of luncheon meat. He/she so unnerved me that I stumbled backward into a switch and accidentally turned on all the lights in the room.

As the evening continued, the crowd got bigger, until every room was a pulsating petri dish of human strangeness. They were all there. Young nude men in chaps. Old nude geezers in G-strings. A woman with a parasol being led on a leash by a Ted Bundy doppelgänger. A bare-chested guy with a disco ball on his head next to a bald guy in only a truss next to a dashing Napoleonic aristocrat with a riding crop. Lots of babes in PVC and spiky, spiky shoes, with their shaved and oiled, harnessed and grommeted men. A woman in a little-girl outfit who looked like Judy Tenuta but wasn’t. A woman in a rubber dress who looked like Margaret Cho and was. A man with a whip and a backpack next to a woman with a broom and a dustpan. What kind of a fetish is that? I wondered. Some sort of anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive cleaning thing? Oh — she’s actually cleaning up.

And so I said goodbye to the Fetish Ball even as I tried to make sense of it. But as I drove away, I realized I had learned a valuable lesson: Leather clothing in summer is not such a good idea.

—Merrill Markoe

I, Neighbor: A Crazy/Beautiful Cakewalk

I went to teeny, tiny, tornado-prone Fritch, Texas, once, just to get a helping of its annual Howdy Neighbor Day. Howdy Neighbor Day is the day Fritchoids come out of their storm shelters and have a parade, a sack race and a cakewalk. Each happy citizen of Fritch is required to repeat the happy phrase “Howdy, Neighbor!” to every other happy person they amble past. The Lions Club makes pancakes. It’s totally satisfying, and I’ve despaired at finding an equivalent event here in Los Angeles.

I found it at Platinum Oasis, the Outfest-sponsored, 18-hour art happening that invaded the Coral Sands Motel this past weekend. Performance artists Vaginal Davis and Ron Athey (who are also L.A. Weekly contributors) lassoed dozens of poolside acts and about 40 different artists to squat in the motel’s rooms and create their own slumber parties. It was Howdy Neighbor Day with blowjobs!

I went straight for the food first, daintily consuming chocolate cake and getting a sucrose-powered, lipsticky, girl smooch on my cheek in the “Cake and Kisses” room. Then, swooning from my first buss of the day, I was primed for a Dame Darcy palm reading. Sadly, every time I went by her room she was way out instead of real in. Dang! Between rooms, there was an endless array of performers on the pool-area stage. Now, I once saw LL Cool J dry-hump a sofa, but fetish-worthy Latino rapper Dead Lee was the first hip-hop artist I’ve ever seen drop to his knees and grind his face into another man’s crotch. Howdy, Neighbor! Then, my new favorite Mr. Lady and co-host of the day, El Cholo, crooned, “I’m Your Puppet,” and sex-changed “puppet” for “cholo,” waving a big pink dildo around like a semaphore. I spaced for a moment and fantasized that Gwyneth Paltrow took the stage and joined Cholo for a nice “Cruising” duet. That would have been sweet.