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By Michael Vasquez   Photography by Ruvan

02/19/08 :: URB 152

The life of a contributing editor is unpredictable—you get all kinds of last-minute assignments—and tonight it’s Nacotheque, the NYC party that’s been described to me as the “Spanish Misshapes,” instantly alerting my own Puerto Rican mistrust of that whole Latin Alternative genre-tag. I’m also curious though, because the flyer is repping some beautiful, semi-naked Go-Go girls that I wanna, umm, videotape for URB dot com.

I enter the stairway down into the cave on 2nd Avenue feeling like Harry Haller in Steppenwolf, following that sign reading “For Madmen Only.” I turn right and there are the Go-Go girls, as advertised, but there’s also a fuckin’ open-shirted madman on the stage. Forget Latino Misshapes, this cat’s a misshapen Latino. The crowd is packing in towards him, but the front row takes a collective step back when he gets too close. He keeps shaking his sweat all over them.

The air is dense, filled with smoke—and not weed—cigarettes! Fuck the mayor’s ban. A campy, noir-ish rhythm is hitting me; the lighting washes the walls and faces all blood red. Bashing his head against a sampler, the portly dude looks like a decadent, nihilistic Louis the 16th or Spanish Inquisition-era counterpart to Daedelus’s Edwardian-era schtick. Of course, that’s an imperialist, Eurocentric comparison, seein’ how this cat’s from Mexico. He’s called Silverio, and he’s stripping out of his irony-free (and ironing-free) red and black suit, down to his bikini underwear, looking like Les Savvy Fey’s frontman wearin’ John Oates’s hair.

Silverio is grinding on the go-go girls, sandwiched against a wall. In a split second, my job tonight will involve him air-humping really close to my face (and maybe into the camera), an editorial task I very certainly did not sign up for. I keep filming, glad for the shot, my left hand at the ready to grab balls and kill this kid, should he slip. He cuts it short as it were, sensing danger. The six-dollar Heineken I just bought gets knocked over. “¡Tres teh-keeelahz!” he screams over the heavily-reverbed P.A. I do the math: Silverio + two Go-Go girls = no replacement drink for me. “Order me a Heineken, too” I tell him. “¡Que fresco es!” he exclaims over the PA, belittling me in a SoCalexico drawl, in which second syllables are back-weighted, like a foot gallooshing in a puddle.

“Tumbaste my botella y acabo ha comprar lo. Me debes una cerveza,” I insist, realizing that at this moment my life is a bi-lingual Heineken commercial. “¡Tres teh-keeelahz!” he screams again. Silverio is coming straight from the Id, a morph between the “Stinkin’ badges” guy and an Andy Kaufman alter-ego. And the crowd is right there with him. I ain’t getting my replacement beer.

There are good-natured hecklers aplenty and Silverio offers up the mic, but only after shoving it down his pants and swabbing himself completely, silencing any would-be takers. Cats like this have been party fixtures since Roman times, though there’s more to Silverio than just the give-him-tequila-watch-him-go persona. Despite his best intentions to kill all rhythm dead with his snazzy dancing, his soundsystem actually cooks, as minimal electro makes a fairly funky bed for housey keys, glam riffs and campy film bytes, while he filters his appreciably aggro vocals through a dub chamber.

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