Darwin

Darwin was the best thing about the Sad Belguim.

His queerness was so high-octane, I could sit next to him and appear straight. When you are a young gay-bomb, you learn the lesson of staying away from other gay-bombs, lest you set off the straight boy's gaydar and get a beat down. It's a habit that follows you into adulthood, I usually don't want to be near the queer, so that I can be smeared. But Darwin, wow. Just such a firecracker of gayness he blots out any other potential for harrasment.

I first heard Darwin saying "DON'T go down in the basement" on set. He was telling the tale of a bath house he had found. The straight guys were clutching their sides. It became the catchphrase on the Sad Belgium, anytime an AD asked us to do something we considered untoward -- "DON'T go down in the basement" we'd mouth to each other.

"It's the DISNEYLAND of bathouses," Darwin screeched. "They have rooms with themes, a garden top where you can get it on, just DON'T go down in the basement." He wouldn't tell us what transpired down there. I mean, DARWIN had no problem discussing all the various things that he did and had done to him, yet this basement proved overwhelming. It chilled us all, this basement.

Another day Darwin came in and told us he had been arrested next to a children's hospital for doing coke. The cops had caught him, because as he said "they'd been alerted about a degenerate in the vicinity of children." He didn't even realize there was a children's hospital close, he had just wanted to score the coke he had just gotten from his dealer. He said the cops were actually kind to him:

"They had to calm me down, I was sobbing hysterically." I liked the idea of Darwin being so wracked by tears, that even the burly a-holes LA cops would feel compassion, or at the least fear him going into spasms.

Darwin was also a former statue maker, who had gotten arthritis so bad, he could no longer work. He told tales of all the statute makers having parties and fucking and sucking their models, etc. He was a high-end guy, the kind who did statue's for big parks, etc. It made me realize how many of those stoney civil war generals guarding grassy knolls, had just been conquests that Darwin had picked up from a bathouse, and 2 hours later, found themselves in period costumes. Darwin bragged that the Grant he did for an Illinois river town was of this dude who told him about the "Disneyland of Bathhouses."

"Was Grant down in the basement?" I asked.

"DON'T go down in the Basement!" he said in all earstness, right on cue.