Below is my intro for the Horror Stories reading I held at KGB Bar last night. I never care much about Halloween, but this was a good excuse to try something fun, perhaps new. I’m very happy with how it went. I want to give a special thanks to everyone who read and everyone who came.

Horror stories, the stuff of ghosts and the supernatural, the elements greater than us, haunting to eternity. So many horror stories, all around, everywhere we look.

Horror stories; an apparition in the middle of the night. Horror stories; an unexpected visit from an ex. Horror stories; riding the MTA. Horror stories; making an appointment with your building’s super, talking to your landlord, or waiting in line at the DMV; oh, Horror stories; going to Bushwick. Horror stories; being heckled during a reading. Horror stories; not being able to tell the difference between infatuation and love. Horror stories; dating someone with a peanut allergy.

All these quotidian matters that make up the in between of our day-to-day lives have nothing really to do with the supernatural and unknown, yet they remain horrifying and brutal, existing and inescapable. The banality of evil is true, but have you ever considered the evil of banality? These are all circumstances which are not stranger than fiction. But I’ll now tell you a real horror story that perhaps genuinely is.

Eleven years ago. There was this guy named Mikey who owned a juice shop in SoHo called Buenas. He opened up a new juicing location inside a now defunct workout studio on Lafayette named Monster Cycle, and paid me fourteen dollars an hour to make and serve smoothies to their loathsome clientele. I’d regularly get yelled by Brazilian housewives (why were so many Brazilian?) about the consistency of the collagen powder and I was asked on more than one occasion whether the ice was alkaline; when I said no, they’d throw a fit, and demand I explain why the smoothie costs seventeen dollars if we didn’t even have the decency to make alkaline ice cubes. I’d shrug my shoulders and tell them I didn’t make the rules, and then eventually, tired of being reprimanded on a daily basis by women with huge, shiny earrings and small waists, I started lying about everything involved; I told people the produce was organic and from a local farm and that the blenders we used were next generation, sent straight to us from Vitamix®, and automatically removed all toxins and herbicides through its unique, cutting edge horsepower, that was developed by Elon Musk®. I began telling everyone, whether or not they asked, that the ice cubes were alkaline. I told people that the water coming from the tap going into their smoothie was actually from a coconut, we had special alkaline coconut kegs connected under the sink. That was the narrative. Still, no one tipped. And then one day I quit and I wonder if Mikey ever realized the way I was misleading his customers. In reality, everything came in bulk from Costco, delivered in beat-up old boxes. ‘Here’s ya crap,’ a deliveryman said one day, handing me six crates of kale.

Two days after quitting, a week before Halloween, I got a call from juice-bar Mikey, as he liked to be called. I’d expected him to start yelling at me for all the lies I told the Brazilian housewives about alkaline. But Mikey instead had another proposition. 

‘Yo. You live on your own?’ He asked.

‘I do.’

‘In student subsidized housing?’

‘Uh, not really.’ I responded, unsure where this was going.

‘You know Thanos, the famous SoulCycle® instructor, he runs that Surf Yoga Rum® retreat, has like a million followers… He’s dating Lucy Liu...’

‘From Charlie’s Angels?’

‘Yeah.’ Mikey said. ‘He’s totally banging her. So cool, right?’

This was another interesting detail about Mikey. He was really fucking gay, like gay, gay, but not out of the closet. Every time a woman in leggings would walk by us at the Monster Cycle juice bar, (which was all the time), Mikey would say in the most contrived way possible: ‘Damn. Wow, you would hit that so hard, Gordon. Wouldn’t you, bro? Wouldn’t you slam that shit?’

‘100 percent,’ I’d respond, cutting up a carrot while looking him in the eye.

‘So anyway,’ Mikey continued on the phone. ‘Thanos is looking for an apartment to host his Surf Yoga Rum® Halloween party, on uhm, oh yeah, Halloween night, and I was wondering: would you be up for that? He’ll give you a hundred bucks.’

‘Thanos is banging Lucy Liu and is a famous SoulCycle® instructor?’

‘Yes.’ Mikey responded.

‘He doesn’t have his own apartment?’

‘No!’ Mikey said. His tone became defensive. ‘Thanos is going through some issues at the moment. He lives with two friends in Astoria. He’s in a lot of debt, and it’s not his fault at all.’

‘Oh ok.’ I responded, before eventually agreeing to let them use my apartment.

***

It’s going to be a long night, so I should cut to the chase.

I’ll just lay out the facts of what happened to the best of my recollection:

A day before the party, without letting me know, Thanos sent over two small men from Costa Rica who were in neon running gear. They were tasked with decorating the party, which meant taking everything off my walls and moving all my furniture. They put up posters of Thanos shirtless, everywhere. The photos included Thanos surrounded by insecure-looking, single, Professional Managerial Class women ranged 23-40 in bathing suits at his side, gritting their teeth, an indistinct Caribbean beach behind them. The only men in the photos were Thanos, Mikey, the two Costa Rican’s setting up, and then someone named Dagos, who apparently was Thanos’s brother and ingenue. Dagos never worked out but went with everyone on the Surf Yoga Rum® retreats to try and sleep with the women and make ‘business contacts.’ I was informed Dagos would not be making it to the Halloween party, because Dagos was in prison, for nothing serious, though, the Costa Rican men told me.

All these deranged posters on my wall, and Thanos’s shivering forced smile, I decided to sleep at my parent’s apartment that night. Well sleeping at mine wasn’t an option, because my mattress was propped up against the wall to make space for people to dance or to meditate or to do both, if they’d like. I sighed and then cursed my young, agreeable nature; what a fucking moron I was.

***

The party was just as weird and miserable as you might imagine. It was filled with the kinds of people who actively seek out something vague called community, and who only tend to keep relationships that are merely transactional. A community of builders, cyclers, and dreamers.

I didn’t have the words to describe it back then, but I could feel it in my bones; these were indeed very lonely, creepy people. I felt bad for a lot of them, moving to New York City from some awful suburb someplace far away, looking to fulfill their hopes and dreams, instead finding themselves existing within an isolating, expensive wasteland. They start going to workout classes. They eventually get invited to go on a workout retreat in the Bahamas by a self-proclaimed sage instructor they’re sexually interested in. They then become financially exploited, and, I guess, by legal definition sex-trafficked. Everyone else in their ‘community’ is in same boat as them, no pun intended. This is their newfound traumatic social arena.

Every time I talked to Thanos’s followers I began to sulk. I had some friends who were in a fraternity and sorority come by, really basic® people I grew up going to high school with, and they asked me what the fuck was going on. They were really weirded out and left right away. I couldn’t leave, because it was my apartment, and I absolutely did not trust anyone there. Every time Thanos and I talked he rubbed my back for far too long. I think he dressed up as Christian Slater from some movie I’d never seen. His breath smelled like lemons gone stale.

A sad and scrawny looking man told me, at the party, that he hasn’t missed one of Thanos’s classes in two years, that yoga was his religion, and SoulCycling® his God. I responded that this didn’t make any sense, and he got angry that I questioned him. All the fitness gurus began to turn against me, slowly, one by one. I was being used, it’s true, they needed me to serve a utility, that being my apartment. But they also collectively decided—upon hearing my various doubts and subsequent queries on the many ridiculous things coming out of their mouths—that I was the enemy and not to be trusted. This was fine with me, I was more concerned with them not permanently wrecking the apartment; for however much these individuals were into fitness, to mindfulness, they had no manners or any sense of delicacy. I don’t like to call human beings disgusting, but they were so fucking bizarre and disgusting. Several people vomited all over my bathroom and didn’t even attempt to cover it up. And thank God this was before the era of Ozempic®, because they definitely would have diarrhea’d as well.

One thing I’ll never forget is when Thanos, or Mikey, I think it was Mikey because Thanos never seemed to pay for anything, ordered everyone pizza. The pizza arrived late into the night and was placed on a table in the middle of the room. All the fitness buffs crowded around the plastic table and looked at the pizza as if it were the forbidden fruit, their eyes wide with both desire and fear. And then one person went for it, a tiny stout woman from Boston, and everyone else attacked. I’d never seen anything like it, all these starving insecure people diving in for the pizza, one on top of the other, shoving it down their throats as though it were the only cure for a disease that was slowly killing everyone around them. I saw a girl take three slices and go off on her own into a corner to eat them as quickly as possible. These were some very hungry people. In an instant, the pizza was gone, and then the party continued.

***

I slept at my parent’s apartment again that night, I couldn’t face the grim reality of how Thanos’s congregation had left things. The next morning I gave Thanos a call, I asked him to send me a hundred dollars for a cleaner. My tone was definitely firm, but it wasn’t angry or hostile. He hung up right away, texted saying he was busy and could maybe talk in a few hours. Mikey called me twenty minutes later asking if I could calm down. He said… ‘Bro, is everything OK with you?’

‘Yeah.’ I replied. ‘I just, don’t want to clean all this myself, can you guys send me some money to get a cleaner?’

‘Thanos paid you one hundred dollars already to use your apartment for the party.’

‘But you guys wrecked the place and didn’t clean up.’ 

‘Woh, buddy. Chill. Are you sure you’re OK?’ Mikey replied.

Eventually, after that same kind of back and forth going on for twenty minutes, he sent me sixty dollars.

The next week, when I went to pick up my last paycheck from the juice bar, I noticed that the sixty dollars was deducted. When Mikey went to the bathroom I filled my backpack with strawberries, raspberries, and nut milks. I tried to steal whatever I could that he wouldn’t notice, small spoons for niche powders, a pair of old cycling shoes, anything lying around. I think I took the tops of the two Vitamix® blenders, just to fuck with him. When Mikey left to go down and take a class, I left two notes by the register that read: ‘Nothing here is alkaline. It never was, and it never will be.’

On my way out I whispered to a woman that she was being lied to, and that Thanos has Syphilis®. 'He does?’ She said. I was surprised she knew who he was. I closed my eyes and nodded. ‘He definitely does,’ and then walked away from this hideous, alkaline-free zone. I never went back, and I think Mikey moved to LA. Thanos, well, I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, but whatever it is, I’m sure it’s something spooky, deliriously horrifying, enjoyable and amusing, at least from a distance.

The thing about horror is it’s only fun when it’s not your life. Luckily, tonight, you’ll be hearing of the horrors from the lives of others. And you’ll be hearing from not just the lives of others, but from the lives of writers, and I can assure you one thing: their lives are horrifying.

So, I hope you enjoy, we have an incredible line-up of some of the best and brightest readers in New York City. Let’s get this night started! 

Photo credit; James Kettle