For one night, I would reverse the flow of the universe. Give me your dorks, your losers, your thick-chained mooks from Jersey yearning to get lucky. For them I would open the golden door while the beautiful people waited outside. I could do this because Lotus, the hardest club to get into in Manhattan, let me work the velvet rope as doorman last Thursday, giving me complete control over who entered. I called all my friends, told them to dress badly and show up after midnight. To up the dork content even further I sent an e-mail to the entire TIME staff, many of whom promised to come. A large percentage of them were from IT. This was going to be good.
At 11 that night, I was given an earpiece, a sleeve microphone, a clipboard, two giant bodyguards and a stack of tickets: $20, $10 and comp, which I could give out at will. I was assisted by doorman Brantly Martin, 23, whose only advice in evaluating women was to turn away trashy ones. When I pressed him, he explained, "No fake breasts." This whole beautiful-people thing, I was learning, is highly subjective. When I asked him if a group of women in line met his qualifications, he shook his head and said, "Look at shoes. You can always tell by the shoes." I was starting to wonder about Brantly.
It was 11:08 when I got my first opportunity to strike a blow for the homely. A trio of beautiful women got to the rope; I looked them up and down and said, "I'm sorry, but there's a private party here tonight." When I asked for their names, they asked me my name and kissed me on both cheeks. That's when I realized they were really, really beautiful. Plus, the kissing made them my 13th and 14th most significant sexual relationship in my life, so I really had to give them comp tickets.
Once I felt the hot rush of being liked by attractive people, I couldn't stop handing them tickets. My only defense is that other than my friends, the tech guys from TIME and a whole lot of people I'd never met who said they were "friends of Joel Stein," no dorks came. The only people who go to these kinds of clubs are awful people who act self-important and try too hard. And it so happens I prefer good-looking awful people to ugly awful people.
But even more ego gratifying than being kissed by models was rejecting people. One guy brought six models and promised to buy a bottle of champagne. I sent him back to his stretch limo. I shooed away a man who called himself Papa and tried to stuff a $50 in my palm. I sent home a Wall Street guy who kept offering to "take care of me" and making me look at his date. And I couldn't say yes to the guy with a bandage on his nose who wanted a sympathy ticket for his "deviated septum" surgery. I turned down people who came from Rome, Paris, Greece, Miami and "all the way from the Upper West Side." I was on so much of a power trip I sent away Puff Daddy's bodyguards. That may have been a bad call.
At 3 a.m., I handed in my clip-on microphone and earpiece and asked Brantly if he'd let me in the club in the future. "Sure," he said, telling me that he felt we'd bonded after our night together. "But you would have to pay."