LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Two

      The Clermont Lounge occupies the bottom floor of a condemned hotel in downtown Atlanta. Somehow the lounge, billed as “Atlanta’s oldest strip club,” remains open in spite of the mold, bedbugs, and (in the words of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) “black water spilling from faucets” that plague the building that houses it. I arrive on a Saturday night, better known to the locals as Disco Funk Night, ten-dollar cover charge in my hand. The DJs this Saturday—every Saturday, for that matter—are an oddly mismatched pair who bill themselves as “the Illuminaughty.” First up, at 10 p.m., is an affable young party animal known as Quasi Mandisco. He plays hits of today and the recent past such as “Dick in a Box” by Justin Timberlake and the Lonely Island, and “Sexy MF” by Prince. Then, at 11:30, the proceedings get turned over to Quasi’s mentor: a shadowy, semi-legendary local figure known as ­Romeo Cologne. Cologne makes no concessions to the present day; his clock is turned back to 1977. He’s the man I’m here to see.

      The Clermont Lounge is the type of strip club you’d expect to see in a David Lynch movie: cramped, dimly lit, and filled with a menagerie of characters who don’t seem quite real. A short, slightly overweight black stripper with burning candles protruding from her nipples sways awkwardly on a very thin walkway. She looks to be in her late sixties. A tall, big-haired white stripper who looks vaguely like the woman in the old Whitesnake videos (you know, the lady writhing on the car) dances across the bar. Male and female patrons gaze up adoringly.

      Romeo Cologne, meanwhile, works his magic in a small booth beside the dance floor. He sports a black fedora, an ascot, and a carefully sculpted mustache that gives just the right accent to his narrow, kind face. His ­sloping, spidery fingers gingerly pick through a booklet of CDs, searching for the perfect track to play next. Among his selections for the evening: “Take Your Time” by the S.O.S. Band, “Early in the Morning” by the Gap Band, “Let It Whip” by the Dazz Band, and “Get Off” by Foxie. He’s immersed in the music, mouthing the words and jabbing his index finger at some vague destination beyond the confines of the room, somehow managing to get the room dancing while at the same time remaining entirely inside himself. In this last respect he reminds me very much of his old friend Michael Stipe.

      As you may have guessed, “Romeo Cologne” is not the mysterious DJ’s birth name, though in this day and age he answers to no other. When he first arrived in Athens, Georgia, he was David Hannon Pierce, a recently discharged Air Force vet eager to pour himself into a more carefree civilian life. It was 1976, the year of the bicentennial. Pierce had served stateside during the Vietnam War, working as a medic in an Air Force unit set up specifically to treat former POWs returning from the conflict. He may not have seen combat himself, but this was nevertheless emotionally wrenching work. The most he’ll say about it now is that “a lot of the POWs were in pretty bad shape.”

      That first visit to Athens, then, was a welcome change. Pierce’s brother was working his way toward a drama degree at UGA, and as soon as Pierce took stock of the surroundings, he decided this was where he needed to be. “I loved it,” he says. “There were three girls to every guy. And I was like, ‘Yes, I’m staying here!’” Although he initially failed the preliminary entrance exam, as a veteran Pierce qualified for night school. He spent the next couple of years completing his core curriculum requirements and began attending day classes at the art school in 1979.

      Athens underwent some pretty significant changes during those years. When he first arrived, in 1976, the mainstream culture at the University of Georgia still centered almost entirely around football. That year fell smack in the middle of Vince Dooley’s long and storied career as head coach, and in that year the Georgia Bulldogs—“the Dawgs,” as they are affectionately known—were in contention for the national title, which ensured a season of particularly heavy partying all across town.

      Not that Athenians waited until football season to throw a party. Throughout the academic year and beyond, the social calendar was dictated from the ostentatiously columned fraternity and sorority houses that lined Milledge Avenue. There was not yet much of a bar scene, apart from a popular hangout called the Station, so students vied eagerly for invitations to the fraternity blowouts. And these parties did not disappoint: kegs arrived by the truckload, the music got cranked pretty loud, and sometimes a live band would play. Everyone lost their minds pretty quickly, and a lot of fucking ensued.

      There was a dark side to this, as there is any time alcohol and hormones mix freely. Given the long list of incidents that were documented in later years, it seems probable that the sex at these parties was not always consensual. And sometimes ancillary violence was inflicted on those who were seen as not fitting in. Fraternities were regularly suspended or expelled for various infractions, but others always popped up to take their place.

      Over time an alternative to these frat parties emerged—one that seems almost pathetic by comparison. Rodger Lyle Brown describes the hippie parties of the time as “a dozen guys in flannel shirts . . . listening to the Grateful Dead or old Rolling Stones; smoking joints and waiting in teeth-gritting rough-house futility for stray good-smelling girls to show up.”

      This would all change in 1977, when this long-suffering hippie scene bumped into Athens’s heretofore below-the-radar gay scene and begat a band called the B-52’s. The group consisted of former flower-girl hippie Kate Pierson on vocals, Keith Strickland on drums, Ricky Wilson on guitar, Cindy Wilson on vocals, and a flamboyant gay man with a bullhorn voice named Fred Schneider. The band seemed to have been willed into existence in order to facilitate some honest-to-god parties for all the