At 76, cabaret artist Joey Arias' resume reads like the movie Big Fish. The tales are almost too tall to believe, but he's really done them all.
He's sold clothes to Spanish royalty, sung backup for David Bowie, performed at the 2015 centennial celebration for jazz legend Billie Holiday, and even played ringmaster for Cirque Du Soleil's first ever adult show.
But perhaps this creature of New York is best experienced in a small, swanky, and dimly lit club – the kind of place where you can cozy up to strangers in the safety of relative darkness, while leaving your problems at the door.
A place like Northwest Washington, D.C.'s, Barrel House Cafe and Bar, where on a recent night, the petite Joey Arias slinked up to the stage on black leather high heels, sporting jet black bangs, deep red lipstick and a corset pulled so tight it's a wonder he can even breathe.
"I'm so happy. So honored to be here in D.C. Are you comfortable? Are you feeling sexy?" Arias asks with his trademark smirk.
It's best to go into your first Joey Arias show sans expectations. It's musical, sure, but it's not a concert. He's surely sultry and serious, but he's also a comedian. And be mindful of your aura, as Arias is likely to read your mood with a single look.
"Improv is kind of my strongest point with my career. So I start collecting ideas and think, you know, 'what should I talk about?'" Arias says. "And then when the show starts, the audience kind of tells me what they want."
During a show, Arias will often consult a giant songbook he calls his bible. With long, black press-on nails, he flips through it like a list of spells. It includes years of handwritten notes, some classic rock covers, original music, and jazz standards he can sing so eerily perfect that they'll have you thinking Billie Holiday was reincarnated as a septuagenarian gay man.
Arias prefers to approach the daylight incognito, in an all-black tracksuit, sipping a six-espresso-shot venti coffee and wearing large black sunglasses reminiscent of Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni's character in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2.
When asked where his penchant for entertaining started, Arias replies with a chuckle.
"I think it first started when I landed on this planet. I tell people, I wasn't born here. I was brought here," Arias says.
Arias landed in Fayetteville, N.C., and grew up in California.
"I think I was creating and reinventing myself constantly, even as a child. It kind of worried my parents because … even at the age of like nine years old, I was dying my hair and tweezing my eyebrows and doing weird things to myself," he says.
Arias calls himself a shapeshifter.
"People always think: 'oh I know Joey.' No, you don't know Joey," Arias explains.
If there's anyone who DOES know Joey Arias, it's Kim Hastreiter, founder of Paper Magazine. She met Arias while a student at CalArts in Southern California.
"We grew up together… he was like my bestie," Hastreiter says. In her recent memoir, Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, she devotes an entire chapter to Arias.
"Joey is everything to me – my brother, my husband, my sister, my mother, and my soulmate," Hastreiter writes in the book, "And I know, I am that for him."
When she graduated from CalArts in the mid-1970s, Hastreiter says Arias offered to help move her to New York City. She wasn't allowed to sublease her apartment, so she had to switch places with the new tenant quickly.
"[Joey] helped me move out in the middle of the night through the window, literally. We packed my dragon wagon. It was crazy," Hastreiter tells NPR.
The dragon wagon was Hastreiter's old pickup truck emblazoned with a long, colorful dragon along the side.
"We made this whole itinerary, and we went to every thrift shop between L.A. and New York," she says.
Hastreiter and Arias arrived in New York in 1976. They shared an apartment, both got jobs, and went dancing every night. She says her soulmate Joey Arias just never looked back.
He started working as a sales associate at the Italian fashion brand Fiorucci's flagship store in the United States. And Arias quickly became a draw, acting as a living mannequin who once spoofed patron Andy Warhol and played fashion consultant for the then-Queen of Spain.
"It was sexy with the way it was lit. It was beautiful and all the Italians were always there to market," Arias says. "And it was the beginning of my redefining and reinventing who I was [again]."
Arias eventually made friends with German avant-garde opera singer Klaus Nomi and he began performing with him, even joining Nomi on stage with David Bowie as the musical guests for Saturday Night Live.
Arias often performs a song he wrote in tribute to Nomi, who died of AIDS in 1983 at age 39.
"Klaus had pneumonia… and I went to the hospital and I had to put a paper jumpsuit on. I went in there and he was looking at me and he said 'I can't see you.' I took everything off and I hugged him, kissed him on the cheeks. The doctors were so mad [at me]," Arias says.
AIDS created a tragic duality for Arias' contemporaries of this particular time and scene: a burgeoning underground movement of artists and performers populated by blindingly colorful lights that were being snuffed out as quickly as they came to life.
Arias recalls losing collaborators, friends and even lovers of his, like Chuck Smith.
"We were supposed to grow old together. But he's always guided me spiritually. I know that," Arias says.
Shortly after Nomi died, Arias remembers Smith rolling over in bed one night and whispering simply "I have it." He died a short time later.
"At that point, that was the sentence. If you said you had it, you had less than a year to live," He adds. Arias says he doesn't really know how he made it through that period alive.
In the following years, he continued performing throughout New York City clubs before getting the role of a lifetime: Emcee for Cirque du Soleil's first adult-themed show at the New York, New York Casino in Las Vegas.
Arias also wrote songs for the show. It was called Zumanity.
The show was raunchy, outrageous and sexy. The perfect vehicle for a performer like Arias. But it was also grueling.
After years of doing ten shows a week, Arias says the show's doctor gave him prescription pain killers. He became addicted and his then-husband asked him for a divorce.
"It seemed like things were falling apart," Arias says " I started to drink and before I knew it, I found myself drinking white wine 24 hours a day."
One night, Kim Hastreiter visited her friend during his show at Joe's Pub where she immediately knew something was wrong: Arias, always eager to perform, was getting other people to sing his songs.
"He was slurring, he was completely [intoxicated] on stage. He got other people to sing for him. It was like a mess," Hastreiter says.
Hastreiter then invited her friend to a tea party – a small get-together with a whole bunch of their old friends.
It was an intervention. She helped raise funds to send Arias to rehab, and now Arias has been sober for almost eight years.
"Kim came through and she said I'm not gonna let my best friend, this incredible artist, die on my watch," Arias reflected.
Joey Arias has resurrected and reinvented his career and his persona endless times over his more than seven decades on earth.
And he says he's nowhere close to being finished.
"I want to live to be at least 200 years. … There's so much I want to do. I feel like I'm just starting over again, even right now. I feel like I'm a messenger of the universe," Arias says.
And — he has a message he wants to share with NPR listeners and readers:
"Remember how beautiful you are. Look in the mirror. And if you don't feel inspired, seriously, go to the park, touch a tree, look at the sky," because whatever's happening in the world, Arias says, mother nature knows how to take care of herself.
"And come to my shows, because I will take care of you too," Arias says.
Joe Arias' next set of shows are at Washington, D.C.'s Barrel House Cafe and Bar on Oct. 17 and 18.
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