Harlem Harlem A guy in the back of the 101 ...

A guy in the back of the 101 was snorting coke through a plastic coffee stirrer, and was very helpful as to which stop was closest to the goth club on 3rd Ave. and 122nd St. in Harlem. Lisssa and I scampered up the empty blocks on the way; everything but a bodega or two is closed around there at midnight. I saw a couple of kids wearing goth-raver gear?big, black raver pants with metal hoops on the side?and a woman with the bottom of a witch dress sticking out from under her coat. I knew we'd arrived.

Like many goth clubs, Hidden Shadows has a dress code?no sneakers or jeans, please! In this circle, they fume if a club doesn't enforce a dress code properly. The crowd is pretty young, and some of them are sexualized by their outfits, so part of the idea may be to keep out gawkers, or people who, by their esthetic void, are not safe.

Not all of them are kids, but most are black and Latino youngsters, many of the men wearing ice-blue contact lenses that contrast eerily with their skin tone. It's a good look, and some of the more daring guys accompany it with a floor-length coat and a staff?not to be confused with a cane.

I talked briefly to Alonye, who mostly just wanted to go dance.

"It's a lifestyle that people don't wanna understand," he tells me.

Like who?

"Our parents," he mumbles. "It's better for our race, cuz we get to understand ourselves even more."

By race, I assume he meant the goth race. He was straining to go dance, without wanting to be rude, so off he ran. All this talk is for grownups anyway, so when a slightly ruined-looking man invited me to go talk to the elders, I went with him.

Lord Xanatos, an elder of 27, is a strikingly handsome man who basically grew up in the space, which doubles as a karate studio and a church. He finally got them to stop blessing the church every Sunday morning, reassuring them, "I already blessed it!" His father's a grandmaster who teaches martial science, mostly a Japanese method called Goju, and Lord Xanatos is an expert who's won what looks like a hundred trophies. He met his partner Lord Zillah at a tournament when they were 14.

"I just saw this black kid who was standing very still, but everybody was falling down around him?I went over and introduced myself," Zillah tells me. He's wearing the same silver pendant as all of the other staff members. Or members of the clan, as they prefer to call themselves?there's a family feeling that white goths don't seem to have. In London, for example, everybody's a goth at age 15, when the hormones are right for a melodramatic grand death culture, and then they continue on with their other trends. That's probably true for some of the people on the dance floor, where rave techno-type music is playing?Marilyn Manson but not Peaches?but the Hidden Shadows clan has a broader idea of goth culture that doesn't dwell in misery and alienation.

I ask Xanatos if they're the people who don't fit in to their neighborhoods.

"They don't want to fit in," he stresses, pushing the positive. "The former goth way was loneliness, to keep to yourself. We're more into the vampire aspect."

Drinking blood? Immortality?

"Immortality of the spirit, not of the body. Everything is right here. We dance and sing, and become gods."

Where was Lord Xanatos when I was a teen? (Well, actually, in the 70s, he was one of the unborn, as Anne Rice might put it.)

Sometimes they take the clan, presumably still wearing all black with net shirts and scary contact lenses, on camping trips, to Great Adventure or more recently on a paintball trip to New Jersey. A bus came to pick them up at 6 a.m. when the club closed.

The neighborhood is pretty happy with them. One bodega owner noted that his goth customers are polite, and the chief of police said to Xanatos: "I hear you're king of the vampires over there!"

As we talked in the office, the doorwoman was having a problem: "There's a guy out there with brown Timbies!" (Timberlands)

Xanatos responds with the standard dress-code admonishment, but a moment later she returns with the would-be entrant's protest: The website said no sneakers, but it didn't say anything about Timbies.

For some reason, I didn't even feel bad for the guy. FDNY got in no problem, sent by a rival goth club, and they sort of fit in with their dark uniforms. Later, I was shocked to see a guy on the dance floor, by himself, wearing casual tan pants and, sure enough, light-brown Timberlands. Oh, the horror!