Steve Dickison
WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED
The self-accusing, bitter older writers stand around talking, mostly at the perimeters of the several rooms of the party. They’re envisioned as bitter because they’ve each of them as time goes by lost some of the edge of their sweetness. The younger writers, present for excitement, for the most part appear more in flux, slipping into and out of the lacunae that open up between the sentences and glances of the ostensibly less mercurial older writers.
In pairs and in triplets, sometimes larger clusters, everybody at the party, even the most reserved and the most self-consciously out of their element among the others, feels compelled to engage in conversations. They speak in prose, of recent events, on the poetics of cinema; of politics, Milosevic versus the Kosovars, or alternately, places in the world—Paris, Havana, Port Chicago July 1944, and so on. Some of the older writers, and one or two of the younger writers, like to speak of alimentary ailments. In the course of the evening, everybody present swears under their breath, at least twice, “No more parties.” There’s a ‘mother and daughter scene’ on a small couch. Drinks and eats. Animation in voices, “. . . not quite elsewhere, not quite here.”
—I have trouble with the rules against things.
—Help hold me down while I self-administer the Shirley Temple.
Lou Reed they say (and why not?) used to throw a great party. Until one
day the chips fell, all the camembert and champagne, all the recreationals.
He did his pharmacology and realized he only had $19 to pay for a debt
that swelled to $10,000. Somehow he broke it down to $99 a head. If you
were at that party, or he sus-pected you were at that party, you had to
come up with $99 in cash by the end of the next day. Otherwise, tomorrow
no more party. And then, what’ll you do when Friday comes around?
Turn your head to yesterday’s smile and hide behind your door?