Literary Parties, Pt. 1

Tales From Our Writers

My first book, nonstop, was published in the spring of 1981 when I won a contest for a debut collection of poetry held by Cedar Rock Press of New Braunfels, Texas. Convinced that the launch party would be the closest thing I would ever have to a wedding, I arranged to hold it at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas, a weather-permitting rock club with an outdoor stage where Joe Ely and Sonic Youth would later record live albums. I invited everyone I knew and plastered posters all over town. I bought a beautiful light blue vintage dress with white eyelet embroidery. 

When the much anticipated Sunday afternoon finally arrived, my sister Nancy, my best friend Sandye, who had illustrated the book, and I all took acid. Tripping allowed me to float a few feet above the social complications of this wedding/Woodstock/performance art event, unfolding in a sunny kaleidoscope of smiling faces, longneck bottles, dogs, and ex-boyfriends, all of whom appeared in the book. The publisher, a country boy from New Braunfels, was somewhere between amazed and horrified by the whole thing, but happily sold 200 copies at $3.50 each. MARION WINIK

In 1982 I was the editor-in-chief of Swank Magazine. Working with me was a man named Bill who was the editor of Stag and he did love a good party. He partied by himself if there was no one else to party with, often rolling into the office late, reeking of gin. A few days before Thanksgiving, 1983, Bill made the rounds through the editorial and art departments verbally inviting most but not all of us to come to his apartment on Eighth Avenue between 55th and 56th streets on Thanksgiving morning to drink Bloody Marys. He said the party would last one hour and suggested afterward anyone who wanted to could walk over a few blocks to watch the great Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Disliking huge crowds, I never went to the parade for fear of being trampled or crushed by a break-away gargantuan inflated Disney figure. In any case, my mother and her boyfriend were picking me up before noon at my Greenwich Village apartment to accompany them to his sister’s home in LeFrak City, a 4000+ apartment complex in Queens in the Corona-Elmhurst neighborhood for an all day festival of cooking and eating and fighting, an event that could only be improved by me arriving half drunk.  

Bill stressed the party started at 8 a.m. I arrived bleary-eyed and unshowered although I managed to slather on a pile of mascara. It was a party after all, even at that ridiculous hour, so I wore a short suede skirt and black stockings, and python-print pumps.  On my arrival, Bill handed me a 16 oz plastic tumbler of tomato juice well spiked with vodka. Straddling the rim of the glass was a tiny plastic skewer with an olive and a wedge of lemon. Season your drink however you prefer, darling, said Bill who clearly was not on his first. The outgoing message on his answering machine was, “I may be here, I may not be here, I may or may not pick up,” a message I thought hysterically funny although nobody enjoyed the joke. 

Bill’s apartment was on the second floor above a Thai restaurant I liked but Bill would never eat in because he was sickened by the odiferous cooking smells he said constantly wafted into his apartment. For that reason he kept the air conditioner going 365 days of the year which also drowned out the ever-present din of Eighth Avenue midtown traffic.  The blinds were always closed for reasons of privacy, and Bill kept the apartment artificially and dimly lit which gave it an illicit, underground club air. Every time I visited, which was often, the ashtrays were filled to overflowing and empty beer cans were scattered about. 

Bill hadn’t bothered to tidy up before his party. There were only a dozen guests, but the living room and kitchen areas were packed bum to belly. Bill’s friend and neighbor, Violet, who lived in the apartment across the way, stood at the kitchen counter playing bartender. She was pushing Bloody Marys out as fast as she could. One of my co-workers passed around a joint and then another. I had a couple of tokes and sipped my drink which was too strong. I’d made myself a cup of coffee on my French press before I left my apartment and now needed to use the restroom. Pushing my way through the throng and the cloud of cig and dope smoke I stood in the dark, narrow vestibule connecting Bill’s bedroom and bathroom. The bathroom door was shut tight and I tried the door handle. It was locked. Hang on, someone called out from behind the door. To kill time, I ventured down the hallway to sneak a look into Bill’s bedroom. His king-size bed was unmade and rumpled. The room was pitch dark. Clothing spilled from the drawers of a battered dresser and the open closet and every inch of the uncarpeted wood floor was littered with clothing, none of it clean, I judged, from the dreadful funk. Only a thin hallway wall separated me from my coworkers who were laughing and drinking and getting stoned. The atmosphere was jolly. Bill’s bedroom told another story. I suddenly didn’t feel like I needed to use the bathroom any longer. I said my goodbyes, gathered my things, and left, deciding to treat myself by jumping into a cab. Between the smoke smell clinging to me and my absurd early morning get up, I’m pretty sure the cabbie thought I was a hooker just getting off from a night’s work. He kept giving me the eye in his rearview mirror. Just after Christmas, Bill was fired. When I asked Chip, the magazine owner who openly snorted cocaine in front of me in his office, why he did it, he answered, “Well, he kept coming to work drunk.” Seven years later, Bill was murdered in his apartment by a guy he picked up. He always did have a thing for rough trade. At the celebration of life held for him hosted by Violet a few months after the murder, a co-worker I hadn’t seen in years said to me, Well, it was either going to be that or booze that killed him. 

EVE MARX

Dylan, Nell and Andy, circa 1980’s

Manhattan magazine and book parties in the 1980s often seemed to kick off with an air of the bacchanal lurking just beneath their cool, ultra-civilized surfaces. 

One evening, feeling charmed, a couple of us Gen-Xers flying on the coattails of someone who had social clout, and the holy-grail membership black keyring— wound up at Nell’s nightclub, whose decor replicated a down-at-heels British supper club. Glitzy and shabby, it epitomized a certain facet of that era’s cosmopolitan louche ways. There were always celebrities— Bono, Rob Lowe, Basquiat, Andy Warhol. Prince, too, reputedly, though I never spied him, along with a smattering of heiresses, decadent aristos, art world impresarios, up-and-coming painters and writers, publishing playboys, literary legends and wunderkinds—and, at least on perches where I found myself, lesser publishing folk, assistants and aspiring writers working day jobs as waitresses or temps or hand-to-mouth freelancers, some in MFA programs and proclaiming worship or loathing, or both, of the famously excellent and forbidding writer and editor Gordon Lish. For the last few years all the young writers I knew had raved about Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (which they tried to emulate; I myself was busy trying to emulate Raymond Carver); Bret Easton Ellis’ Less than Zero; and Tama Janowitz’sSlaves of New York, all of which (despite Ellis’ book being set in L.A.) crystallized the times.

A super-wealthy, kind of mysterious trust-fund guy I’d known when I was a student at Wesleyan showed up at Nell’s that night, and at his urging, a clown-car’s-worth of us piled into a taxi—someone lying lengthwise across four backseat laps—some well-suited or in their khakis and button-downs, some in leather jackets or pants or Edie-Sedgewick-meets-Calamity-Jane getups like mine and sped off to the Tribeca loft of a well-known writer couple. I remember Mary Gaitskill, whose first collection of stories Bad Behavior had come out early that year, was there; I admired the stories tremendously, but I was too nervous to talk to her about it. The place was full of people drinking and starting to get frisky in chairs and on couches and in the hallway, and the highbrow, sped-up conversations, and mostly well-bred, badly-behaved crowd continued to whoop it up until the sun rose.

What I remember most clearly from that night is walking home to my East Village housesit at 5:00 or maybe even 6:00 a.m. My boyfriend had headed home earlier, and I was solo, tipsy and jittery, elated, but mostly exhausted, and stopped when someone called out: Hey, girlfriend, you don’t stop for no one to say hi? I looked over and there on the corner of St. Mark’s and Third was an easily 6’3”-tall, well-known drag queen I’d seen perform before: one size-13 strappy heel on, one dangling in her left hand, glorious Loni Anderson-styled wig atop a face whose surprisingly delicate architecture was somehow even more glorious in its makeup smudged from a debauched night, spangled dress hoisted above her waist, fishnets wrenched down, cock in her right hand, taking a monster whiz into the garbage can on the corner.

Oh, hi, I said and waved. It occurred to me that the streets were pretty deserted, and I wanted, suddenly, desperately, to be home. She seemed to still be raring to go, yelling after me and looking for a partner in crime, and I wanted nothing more than two pieces of buttered toast, a glass of water, and preemptive Alka-Seltzer, so I bid her adieu. 

I hurried my last few blocks east, keys pocketed in my hand to quickly open the building and apartment door, hoping I’d have the wits to amble back—sometime much, much later that day—into a series of poems I’d been obsessing over in Granta, or Susan Minot’s novel Monkeys, which I identified with and devoured around that time.

DANIELLE TRUSCOTT

On many evenings usually, after a book party, I would be swept along with the writer, the editor, the agent, and select friends to Elaine’s. The eponymous owner never failed to look at me, approvingly, a nice compliment to the men of the party. The air was saturated with maleness which, even in its heyday, for a woman, wasn’t exhilarating, merely exclusionary. Weaving through the restaurant we were seated at a large table where at some point a deracinated pork chop would be put down in front of me. Thank god, for the bumps of blow making the rounds, it saved me from having to jaw my way through it.

The bathroom was tight, with just two stalls, and those of us waiting had to lean against the sink. We were all silent, until someone shaking her head, breathed “Fuck.” We all nodded. Someone else said, “Fuck this.” We nodded more.The toilet flushed and a woman emerged arranging her skirt, “Why don’t we?” But no, the next woman went in to pee, and then the next, new women joined the queue, but they seemed happy. So we went quietly back to our respective tables. 

BEX O’BRIAN