DRINKING IN NEW YORK

Bending an elbow with literary types

Literary nights in New York were, for the most part, hard drinking affairs.   Perhaps it was some kind of holdover from the 1950’s Cedar Tavern crowd, or the Algonquin Round Table, but writers and editors in the city always liked a cocktail, and I was no exception. 

I had a monthly salon called ASH-X that met in a wine bar that belonged to a friend of mine in the East Village every first Tuesday ( I’ll call her Dottie.)  It was teeming with playwrights and painters and directors and writers and journalists, with the odd rocket scientist or spook thrown in.  A marvelous time was had every time for years, until one night we invited a couple of academics — a PhD candidate at Princeton and her friend, who already had her PhD.  “Jeez,” said Dottie, looking at the two brilliant, (straight) women making out sloppily on a barstool.  “Academic chicks really don’t know how to drink.” 

“No,” I said.  “Instead of learning about the important things in life, like how to hold your liquor, they were always reading.”  

All hell broke loose after I left that night.  The Princeton PhD candidate got drunker and drunker until she was in a fairly belligerent blackout.  She punched the waiter, stole a bottle of wine, refused to pay her tab, and wouldn’t leave.  Dottie was traumatized.  I was in shock.  I didn’t want to host an event where people got that fucked up — like hanging off of lamposts, falling asleep in a doorway -drunk — like someone’s going to kill you on your walk home- fucked up. 

I could never live with myself if someone got murdered after my event because they were so loaded.  (It turned out that the Princeton chick’s cousin actually HAD been murdered after her car was towed and she was trying to stumble in an advanced state of drunk along the West Side Highway at 2AM.  It was all quite spooky.)

So ASH-X ended on a sour note — we couldn’t do it anymore, after that.  But it was a potent reminder not to invite academics anywhere they feel off the chain.  They’re too under-socialized. (A musician friend of mine actually says that tech people are worse.  He plays saxophone in a wine bar.  “Those tech children are throwing up in the gutters by 10PM,” he said.)

Anyway, I fell in with a Canadian fashion mafia at some point.  I had done an article in Toronto for ELLE and ended up befriending  “Antonio,” a fabulous Italian man that I thought had the perfect face to portray Cesare Borgia in an oil painting.   A mighty steed of a gay man.  We became fast friends.  He was starting a culture magazine with fashion money called “The Aesthete.” 

And so I ended up on the masthead. 

So one night I was out with all the fabulous Canadians — the sleek magazine editors and about 6 of Antonio’s other friends — particularly a beautiful, black-haired lesbian TV producer whom I absolutely adored, “MM.”   Over a fabulous candlelit dinner at a long black table in some cavernous black restaurant uptown, I had been trying to get MM to laugh all night, and sometimes succeeding. 

There had been multiple bottles of wine consumed, and I was a shade tipsy.  If I talk too much I forget to eat anything. 

So the entire Canadian entourage was going to a natty rooftop bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and I followed along.  I was wearing a long leather coat, Ann Demuelemeester black satin bondage pants, platform boots.  I was carrying a black patent leather handbag with my phone in it.  I was also wearing an 18k gold merkaba around my neck on a string - a merkaba being a geometric design that is intended to reflect the 17-foot electromagnetic circumference of the human soul.

I was walking around the rooftop bar, trying to find MM, and I saw before my eyes an absolutely beautiful turquoise leather couch.  “Why is nobody sitting on this gorgeous couch?” I thought to myself, and found out why one second later when I sat down, and was clearly underwater.  In an inoperative hot tub, which had been sitting uncovered and unheated at knee-level.  

I fished myself out.  Two gay men were staring at me with aghast expressions, slack-jawed, like I had done it on purpose, when I emerged soaking from the turquoise-underlit water. 

“Well,” I said, hoisting myself and my belongings over the side.  “THAT just happened.” 

They turned away from me, snittering together.

I thanked the fashion gods that I only wore shiny black stuff, and I proceeded to walk (slurrsh slurrsh slurrsh) through the catacombs of the dark and throbbing nightclub, trying to front like I wasn’t soaking wet.  I felt fucking ridiculous. I stood up straighter and moved quickly like I was intently looking for someone.  The elevator operator stared at the puddle I was forming under myself.  I shrugged.  My hair was soaking and my mascara was everywhere. 

On the curb, I was amazed how nobody in line to get into the club was laughing at me as I poured about a liter of water into the gutter from my handbag. 

I wetly hailed a cab. 

My doormen in my building sat stone-faced as I slurshed by them. 

By the time I got back to my apartment in DUMBO, I was aware that my phone was dead and my merkaba was gone. Naturally I had to buy a new merkaba.  

It was too much!  I turned on the TV but it wasn’t behaving for some reason. Something in me suddenly couldn’t take it anymore, and I flung the remote…which hit the dead center of my television, cracking the 52” screen.  

It was at that point I just started laughing.  At this point of absurdity, I tend to decide that the problem is astrological.  

Some nights, the stars make you fall into hot tubs and lose things. 

Artwork: “Space Guys,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2021