Pretty Dapper

From July 1, 2013:

I went to a party the other night, that, as I stood in the living room by the grand piano listening to the impromptu cabaret performance that had organically manifested from the eccentrics present, reminded me of something. While the pianist rocked back and forth with hands like jumping beans, and the singer crooned with the facial expressions of a silent film actor, it occurred to me what: The Great Gatsby. It was an enormous rambling house, with a yard that was more a patchwork of yards from Sunset magazine all stringed together to surround one house. The property was alone, socked into a pocket of the Hollywood Hills, just a bit above a canyon but hidden away at the base of a half-circle of cliffs five hundred feet straight up. There were two houses on the edge of those cliffs, looming over the property like coyotes on the edge of a wall watching a rabbit trapped beneath. It was surreal, secluded, and full of the type of people that either should have been at Woodstock or probably were extras on Entourage. The theme of the party was “Gods and Goddesses.” Not everyone brought a costume, but they did bring theme-appropriate levels of excess and ego. The hostess was a gorgeous woman, young, but perhaps ageless, with an accent that was impossible to place and a source of income that was even more mysterious.

As the party progressed, ugly Italian models talking to old Italian producers, people high from who knows how many things jumping into the pool in their underwear from the high diving board, the mean little dog barking for someone, anyone, to pay attention to her, people listening to records and smoking weed in ornate wood-paneled basement, rock musicians on the patio making fun of Valley Girls in the kitchen, a guy who’d just directed a Madonna video flirting with a woman covered in blue paint, men in suits and leather jackets, and women in saris and nylon miniskirts, my friends and I went to find another of our friends, wherever he might be. 

We wandered the tiers of the winding grounds, and multiple levels of the labyrinthine house. It was like a living advent calendar, every direction you looked and every room you entered was like a tableau of any of myriad separate parties, but it was all one living, breathing tumult. Finally we found the dining room. At the far end of the long table, strewn as it was with bunches of firm green grapes like the glorious refuse of some forgotten Bacchanalia, sat our friend. He was quietly watching the hubbub of party-goers filtering from the kitchen behind him into the rest of the house, the dark patio opening from a wall of glass to his right.

He was not the only man sitting quietly at the table. Closer to us as we entered, sitting to the side of the table at the end by the entryway, snug against the wall, was a man so still to look at him was chilling. He was slumped sitting back, his legs splayed straight out in front of him at a angle down from the chair. His hair was wild, dark as ebony, curly and thick like a maelstrom. He had a beard, not long, but very full. He looked like a pirate captain, a wild man. He was clothed in a suit of gold brocade, head to toe. His shoes were made of the same fabric. It looked like a uniform for a rock star or a Rococo demon. He looked unreal.

As he sat there he clutched a giant bottle of Jack Daniels. It was one of those massive bottles they seem to only sell at Costco. It was half empty, in every way. He held it like a life preserver, clutching it as though to loosen his grip would mean certain forfeiture to the waiting hordes hoping to snatch it from him.

The man was so still that to look upon him was to enter the eye of a storm, as he sat there in the midst of the buoyant melee all around. The stillness did not come merely from his lack of movement, which was absolute, but from his eyes. He was staring straight ahead. It might have been five minutes since he last blinked, or five centuries, the effect was the same. He had a look in his eyes like he’d just remembered his heart was broken, and was thinking about that. It was something beyond misery or contemplation, he was gone to a different place. It didn’t look like a happy place, but it did look like a place beyond judgment and emotion, where things simply were, and if they were bad, one must objectively accept and analyze the pain. It was just there, and he was looking at it so deeply that he had left his earthly shell behind for a time, clutching the whiskey so that it would still be there when he came back.

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