The After Party
Writers? A Murder of Crows
Had a thing here this evening. Everybody present. S’great.
You got to keep watch all the time, keep the predators away from prey. Twice I had to rescue Nathanael West from Sylvia Plath. She had that thin-lip teeth-deep-inside look going. I gave him a whiskey sour and she moved on. Barthelme was weeping again. Best to leave him alone when he’s like that. Otherwise you get too many minimalist paragraphs of extravagant grief. Nearly had to shoot Beckett. Damn good looking cuss. Women line up to wait for him. Useless to tell them he has the IQ of a turnip. Kafka died again. He always has to top Camus. Messy messy, as usual. Had some fine drinks with the two F’s, Scott and Bill, tied with me for the worst first novels in history. (Thurber’s Henry James screech doesn’t count.) Willa Cather took off her top. At least Kafka didn’t have to see that. Then things got ugly between me and JJ, the fake one-eyed wonder, when I told him I’d written a cosmology bigger than fucking Ireland Squared and he should get off my porch. Virginia Woolf proposed to me, until I told her what I’d written about The Waves. (I still love To The Lightouse, but you know how women are.) No one wants to say it, but I will. There were untalented Jews skulking in the corner of my laundry, Philip Roth sucking on my wife’s Celtic underpants and Norman Mailer waiting to splooge her bustier. Told them what I’d do right after I was finished kicking the asses of the illiterate three, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. All I had to do was quote Capote. “Typing isn’t writing.” Had a quiet brandy with Saul Bellow, though. Told him he had written a sentence I loved, something about braided water in a ditch, and he bought me another brandy. People named William Styron and suchlike showed up. I let them know the party was down the street. You couldn’t guess what happened next. John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and James Michener showed up. I quick asked them how that fake socialist, incredibly long book wheeze was going, and what did they think of Bernie, which is when they lumbered out.
Hemingway showed up, drunk and dumb as usual. I said, “If you’re so much better than Fitzgerald, how come your cock is half the size of his? And why does John O’Hara have all your wives’ phone numbers tattooed on HIS cock? My dyslexic domestics Arthur Miller and H.L. Mencken dragged Hem away after he threw up his day’s ration of Viagra. Right after that, J.D. Salinger tried to lose his virginity to a girl he wanted to kill, but we told him we knew about his secret of having no more talent than erections. He, uh, subsided at that point.
After everyone else had gone, John Cheever arrived, skunk drunk, writing 200 O’Hara New Yorker stories as he came, and Updike bringing up, as always, the rear, meaning the ass-end of a dreary rabbit in predictable flames.
Then I went into the back room, where my wife had prepared a special group of friends. Thorne Smith, Max Shulman, Ray Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and a few older gentlemen, all of them fed up with every kind of literary pretention. Names? Will initials do? EW. MT. EAP. AB. In those nine letters lies more talent and honestly earned despair than most men will ever stumble over on their all too predictable paths to ruin.
You got to keep watch all the time, keep the predators away from prey. Twice I had to rescue Nathanael West from Sylvia Plath. She had that thin-lip teeth-deep-inside look going. I gave him a whiskey sour and she moved on. Barthelme was weeping again. Best to leave him alone when he’s like that. Otherwise you get too many minimalist paragraphs of extravagant grief. Nearly had to shoot Beckett. Damn good looking cuss. Women line up to wait for him. Useless to tell them he has the IQ of a turnip. Kafka died again. He always has to top Camus. Messy messy, as usual. Had some fine drinks with the two F’s, Scott and Bill, tied with me for the worst first novels in history. (Thurber’s Henry James screech doesn’t count.) Willa Cather took off her top. At least Kafka didn’t have to see that. Then things got ugly between me and JJ, the fake one-eyed wonder, when I told him I’d written a cosmology bigger than fucking Ireland Squared and he should get off my porch. Virginia Woolf proposed to me, until I told her what I’d written about The Waves. (I still love To The Lightouse, but you know how women are.) No one wants to say it, but I will. There were untalented Jews skulking in the corner of my laundry, Philip Roth sucking on my wife’s Celtic underpants and Norman Mailer waiting to splooge her bustier. Told them what I’d do right after I was finished kicking the asses of the illiterate three, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. All I had to do was quote Capote. “Typing isn’t writing.” Had a quiet brandy with Saul Bellow, though. Told him he had written a sentence I loved, something about braided water in a ditch, and he bought me another brandy. People named William Styron and suchlike showed up. I let them know the party was down the street. You couldn’t guess what happened next. John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and James Michener showed up. I quick asked them how that fake socialist, incredibly long book wheeze was going, and what did they think of Bernie, which is when they lumbered out.
Hemingway showed up, drunk and dumb as usual. I said, “If you’re so much better than Fitzgerald, how come your cock is half the size of his? And why does John O’Hara have all your wives’ phone numbers tattooed on HIS cock? My dyslexic domestics Arthur Miller and H.L. Mencken dragged Hem away after he threw up his day’s ration of Viagra. Right after that, J.D. Salinger tried to lose his virginity to a girl he wanted to kill, but we told him we knew about his secret of having no more talent than erections. He, uh, subsided at that point.
After everyone else had gone, John Cheever arrived, skunk drunk, writing 200 O’Hara New Yorker stories as he came, and Updike bringing up, as always, the rear, meaning the ass-end of a dreary rabbit in predictable flames.
Then I went into the back room, where my wife had prepared a special group of friends. Thorne Smith, Max Shulman, Ray Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and a few older gentlemen, all of them fed up with every kind of literary pretention. Names? Will initials do? EW. MT. EAP. AB. In those nine letters lies more talent and honestly earned despair than most men will ever stumble over on their all too predictable paths to ruin.
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