CASUAL
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual MY ME DECADE I was at dinner with a tableful of Washington journalists—eight right-wingers and a leftist. The drunkest of the conservatives, at a cruising altitude of five or six cocktails,...
...The jacket had fit me about a growth spurt ago...
...My fake I.D...
...What’s stunned me lately is the attitude of the young...
...and laughed till he cried...
...My friends looked for cocaine...
...Did you protest the war...
...He asked, “Did you ever go to Studio 54...
...I’m beaming into the camera, bangs hanging down to eyebrow level...
...These photos have been stored in a numbered safedeposit box in a Swiss bank...
...They love the seventies— its inflation, oil shocks, meltdowns, mass suicides, and (especially) disco and pornography...
...I saw a disheveled girl in the corner who seemed as clueless as me...
...If the seventies was about making the elite excesses of the sixties available to the masses, then Studio 54 wasn’t the seventies...
...It was in the 1970s,” Lefty replied...
...The barman just laughed...
...I didn’t know what a key party was until I saw The Ice Storm last year, and never O.D.’d until well into the 1980s...
...Then he walked up to where I was sitting with my head in my hands and said, “You’re too much, kid...
...About her being as clueless as me, I mean...
...I’d colored in another corner with black magic marker, typed IOWA ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE SOCIETY over it in crumbling Wite-Out, then a date of birth from sometime during the Boer War...
...We danced...
...I must have looked like an ottoman...
...It being the seventies and all...
...the barman said...
...When Disheveled turned on her heels and left I realized I’d been wrong...
...At 1 A.M., she said, “Let’s go to Studio...
...They had me there: I couldn’t afford 5 bucks for a beer...
...I was living in New York with some artist friends...
...The drinking age was then 18, a huge injustice...
...Protest the war...
...The beer’s on me...
...I’d forgotten: Yes, I did...
...I explain that, having been 17 when the decade ended, I missed it, too—at least the stuff he’s interested in...
...In line, I wore a Harris tweed over a heavy fisherman’s sweater...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...Did you have a disco suit...
...I remember that because I clashed so badly with everyone around me, in their Mohawks and their leather pants and acetate ties...
...Debbie Harry (of the band Blondie) was sprawled on a couch...
...It was an escape from the seventies, a haven for those who wanted to keep libertinism an exclusive thing...
...He called the waitresses over...
...But he recognized Two Short Planks, and we got in as a group, at 15 bucks apiece...
...The bartenders, all men in Speedo trunks, were making out with one another...
...There’s a kid at the magazine who peppers me with questions: “What’s a ‘key party...
...consisted of a 2-by- 3-inch rectangle I’d cut out of a manila folder...
...If a 12-yearold can fight and die for his country in, ah . . . in a few years, then, ah . . . why can’t he drink until he throws up all over someone else’s parents’ living-room sofa...
...Photos of my freshman formal in 1977 show me in a pistachio-colored rent-a-tux with Liberace-style ruffles bubbling out from in between the lapels...
...Our only act of civil disobedience consisted of making fake I.D.s...
...He feels like he missed it all...
...it should have been 12...
...I even share it...
...So I left Two Short Planks and my other friends behind and walked east into Midtown where an Irish bar was open...
...The bouncer wouldn’t have let me in in a million years...
...Get a load of this...
...He passed it around to other patrons...
...I never got a disco suit, either, although that can hardly have been a matter of taste...
...Having grown up in the 1970s, I’m used to Drunkie’s disdain for the decade...
...Freshman year, a bunch of us went to New York for the weekend and wound up at the house of a woman who lived in my dorm...
...She was slender, elegant, rich as Croesus, and thick as two short planks...
...Mike, the manager, looked at my I.D...
...Yo, Mike...
...Did you ever O.D...
...I.D...
...There were lights flashing, and Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” was playing...
...I, white teenager that I was, tried that mime of cross-country skiing that passed for dancing in our set...
...The War on Inflation...
...The drunkest of the conservatives, at a cruising altitude of five or six cocktails, asked his colleague how he’d wound up on the left...
...I never had any war stories for Missed-It-All until the other day...
...Like many at the time, we were questioning social relations—” Drunkie, who took this explanation in a narrow sexual sense, interrupted Lefty with a bon mot so filthy that (a) my editors won’t print it and (b) Lefty will probably never “question social relations” again as long as he lives...
...now it was so tight I had to unbutton the thing to get my cigarettes out of the breast pocket...
...he yelled down the bar...
...What war...
...she’d got into college because her father was thinking of building the school a boathouse...
...In one corner I’d stuck a photo of myself standing in front of some azaleas in our backyard the previous spring...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 9
