Lucking Out - James Wolcott [80]
And so it proved to be. I wouldn’t run into Ephron until decades later on the opposite coast, where she and I were among those enveloped within the celestial orange cloud of the hospitality of Arianna Huffington, who was hosting at her Brentwood home a party for the Nation magazine in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, then at the zenith of its luminariness under the impresario wand of the Times’s elegant book-review editor Steve Wasserman. The pheromones of success suffused the gathering even more strongly than they had at Mort Zuckerman’s decades before. But then, success had become so much more successful since the seventies, a higher, richer, headier halation. I spotted Ephron from a safe distance; she formed a trinity with two other women, one of whom was the New York Times columnist and dark-stockinged, red-tressed femme fatale Maureen Dowd. “You should go over and say hello,” my date for the evening suggested, but I declined, not wanting to interrupt this impromptu meeting of the Dorothy Parker Society. Gore Vidal was also in attendance, ensconced on a sofa (even in his late infirmity, nobody ensconces like Gore Vidal) as admirers, one after another in an orderly fashion, stopped to pay their respects, as if presenting themselves to a monarch in exile. I paid mine too, as was only proper, knowing much better now that we like-minded writers have to stick together no matter how much we defund each other’s patience.
CBGB’s wasn’t a romantic-erotic rendezvous spot, a lovers’ retreat with discreet corners for nuzzling and those more advanced favors provided in the balconies of Studio 54, say. It was not a place one went in search of a tender touch and molten glances. (Once when I asked the poet-rocker Lydia Lunch how things were going, she said, just fine: “My boyfriend and I spent the weekend drilling holes in each other’s teeth.”) Nor was it a slumming scene doused with the alley-cat stink of nostalgie de la boue, a dive where posh debutantes or downtown gamines in black leggings could find ravishment at the seam-ripping hands of a sensitive brute who worked at the Strand Bookstore by day, club-hunted by night, and knew how to weld. (Or perhaps there was too much alley-cat stink. I made the mistake of taking a date there once who prided herself on being a bohemian spirit, something she cultivated growing up in New Orleans like a rare orchid. She took one whiff of CBGB’s, and if she had recoiled any harder, I would have had to catch her in my arms. And here I thought she would appreciate our little pissoir.) Personal charisma was sliced too thin in the punk scene to attract colorful moths. A lazy entitlement lolled south through the loins of those beyond-cool scenesters looking for something soft to lean against or into, as long as it didn’t involve minimum-plus effort. One female friend, a fellow journalist who went on to direct films, nailed this type as the sort of charmer who, if you buy him a drink, might let you give him a blow job later. Falling asleep while receiving a blow job was not an unheard tale in those pioneer days, not the sort of thing to bolster a girl’s confidence, though most sounded philosophical about it. Musicians scored at CBGB’s (there was a sex chart in the ladies’ room peter-metering the top contenders on the