Saturday reprise: We were young and we were beautiful and we were addicted

SX-70 photo of me and Orange the cat in 1977

This is a column I wrote in February of 2021, reprinted here for the pleasure of new subscribers and old.

There was a pay phone in the Spanish restaurant downstairs from my loft on Houston Street in the early 70’s and let me tell you what I used to do at that pay phone.  I would make some excuse to my girlfriend, with whom I was living in the loft -- I was meeting a pal at the Lion’s Head, or I had a dinner uptown with a magazine editor -- and I would run downstairs to that pay phone and drop a dime and call up a gorgeous girl I knew who lived on West 10th Street, and I would hightail it up to her apartment and we would go out to some bar in Chelsea and drink and buy some coke from a skeezy guy who hung out there, and then we’d go back to her place and drink some more and snort some coke and fuck.  And then around midnight I’d make my way back down to Houston Street and climb in the bed next to my girlfriend and go to sleep, like nothing happened.

That’s what it was like to be 25 back then.  Nothing was enough.  There weren’t enough hours in the day, enough assignments to get, enough stories to write, enough Henry McKenna bourbon to drink, enough steak to eat, enough coke to snort, enough girls to charm and flatter and maneuver into bed, enough miles to drive, enough flights to take, enough motels to check into, enough rock and roll to hear... there was never enough, man!

That’s the way my generation saw ourselves and the world, or at least the cohort I belonged to.  We were young and we were fast and we were hungry and we wouldn’t let up, because the world was rewarding us for being hip, man!  We were the “me generation,” or we were “new age,” or we were punks, or we were back-to- the-landers, or we were new leftists.  We lost count of who we were. 

As we got older, we wouldn’t let ourselves age because we fashioned a time and a place to live that belonged to us, we earned a living doing it, and we were praised to the high heavens because of how we were changing “the culture.” 

There are four or five of us sitting around drinking at a big round table at the Brasserie in midtown -- writers, magazine editors, fashion stylists, even a model for Halston with a look that stopped traffic on 53rd Street as she arrived in a cab. One of the guys says, geez, did you hear Townshend’s guitar last night at the Beacon Theater?  Another guy mentions a young woman we all know who just opened a cool new restaurant in the West Village where everyone we know is going.  We’re talking about what we’re reading, what movies we just saw, where we’re going -- did you read his new book, or her essay in the New Yorker, or that brilliant treatise on the French New Wave in the New York Review?  How about her genius take-out on Times Square hookers in New York Magazine?  Carver had another of his disturbing short stories in Esquire, did you read it?  Did you hear that this one is running for congress in Massachusetts, or that one just got elected secretary of state in Colorado?

We were doing so much, so fast, we didn’t have time to get older, and why should we?  We were young, we were beautiful, and as wonderful as our lives were, if we got tired of who we were, we could become someone else.  We wore cowboy boots one day and Ralph Lauren velvet slippers the next.  We hung out at Elaine’s on Second Avenue and when she closed up, we cabbed down to an after-hours bar on Pine Street across from the Fulton Fish Market.  We could sculpt our bodies with personal trainers and tune up our synapses with Prozac or MDMA or organic mescaline from Zacatecas or sinsemilla buds grown on mountainsides in Humboldt County.

When we made money, we could fly away to exclusive enclaves like St. Barts in the Caribbean, where we ate grilled lobster at the table right next to the same three people we shared steak frites with at Raoul’s last week.  Look over there at the next table, there’s Gilda with Lorne and Paul Simon.  I saw Keith Haring at Grand Saline beach…he’s sharing a villa with the guy who owns Basquiat’s gallery. Everybody is there. It’s so hip it’s painful to keep up.

We threw out everything we grew up with.  If your parents had big plush sofas and porcelain figurines and little ceramic boxes that held matches for their cigarettes, we had chrome glass-topped coffee tables with perfect slender crystal pyramids that stood there like a middle finger to the past.  Everything was sleeker, brighter, and polished so we could slip cleanly into the future.  

There was a time when every other guy I knew in New York had to have a waist length black leather Armani jacket, unadorned, smooth, shiny but not too shiny, that gave you a slouch that was just…perfect.  You had a Saint Laurent velvet blazer and two French long sleeved shirts with no collars and a pair of faded 501 XX Levis with the button front and rough-out suede cowboy boots, and a Rhodesian big game hunter’s hat that you wore cocked to one side with zero irony.  Women we knew, magazine editors and writers at Vogue and the ones on their way up the ladder in the advertising racket, they wore black.  All black.  Black leggings, black skirt, black heels, black boots, short black Balenciaga jacket, black bag.  Nothing else.

The generation that had dodged the draft and protested the war was wearing uniforms, and they were happy because they could wake up in the morning and put on anything in the closet.  They didn’t have to make a decision, they just threw it on and looked cool and it all went together.  You had your hair cut and colored by Sally Hershberger, because, well, everybody did.  A genius cut could save you, and I mean it, just look at John Bon Jovi.  She saved him and she’ll save you, too.

Across Houston Street from my loft was Joe’s Dairy, where they made fresh mozzarella every day, and down Sullivan Street was one butcher shop that sold meat, another butcher who sold only fowl, and next door was a little vegetable market with wide awning over a table on the sidewalk showing off red apples and tomatoes and bunches of fresh spinach and big black eggplants. 

One day, a friend opened up a mid-century modern antique shop just down the street selling funky 50’s lamps that arched up from a big platter base and had chrome balls for shades, and love seats with triangular backs and knobby upholstery and blonde wooden legs, and chrome dinette sets with Naugahyde seats and a round table with chrome legs and a speckled turquoise top made from linoleum.  People started buying this stuff and decorating their apartments and lofts.  It was sleek and modern -- a few perfect pieces and there you were! 

The old Italian ladies on the block used to walk past the mid-century modern shop and cluck their tongues – two hundred dollars!  Upstairs, in the same building, the old ladies and their families were still eating on their dinettes they bought at May’s Department Store on Union Square for $15.

Everything was going to save us – the hip haircuts, the minimalist furniture, the sleek all-white lofts with white floors and white walls and white ceilings, and other stuff, too, like Werner Erhard and EST where you would “get it” for only two grand and a long weekend in some hotel ballroom in the suburbs.  At least for a while, rock and roll was going to save us, and drugs were going to change the world, and communes were going to teach us how to get along, and yoga was going to tone our bodies and calm our minds, and style was going to save us, our minimalist style where everything was cleaner and purer and…better.

Even the prose was minimal, shorn of excess, stripped of the baggage of style until stories were boiled down to a guy who parked his truck and drank a beer and went home and hit his wife and fell apart and cried, lost in his empty, flat misery.  The stories didn’t contain meaning, they self-consciously lacked it. They taught minimalism in the writing programs, they collected it in skinny books, they sold it as a philosophy that was so barren it could be broken down into cigarettes and coffee and a sheet of blank paper, because it was minimalist and it was hip, man.

Even drugs slotted into the lifestyle as if they were designed just for us.  You worked really, really hard so you could make money and you took the money and bought some coke and you snorted the coke so you could work even harder to make even more money so you could buy larger quantities of coke and snort it so you could get even more work and buy even more coke and…

It was pure, minimalist, modern capitalism emptied of everything but a skinny, jumpy high that fit us perfectly. Cocaine fed the beast of youth by keeping you moving and hunting and getting and taking and spending and doing pretty much anything but living a normal life, because who wanted normal? 

It was like being on a carousel that didn’t stop.  You couldn’t get off because the carousel kept going around and whatever it was you were trying to achieve went around again and what you had wasn’t there anymore, it was past its sell-by date.  It was…curses…old.

We were addicted to it all:  to the music, to the art, to style, to the getting and having, to the loving and leaving, to the excess, to the front table at Raoul’s and Elaine’s, to the next martini, to being young, to each other.  We were young and we were beautiful, and we were never satisfied, so we changed ourselves, we changed everything, our hair, our clothes, our coffee tables, our diets, our faces, we changed everything because we didn’t want to grow old because then we wouldn’t be beautiful anymore.

I remember one time when my father came to New York to visit, and I took him uptown to some little club on the West Side where Muddy Waters was playing.  I thought, I’ll take my dad and show him some blues so he’ll understand who I am, that I’m different from him and his Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra.  I’ll let him listen to something real like Muddy Waters, and then we’ll see what he thinks.

So, we sat in this little club that held maybe 100 people, and Muddy Waters sang some of his hits like “Got My Mojo Working,” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and “Mannish Boy,” songs that told tales of growing up Black and hungering after everything and being tempted by forbidden things that were better left unsaid and unsung, but there he was, singing about all of it anyway.

And I’m thinking, man this is the real shit!  My dad’s going to get it, he’s going to understand why I am the way I am, because this is what I love, and he’ll hear the music and he’ll finally see me for who I am. So, after Muddy’s set as we were walking out of the club to get on a subway and head back downtown to my hip loft, I asked my father what he thought of Muddy Waters. 

He thought for just a moment, not long, and he said, “Well, he is quite a gentleman, son.  Quite a gentleman.”  I walked along next to him, and I thought, wasn’t he listening?  I couldn’t believe that was his reaction to this essential American music, this essential man who had influenced so much of the culture.  I mean, the Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy’s song!  So did Rolling Stone magazine!  You couldn’t listen to anything more authentic than Muddy Waters.  You couldn’t reach down into your own soul and touch deeper than his music touched.

I was mystified by my father’s reaction to Muddy Waters until I got old, and then I understood exactly what he was saying, exactly what he meant, and how right he was.

If you’re lucky, age strips you of arrogance and the dangers that go with it.  You move through the world at a slower, steadier, kinder pace when you get older. You don’t want to get hurt.  If you are a gentleman like my father and Muddy Waters, you reach the point where you don’t want to hurt others, and if you take the world on its terms, the chances are that the world will let you be.

We thought the world owed us life on our terms.  We were addicted to arranging ourselves so the world wouldn’t have a chance to arrange itself around us.

My father and Muddy Waters knew better.  It took me another 50 years, but I finally made it.  I’m old, and I’m still here, and that’s enough.