Pretty Convincing

Talking to my friend Emily, whose drinking

patterns and extravagance of personal

feeling are a lot like mine, I’m pretty

convinced when she explains the things we do

while drinking (a cocktail to celebrate the new

account turns into a party that lasts till 3

a.m. and a terrific hangover) indicate

a problem of a sort I’d not considered.

I’ve been worried about how I metabolize

the sauce for four years, since my second bout

of hepatitis, when I kissed all the girls

at Christmas dinner and turned bright yellow

Christmas night, but never about whether

I could handle it. It’s been more of a given,

the stage set for my life as an artistic queer,

as much of a tradition in these New York circles

as incense for Catholics or German

shepherds for the blind. We re-enact

the rituals, and our faces, like smoky icons

in a certain light, seem to learn nothing

but understand all. It comforts me

yet isn’t all that pleasant, like drinking

Ripple to remember high school. A friend

of mine has been drinking in the same bar for decades,

talking to the same types, but progressively

fewer blonds. Joe LeSueur says he’s glad

to have been a young man in the Fifties with his

Tab Hunter good looks, because that was the image

men desired; now it’s the Puerto Rican

angel with great eyes and a fierce fidelity

that springs out of machismo, rather than a moral

choice. His argument is pretty convincing, too,

except lots of the pretty blonds I’ve known

default by dying young, leaving the field

to the swarthy. Cameron Burke, the dancer

and waiter at Magoo’s, killed on his way home from

the Pines when a car hit his bike on the Sunrise Highway.

Henry Post dead of AIDS, a man I thought would be around

forever, surprising me by his mortality the way

I was surprised when I heard he was not

the grandson of Emily Post at all, just pretending,

like the friend he wrote about in Playgirl, Blair Meehan,

was faking when he crashed every A List party for a year

by pretending to be Kay Meehan’s son, a masquerade

that ended when a hostess told him “Your mother’s here”

and led him by the hand to the dowager—Woman, behold

thy son—underneath a darkening conviction that all,

if not wrong, was not right. By now Henry may have faced

the same embarrassment at some cocktail party in the sky.

Stay as outrageously nasty as you were. And Patrick

Mack, locked into memory as he held court in the Anvil

by the downstairs pinball machine, and writhing

as he danced in Lita Hornick’s parlor when the Stimulators

played her party, dead last week of causes I don’t know,

as if the cause and not the effect were the problem.

My blond friend Chuck Shaw refers to the Bone-

crusher in the Sky, and I’m starting to

imagine a road to his castle lit by radiant

heads of blonds on poles as streetlamps for the gods,

flickering on at twilight as I used to do

in the years when I crashed more parties and acted

more outrageously and met more beauties and made

more enemies than ever before or ever again, I pray.

It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids

with haircuts from my childhood and inflated self-esteem

from my arrival in New York, who plug into the history

of prettiness, convincing to themselves and the devout.

We who are about to catch the eye of someone

new salute as the cotillion passes, led by blonds

and followed by the rest of us, a formal march

to the dark edge of the ballroom where we step out

onto the terrace and the buds of the forsythia

that hides the trash sprout magically

at our approach. I toast it

as memorial to dreams as fragile and persistent

as a blond in love. My clothes smell like the smoky

bar, but the sweetness of the April air’s

delicious when I step outside and fill

my lungs, leaning my head back

in a first-class seat on the shuttle

between the rowdy celebration of the great deeds

to come and an enormous Irish wake in which

the corpses change but the party goes on forever.

Source: A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011)