"I dragged him inside, which was hard, because he was six feet tall. His name turned out to be Duncan, and soon we were living in weird hotels together and staying in all day, except for going down to the deli for bologna with green olives in it. Like me, he got some money from home— his came from North Carolina. Tennessee Williams called a couple of times, and then Duncan’s voice would get more Southern, would become a real drawl. I think I was jealous of Tennessee Williams. At night, we lived in bars until closing time (Sorabaja, on the Upper East Side; the White Horse; Chumley’s—watching Zoot Sims put dimes in the jukebox), and in the beginning I had little fantasies of marrying him. I pretty much gave up on that when I finally had to put him in Gracie Square Hospital because he thought God was talking to him in the Wellington Hotel. It seemed I was developing a sort of ruthless, practical side. I was sad when I had him committed; we had been like 'Les Enfants Terribles' together."
I love the writing. Each paragraph is self-contained, like a blog post, that is... like a post on the greatest blog ever written. Quite condensed and spiffy!
You have to have these experiences to tell these stories... or I suppose you could write like that in fiction. You come home to find a drunk passed out in front of your apartment door and you drag him inside... because he's beautiful. And you're beautiful too, of course, so you live like Les Enfants Terribles until you need to drag him elsewhere, to the mental hospital.
"Les Enfants Terribles" — Wikipedia says — "is a 1929 novel by Jean Cocteau [about]... two siblings... who isolate themselves from the world as they grow up, an isolation which is shattered by the stresses of their adolescence."
The hipster life gets dirty and grungy quickly. I used to admire the Beat Poets until I met them. The dirty underwear, alcoholism and cheap apartments thing got old in hurry. My Facebook feed dumps a lot of R. Crumb comics on me. I still love his art work, but I no longer agree with any of his bleeding heart, anarchist political ideas.
"One night, on the way back from buying Betty Crocker brownie mix on Columbus, I actually found a beautiful young man, in front of our apartment, on the floor, passed out drunk." "I dragged him inside… His name turned out to be Duncan…
Knowing his last name is Hines clarifies the infidelity that put him in such a tailspin. She also had a torrid affair with Poppin Fresh, the Pillsbury Dough Boy that involved more exploration than just a finger poke to the belly.
Wince said... "She also had a torrid affair with Poppin Fresh, the Pillsbury Dough Boy that involved more exploration than just a finger poke to the belly.”
I assumed Poppin Fresh was his ‘80s rap name.
I always felt sorry for the Pillsbury Dough Boy. After Ghostbusters came out, people kept confusing him with the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.
My husband (then boyfriend, but I'll refer to him as "husband" herein) finished his last college course several weeks early (a technical writing class, one unit, required, but no final exam - just the paper) and took himself on a road trip up to Seattle to visit relatives. On his way back down, he picked up a hitchhiker, a very tall, very handsome French guy who had landed in NYC some months previous and already hitchhiked his way across Canada. He was working his way down to Patagonia.
Well, when my husband stopped at his grandparents' place in Florence, OR, the grandparents kindly offered to let the guy stay too, instead of my husband's having to leave him at a nearby campground. Years later, we learned that Grandpa began to suspect his grandson was gay, after this occasion.
So, they continue to travel together down into CA. Christophe asks to be dropped off, oh somewhere near the Bay Area, and my husband tells him he's going to get some lunch but if he's still there when he returns, he'll pick him up again. This is what happens, so after a couple more hours on the road, they show up at the apartment I share with my husband. "I brought you a present," he tells me.
Christophe stayed with us for a little over a week. We took him to Yosemite, to Tahoe, all over the Sierra Nevada, then finally put him on his way. He eventually made it to Patagonia. Sadly, we lost touch after that.
Apologies for typos, especially in the middle of this comment; I can't get to that part to proofread. I hope you can tease out my meaning.
I really do not understand the fascination with the... can we call them sluts? to the rich and famous. That might have been impressive back in the day, before women got educated and became liberated, but now? She was a cheap whore with family money who seemed to have slept her way to a top magazine (with married men!) and later was let go, but she lived on fucking in New York City in a subsidized apartment.
I never watched Sex and the City either, so I doubt you are alone, but please explain to me the fascination or "what a writer!" you see in her tales of getting laid? Is this hands-in-your-pants jack/jill-off reading? If so, go to it. It sounds like high-brow Penthouse letters, but pretending this poor used-up receptacle has had an admirable life worth reading about?
I hope you can tease out my meaning. ------- Did you fuck him too? Grandpa knew why you pick up hitchhikers... I imagine it was a quite intimate two years sharing the apartment with your boyfriend and the "gift" he brought home and you let him keep and play with before you officially "settled down" into monogamous family life.
Ann has stories to share, I bet. Richard Cohen and her were young once too...
(I think a lot of middle-aged or older women have their own "I was a free spirit sexually once too!" stories locked inside them waiting to get out... Self publish?)
Jamie’s comment aside (as it was her husband); why would a single woman drag a drunk male stranger inside her home? I guess that’s a hook to make the book interesting, but it is too odd for me. Skip.
we were living in weird hotels together and staying in all day, except for going down to the deli for bologna with green olives in it.
Did the poor gal never hear of "olive loaf" or did she think it lacked flourish?
I was sad when I had him committed;
Can you REALLY be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum by a dame you're shacking up with?
The most interesting writing here is the namedropping and parts that can't be verified. That's a red flag. If it was a book, it would be "A Million Little Olives."
this lady's writing is incomplete, and FULL of holes. HOW can we take her seriously, when she does NOT address The Important Issue? What Happened with the brownies? Did she make them? Were they good?
Leland @8:19, oh, don't think that didn't give me quite a bit of pause! Sure, honey, bring home a hitchhiker - nothing bad ever happens when people do that!
But he was in fact very good-looking, and I was all of 22... So I was nonplussed, to say the least.
"Can you REALLY be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum by a dame you're shacking up with?"
This is an excellent question, and I was just crediting The New Yorker with fact-checking excellence.
I asked Grok, specifically about how things worked in the 1970s in NYC. Woman brings boyfriend to the hospital when he's having some kind of mental breakdown. What would make it accurate for her to say I got an "involuntary commitment" for him?
"For her statement to be accurate, she would likely have played a role in initiating a formal process where her boyfriend was admitted against his will. This could happen if: She reported his behavior to authorities (e.g., police or mental health professionals) or provided information leading to his evaluation. [OR:] She brought him to a hospital, and during the evaluation, medical professionals determined he met the criteria for involuntary admission (e.g., he was suicidal, violent, or severely delusional). [OR:] She signed a petition or affidavit (if required) as part of the process to have him evaluated or admitted involuntarily, though this was not always necessary if professionals or police were involved. The statement might also reflect her perception of the outcome. For example, if she took him to the hospital and he was admitted against his will (even if she didn’t directly file paperwork), she might describe it as “I had him involuntarily committed” in lay terms."
"Did the poor gal never hear of "olive loaf" or did she think it lacked flourish?"
I think she is doing something like Tolstoy's defamiliarization — ostranenie in Russian, literally "making strange." It's a great, great technique. The best!
Ann Althouse said... "Jamie’s comment aside (as it was her husband); why would a single woman drag a drunk male stranger inside her home?"
That's how beautiful he was. That's how you show and not tell. ----------- So you're saying Jamie and her husband WERE both fucking the beautiful stranger? I'd read that, no namedropping needed. You can self publish at nifty.org. Do it, Jamie! The dead lady has nothing on your if you have sex stories to spill...
(I am going to read your comments in a different light now though, knowing about your sexual libertine past. Just yesterday we all learned you are not a dude, and now you drop this. WOW. Keep on commenting!)
Ann Althouse said... Keep in mind that the New Yorker made a big thing out of its fact checking. This is *not* fiction palmed off as memoir. --------- Unless she kept the sexx tapes, everybody embellished their youthful sex life, I suppose... Especially if you've got a book advance and maybe don't feel all that sexxy or desired anymore as an older lady living in NYC but not part of the scene anymore... I pity her. If ann thinks this is "the best" writing she's ever read, I pity ... meade. Somebody's not doing their job. Reminds me of when the prosecutor was impressed that Wm Kennedy Smith had sex twice with the alleged rape victim. Yes ma'am. It happens. Even if a lot of the deets are fudged to make things seem bigger and more impressive decades later.
Soft-core porn for the old boomer hippie set who miss those wild-west days in NYC.
That essay is so sad. The frequent name dropping makes it even sadder. All the brushes with fame, and the empty sex with the beautiful, fascinating men, but no meaningful relationships. Looking for love in all the wrong places. There were only two positive relationships in that story - the man who wanted to marry her, and Burt Lancaster who told her to stop being crazy. It was as if Burt Lancaster could tell her craziness was an act to protect her from emotional intimacy.
I can only hope she enjoyed her life, because she comes off as sad and pathetic from my end, summed up as "Men loved me (and left me) and married women hate me."
The comments seem to have more questioning of you, Professor Althouse, than normal. As I read, I kept answering for you. "You had to be there. Then. Life was often, very often like a movie." For some of us. Just before I became a disco DJ in a club called Big Daddy's in Key West, where the fire chief was a drug-dealing Cuban named "Bum" Farto, I was a late night DJ at a FM station in the middle of the woods in Central Florida "dating" and then stalked by a young woman named Susie Musick.
Shouting Thomas: "The hipster life gets dirty and grungy quickly. I used to admire the Beat Poets until I met them. The dirty underwear, alcoholism and cheap apartments thing got old in hurry. "
Sums up my brief encounter with Ginsberg, Orlovsky and Corso perfectly.
I'm sorry, but unless a woman is into weight lifting as a hobby, there's no way in hell she can drag a six foot tall man anywhere. 160+ plus pounds of dead weight, that you're dragging against the friction of the floor? Not happening.
And if you're a medium sized woman propping up some 6ft guy who's blotto and he goes over? Well, he's taking you down with him.
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38 comments:
The hipster life gets dirty and grungy quickly. I used to admire the Beat Poets until I met them. The dirty underwear, alcoholism and cheap apartments thing got old in hurry. My Facebook feed dumps a lot of R. Crumb comics on me. I still love his art work, but I no longer agree with any of his bleeding heart, anarchist political ideas.
I can't help but wonder ... How did Tennessee Williams know the number to call to reach his itinerant drunk gay friend, Duncan?
"One night, on the way back from buying Betty Crocker brownie mix on Columbus, I actually found a beautiful young man, in front of our apartment, on the floor, passed out drunk."
"I dragged him inside… His name turned out to be Duncan…
Knowing his last name is Hines clarifies the infidelity that put him in such a tailspin. She also had a torrid affair with Poppin Fresh, the Pillsbury Dough Boy that involved more exploration than just a finger poke to the belly.
Wince said...
"She also had a torrid affair with Poppin Fresh, the Pillsbury Dough Boy that involved more exploration than just a finger poke to the belly.”
I assumed Poppin Fresh was his ‘80s rap name.
I always felt sorry for the Pillsbury Dough Boy. After Ghostbusters came out, people kept confusing him with the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.
My husband (then boyfriend, but I'll refer to him as "husband" herein) finished his last college course several weeks early (a technical writing class, one unit, required, but no final exam - just the paper) and took himself on a road trip up to Seattle to visit relatives. On his way back down, he picked up a hitchhiker, a very tall, very handsome French guy who had landed in NYC some months previous and already hitchhiked his way across Canada. He was working his way down to Patagonia.
Well, when my husband stopped at his grandparents' place in Florence, OR, the grandparents kindly offered to let the guy stay too, instead of my husband's having to leave him at a nearby campground. Years later, we learned that Grandpa began to suspect his grandson was gay, after this occasion.
So, they continue to travel together down into CA. Christophe asks to be dropped off, oh somewhere near the Bay Area, and my husband tells him he's going to get some lunch but if he's still there when he returns, he'll pick him up again. This is what happens, so after a couple more hours on the road, they show up at the apartment I share with my husband. "I brought you a present," he tells me.
Christophe stayed with us for a little over a week. We took him to Yosemite, to Tahoe, all over the Sierra Nevada, then finally put him on his way. He eventually made it to Patagonia. Sadly, we lost touch after that.
Apologies for typos, especially in the middle of this comment; I can't get to that part to proofread. I hope you can tease out my meaning.
I really do not understand the fascination with the... can we call them sluts? to the rich and famous. That might have been impressive back in the day, before women got educated and became liberated, but now? She was a cheap whore with family money who seemed to have slept her way to a top magazine (with married men!) and later was let go, but she lived on fucking in New York City in a subsidized apartment.
I never watched Sex and the City either, so I doubt you are alone, but please explain to me the fascination or "what a writer!" you see in her tales of getting laid? Is this hands-in-your-pants jack/jill-off reading? If so, go to it. It sounds like high-brow Penthouse letters, but pretending this poor used-up receptacle has had an admirable life worth reading about?
Please.
I hope you can tease out my meaning.
-------
Did you fuck him too?
Grandpa knew why you pick up hitchhikers...
I imagine it was a quite intimate two years sharing the apartment with your boyfriend and the "gift" he brought home and you let him keep and play with before you officially "settled down" into monogamous family life.
Ann has stories to share, I bet. Richard Cohen and her were young once too...
(I think a lot of middle-aged or older women have their own "I was a free spirit sexually once too!" stories locked inside them waiting to get out... Self publish?)
Jamie’s comment aside (as it was her husband); why would a single woman drag a drunk male stranger inside her home? I guess that’s a hook to make the book interesting, but it is too odd for me. Skip.
we were living in weird hotels together and staying in all day, except for going down to the deli for bologna with green olives in it.
Did the poor gal never hear of "olive loaf" or did she think it lacked flourish?
I was sad when I had him committed;
Can you REALLY be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum by a dame you're shacking up with?
The most interesting writing here is the namedropping and parts that can't be verified. That's a red flag. If it was a book, it would be "A Million Little Olives."
this lady's writing is incomplete, and FULL of holes.
HOW can we take her seriously, when she does NOT address The Important Issue?
What Happened with the brownies?
Did she make them? Were they good?
Leland @8:19, oh, don't think that didn't give me quite a bit of pause! Sure, honey, bring home a hitchhiker - nothing bad ever happens when people do that!
But he was in fact very good-looking, and I was all of 22... So I was nonplussed, to say the least.
"Jamie’s comment aside (as it was her husband); why would a single woman drag a drunk male stranger inside her home?"
That's how beautiful he was. That's how you show and not tell.
Keep in mind that the New Yorker made a big thing out of its fact checking. This is *not* fiction palmed off as memoir.
"Can you REALLY be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum by a dame you're shacking up with?"
This is an excellent question, and I was just crediting The New Yorker with fact-checking excellence.
I asked Grok, specifically about how things worked in the 1970s in NYC. Woman brings boyfriend to the hospital when he's having some kind of mental breakdown. What would make it accurate for her to say I got an "involuntary commitment" for him?
"For her statement to be accurate, she would likely have played a role in initiating a formal process where her boyfriend was admitted against his will. This could happen if: She reported his behavior to authorities (e.g., police or mental health professionals) or provided information leading to his evaluation. [OR:] She brought him to a hospital, and during the evaluation, medical professionals determined he met the criteria for involuntary admission (e.g., he was suicidal, violent, or severely delusional). [OR:] She signed a petition or affidavit (if required) as part of the process to have him evaluated or admitted involuntarily, though this was not always necessary if professionals or police were involved. The statement might also reflect her perception of the outcome. For example, if she took him to the hospital and he was admitted against his will (even if she didn’t directly file paperwork), she might describe it as “I had him involuntarily committed” in lay terms."
@gilbar LOL. Exactly.
"Did the poor gal never hear of "olive loaf" or did she think it lacked flourish?"
I think she is doing something like Tolstoy's defamiliarization — ostranenie in Russian, literally "making strange." It's a great, great technique. The best!
Ann Althouse said...
"Jamie’s comment aside (as it was her husband); why would a single woman drag a drunk male stranger inside her home?"
That's how beautiful he was. That's how you show and not tell.
-----------
So you're saying Jamie and her husband WERE both fucking the beautiful stranger? I'd read that, no namedropping needed. You can self publish at nifty.org. Do it, Jamie! The dead lady has nothing on your if you have sex stories to spill...
(I am going to read your comments in a different light now though, knowing about your sexual libertine past. Just yesterday we all learned you are not a dude, and now you drop this. WOW. Keep on commenting!)
I've had olive loaf, ann. It's really not all that...
Ann Althouse said...
Keep in mind that the New Yorker made a big thing out of its fact checking. This is *not* fiction palmed off as memoir.
---------
Unless she kept the sexx tapes, everybody embellished their youthful sex life, I suppose... Especially if you've got a book advance and maybe don't feel all that sexxy or desired anymore as an older lady living in NYC but not part of the scene anymore... I pity her. If ann thinks this is "the best" writing she's ever read, I pity ... meade. Somebody's not doing their job. Reminds me of when the prosecutor was impressed that Wm Kennedy Smith had sex twice with the alleged rape victim. Yes ma'am. It happens. Even if a lot of the deets are fudged to make things seem bigger and more impressive decades later.
Soft-core porn for the old boomer hippie set who miss those wild-west days in NYC.
What Happened with the brownies?
Did she make them? Were they good?
Lucky thing it was Betty Crocker brownie mix and not Aunt Jemima pancake mix or she’d have been accused of racism.
And when you're tall fit and good looking, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.
To take it even further baloney is essentially a giant hot dog
Bologna not baloney one's real the other fake?
It's just another example of the first principles way of looking at the world popularized by Elon Musk on The Joe Rogan podcast. You're welcome
God wouldn't be caught dead at the Wellington.
+1 on the good writing.
That essay is so sad. The frequent name dropping makes it even sadder. All the brushes with fame, and the empty sex with the beautiful, fascinating men, but no meaningful relationships. Looking for love in all the wrong places. There were only two positive relationships in that story - the man who wanted to marry her, and Burt Lancaster who told her to stop being crazy. It was as if Burt Lancaster could tell her craziness was an act to protect her from emotional intimacy.
You can take the girl out of New York, but you cannot take the New York out of the girl.
This is the perfect opening sentence for a novel.
"I was sad when I had him committed."
I can only hope she enjoyed her life, because she comes off as sad and pathetic from my end, summed up as "Men loved me (and left me) and married women hate me."
The comments seem to have more questioning of you, Professor Althouse, than normal. As I read, I kept answering for you. "You had to be there. Then. Life was often, very often like a movie." For some of us. Just before I became a disco DJ in a club called Big Daddy's in Key West, where the fire chief was a drug-dealing Cuban named "Bum" Farto, I was a late night DJ at a FM station in the middle of the woods in Central Florida "dating" and then stalked by a young woman named Susie Musick.
It is interesting to watch rich white liberal women demonstrate how shallow and thoughtless and selfish they are.
They are of course also very intent on telling other people how to live.
The fastest way to end up back in caves and mud huts is to give women like this the opportunity to vote.
Shouting Thomas: "The hipster life gets dirty and grungy quickly. I used to admire the Beat Poets until I met them. The dirty underwear, alcoholism and cheap apartments thing got old in hurry. "
Sums up my brief encounter with Ginsberg, Orlovsky and Corso perfectly.
I'm sorry, but unless a woman is into weight lifting as a hobby, there's no way in hell she can drag a six foot tall man anywhere. 160+ plus pounds of dead weight, that you're dragging against the friction of the floor? Not happening.
And if you're a medium sized woman propping up some 6ft guy who's blotto and he goes over? Well, he's taking you down with him.
Sorry, this is creative fiction.
If there weren't a jazz saxophonist named Zoot Sims, you'd have to invent one. What a great name!
I have helped beautiful dogs I found at my door who were hungry, and then brought them into my house. Lived experiences.
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