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, asked his colleague how he’d wound up on the left.
“It was in the 1970s,” Lefty replied. “I was living in New York with some artist friends. 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.
Having grown up in the 1970s, I’m used to Drunkie’s disdain for the decade. I even share it. What’s stunned me lately is the attitude of the young. They love the seventies — its inflation, oil shocks, melt-downs, mass suicides, and (especially) disco and pornography. There’s a kid at the magazine who peppers me with questions: “What’s a ‘key party’? Did you ever O.D.? Did you have a disco suit? Did you protest the war?” He feels like he missed it all.
I explain that, having been 17 when the decade ended, I missed it, too — at least the stuff he’s interested in. 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. I never got a disco suit, either, although that can hardly have been a matter of taste. 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. I’m beaming into the camera, bangs hanging down to eyebrow level. (These photos have been stored in a numbered safe-deposit box in a Swiss bank.)
Protest the war? What war? The War on Inflation? Our only act of civil disobedience consisted of making fake I.D.s. The drinking age was then 18, a huge injustice; it should have been 12. If a 12-year-old 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?
I never had any war stories for Missed-It-All until the other day. He asked, “Did you ever go to Studio 54?”
I’d forgotten: Yes, I did! 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; she’d got into college because her father was thinking of building the school a boathouse. At 1 A.M., she said, “Let’s go to Studio!”
In line, I wore a Harris tweed over a heavy fisherman’s sweater. The jacket had fit me about a growth spurt ago; now it was so tight I had to unbutton the thing to get my cigarettes out of the breast pocket. I must have looked like an ottoman. I remember that because I clashed so badly with everyone around me, in their Mohawks and their leather pants and acetate ties. The bouncer wouldn’t have let me in in a million years. But he recognized Two Short Planks, and we got in as a group, at 15 bucks apiece.
There were lights flashing, and Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” was playing. My friends looked for cocaine. The bartenders, all men in Speedo trunks, were making out with one another. Debbie Harry (of the band Blondie) was sprawled on a couch. I saw a disheveled girl in the corner who seemed as clueless as me. We danced. I, white teenager that I was, tried that mime of cross-country skiing that passed for dancing in our set. When Disheveled turned on her heels and left I realized I’d been wrong. About her being as clueless as me, I mean.
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 an escape from the seventies, a haven for those who wanted to keep libertinism an exclusive thing. They had me there: I couldn’t afford 5 bucks for a beer. So I left Two Short Planks and my other friends behind and walked east into Midtown where an Irish bar was open.
“I.D.?” the barman said.
My fake I.D. consisted of a 2-by-3-inch rectangle I’d cut out of a manila folder. In one corner I’d stuck a photo of myself standing in front of some azaleas in our back-yard the previous spring. 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.
The barman just laughed. “Yo, Mike!” he yelled down the bar. “Get a load of this.” Mike, the manager, looked at my I.D. and laughed till he cried. He called the waitresses over. He passed it around to other patrons. Then he walked up to where I was sitting with my head in my hands and said, “You’re too much, kid. The beer’s on me.” It being the seventies and all.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
