GSTAAD—It’s written in the Declaration of Independence so it must be true, the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. There are those, of course, who try to deny us the pursuit of happiness—we used to call them ballbusters—and they were more often than not wives or girlfriends, ladies who had replaced stern nannies or even sterner mothers as we grew older. I’ve had women try to stop my pursuit of happiness throughout my life, mostly using the excuse that they’re worried about my health. They don’t seem to get it that happiness is more important than health, and that I was never healthier than when I was in Pentonville doing three months without booze or drugs of any kind. Happy I was not. (That was 35 years ago.)
Never mind. The wife no longer gives me hell after a nightlong bender, but now I have children playing nanny, and soon it will be the grandchildren. What fresh hell is this? Can’t a man have a little tinkle once in a while? Mind you, we did overdo it for my birthday, but then I’ve got news for the new Gestapo—it comes only once a year, thank God. And what these Nazis didn’t realize is that my name day, the saint’s day that counts even more back home, is August 15, four days after the dreaded birthday, and yet another excuse to get rip-roaring drunk and disorderly. And oh boy, the Karamazovian hangovers now last three days. Remember the great old days when the hangover would disappear after twenty minutes of running? After two hours of exercise, one was ready for another big one, and then another, and another. Yep, those were the nights—days, rather, preparing for the nights to come.
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No longer. The sainted editor writing in the Telegraph quoted an actress about decadent and degenerate grandparents, or was it parents? Yippee! Today’s youth is shell-shocked from being bombarded with messages concerning their DNA. Unless they’re members of LGBTQ (what the hell does the Q stand for?), young men are seen as rapists and Neanderthals. Admiring a woman is now leering, and opening a door for a lady is sexist. So, late into the night Michael and my son and some other friends talked about past “creative gatherings,” mainly at my New York house, a block down from the recently departed pedophile Epstein’s megamansion shithole.
The evenings were informal and relaxed; most of the time, dinner was in the kitchen, a converted library with dark brown paneling on the walls. Norman Mailer was at the head; Jay McInerney of Bright Lights, Big Cityfame and Bret Easton Ellis of Less Than Zero renown being regulars; the literary talks interrupted by Anthony Haden Guest crashing, forcing us to plead in unison with the Hilaire Belloc ditty “Grant, oh Lord, eternal rest, to thy servant Haden Guest/Never mind the where and how, only grant it to him now.” We never managed to shame him into leaving. Free booze was our downfall. Little John Taki would hear the noise and come down, an 8-year-old conversing with best-selling novelists about life and sport. He now recalls those evenings with almost teary-eyed nostalgia.
