Life of the Party
From the Archives
By Padgett Powell
At a party, I don’t think it was a costume party, I met a woman dressed as a bullfighter, very attractive, and plied my troth upon her, which was easy on a woman dressed (and acting) like a bullfighter, “I like your suit of lights” is an easy opener, “I like those slippers,” “Do you have a bull’s ear to give away?” and so forth, and it worked, and later she’s in a position to say, against the refrigerator, so many people pressed into the kitchen that you already virtually are, “Gore me,” so you get that suit of lights off in the dark and effect agreeable groin wound and everybody’s content, until morning. After the carrera, the trouble. Tempo male. No thank you. No bullfighter-suit-wearing fair ladies in the light of day. You’re a fake. You’re a . . . whatever you are, it’s inauthentic. That’s the best you can know walking unpeopled Sunday streets with pictures in your head of a suit of lights thrown all over an apartment bedroom and a not very attractive naked bullfighter asking if you’ll call. Inauthentic. You need an authentic cup of coffee, or a beer, a phone call home, to make a big pot of money, or chili, or something and no whining football on TV. You’ve got the shakes, not booze shakes, but garbage shakes, garbage-living shakes.
At a party, I know it was a cocktail party, I met a man who dropped his drink, dropped his pants, dropped to the floor, got the drop on the concerned hostess and tripped her, dropped everybody dead with a bold look of supine tumescent superiority with scrambling hostess on the side. A roach ran horizontally across a wall and dropped neatly into an ashtray someone had dropped. It had a green-plaid bean-bag base and a june-bug-green metal dish and had landed upright and the roach that dropped in it had momentary trouble getting purchase up the shiny bowl-shaped surface. The butts and ashes he might have used for traction were beside the ashtray on the carpet. The dropped-trou man crawled to them and inspected them and announced, “That roach is in the CIA unless I miss my bet.” This got a decent laugh from the party, considering the circumstances. “Drop it right there, pardner,” the man said to the spot along the baseboard into which the roach had dropped from sight. His teeth dropped out. He reached blindly behind him until he felt the fringe of the tablecloth beneath the party buffet and yanked it with surprising force. The items of the buffet converted to a tux and accessories that matriculated through the air onto the man, standing now and fitting into his mouth, and snapping them for fit, a new set of teeth, werewolf in style. “More like it,” he pronounced. “I’m dropping back in. Never drop everything, it’s lonely down there.” He began snapping his fingers, cocking his head to a distant tune. “Be bop,” he said, once.
At a party, I believe it was supposed to be in support of a political candidate, whom I did not meet, who might have not even been there, but probably was, a friend pulled me in the bathroom and locked it and held off the women outside by telling them I had diabetes or leukemia or a colostomy bag, I have forgotten. The women, whatever malady we alleged, holding themselves by mincing around pigeon-toed outside the door, were not much mollified. We ate mushrooms from a baggie, dash of tap water to clear the fungal dirt from our mouths, and we were out.
Before the mushrooms kicked in I watched a girl faint two or three times, falling like timber, someone saying over her each time, That’s Henry Whaley’s little girl, isn’t it? Then I watched the most beautiful woman at the party sit in the lap of the most beautiful man at the party, arguably the most beautiful man on the Seaboard, whose feminine gestures suggested he was gay until Ms. Bombshell roughed her hands through his hair and kissed him fondly and lightly as she did, making you less certain of the world than you had been, and a woman I knew asked me if I’d like to go for a walk, and I asked, by way of saying No, if her fiancé was not present, a large man who either had by then or was yet to one morning when he was supposed to be fishing trap me in a bedroom with this woman, I said No and she said Be that way and shamed me so we went for the walk, her father had died and she managed to bring that up before she started crying in such a way that she couldn’t talk or breathe and would shy into the street if you tried, as you knew you shouldn’t but couldn’t help trying, to touch her, and we went back to the party and just as I saw the tall fiance who had caught me or was to catch me in his woman’s bed, and just as the tall fiancé saw us returning to the party with women on the floor and in handsome you-thought-gay laps the mushrooms kicked in and my knees felt like jelly and bees and I bravely sallied on awobble to meet the brute, who said nothing. The woman was sniffling yet, that helped, I suppose. Carolyn was yet in Woody’s lap. Woody’s hair looked great, like shredded wheat, the way Carolyn had primped him, prinked him, what is it, shit.
The political candidate died shortly thereafter in a plane crash. The crying woman married a short guy given to kelly-green polyester walking shorts.
That woman, the crying woman, it occurs to me, is one of the few people I know who do not judge me ill. Who will not, by some principle of shared ruinedness, or something.
At a party, I thought it a drug party but it was a garden party, rosebay rhododendron flirted with luxuriant alien manly bamboo, I sat in a lawn chair, a pony called Zelda nibbled lady fingers, a possum drank the punch. There were some crust-free little tuna sandwiches you could smell blowing this way and that across the garden from the platter on which they rode to and fro out of reach on the upright arm of, I swear to God, an Emerald City guard with a Fuller-brush mustache. I was tired, too tired to . . . “I’m not pregnant,” a woman said from the bushes.
Fourteen—as near as I could tell, I was too tired to . . . move—fourteen one-dollar bills blew through the garden. The pony Zelda looked at one and did not nibble it. The possum located a portable telephone and managed through a deft series of contortions, rolling around on the buffet table and making odd noises, to get the phone into its pouch. It concerned me whether the phone was on Standby or Talk.
Then it lightninged, once. A woman came out of the bushes and whistled to the possum, which grinned, sort of, if a grin can be said to include a kind of hissing salival mist spitting out of four or five hundred hairlike razor-looking teeth, and walked off with the phone at normal possum speed, .02 miles per hour. The woman went back in the bushes and said, “I may be late but I’m not a bimbo.”
I wondered if I’d gotten any mail that day. Going home to no mail, or to, you know, nothing any good, and the odds for that God knows are not real bad THIS DAY AND AGE, would be a bummer. With, I think, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher, I do not mean a Mannlicher but the Mannlicher, which I found under my chair, though I really noticed it only once I had it across my knees and saw that it was Lee’s, I thought of shooting the Emerald City cossack for a tuna sandwich, crustless and about one inch by one inch and soft.
I have five girlfriends but none of them is interested in spending time with me, visiting me, eating with me, going anywhere with me, camping out with me, talking with me, looking at me, having anything to do with me, or sleeping with me. I’ve considered getting more. But above five, it gets, you know, complicated. They . . .
And Zelda, I swan, started, like, dancing around the garden, in a pink tutu, on her hind legs, smiling, her eyes porcelain cueballs taking great sidelong leering happy looks at me, and she bent over into the bushes and said, “I’m a Yoooonicorn if you’re not a bimbo.” And then conspiratorially winked at me, stomped the possum and phone, kicked the cossack in the silver platter, it rained tuna dainties for days, hours, minutes, a second, I almost caught one. 
“Life of the Party,” by Padgett Powell, Vol. 79, no. 2/3, Spring/Summer 1994
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