Tender Is The Night Of A Thousand Metas (Or: Waiter, There's A Blogger In My Soup Kitchen)
There was a decent roll call. Krucoff, 99, Carney, ConBon, Katie Bakes, Laura, Meaghan O. Sheila McClear was there for a second. She checked her text messages and left. Alex Pareene stayed for most of it, but what’s funny about this is that his girlfriend’s sister had just flown into town. “This?!” I asked him. “This is where you take her STRIAGHT FROM THE AIRPORT?! You’re a terrible host.”
The chairs at Merchants were these big, red velvet fuckers, the size of Buicks. They made it hard to sit or stand anywhere. And not that I paid for a drink for most of the night, but getting the attention of anyone there to get you a drink was near impossible, which was kind of part of the fun, I guess. I mean, if you’re there, you’re into charity or masochism or bloodsport, so it works, right? Right.
We saw Gessen across the room. Andrew told us that he can’t meet him alone, we have to go over with him. He has these dark, almost sunken-back eyes. They are dark and shadowed. He looked like he was out for blood. We came up to him and he shook our hands and we shook his. He had a firm handshake. We were all quite civil, and someone - maybe Eli Valley - asked us if we were going to suck his dick anymore than we already were, and Gessen even invited us to give him a little guff, which we all, naturally, did.
Andrew told him he was 50 pages into the book and that it was “weak.” I thanked Gessen several times for dignifying our bullshit, and explained how excited I was to read the book when I got it, and that I was disappointed after. I asked him if the characters were based on actual friends of his, or him; they are him. I asked him about football at Harvard (he was a safety). He was very nice, although at one point he did call Andrew out for leaking his email. Andrew’s defense was something about “once you call somebody a pussy, it becomes leakable” and Gessen made a funny joke about a hymen being breached.
Gessen posed for pictures with everyone but Alex Pareene, because apparently Pareene’s chapter of the Bloods isn’t simpatico with N+1, or whatever. Keith offered to buy me a beer, which is funny. So I offered to buy him a beer, and he would have let me, had 99 not stepped in and bought both of us beers. I’m sure 99 said some shit to him at some point, but I was far more sober than I’d ever - ever - been with this crowd. I felt capillaries bursting in my face from all the meta. Not many things are “too much” for me. I think I finally found my threshold.
The auction started sometime after Alex Pareene won a raffle for tickets to that 80’s Prom Thing at Webster Hall, which he screamed painfully at. I think he wanted to win the luggage, which Katie won. She wasn’t too excited about it, I think she had plans to put it outside her building with a sign. Maybe she can donate it to the needy.
Anyway. Andrew introduced the book and maybe 15 people knew what was going on, but they clapped when they knew a published author was in the house, because Andrew pointed Gessen out and made him speak. Gessen spoke about the book, and Harvard, and the impetus for the changes made in the book: “Well, the Internet wrote me back and chose Florida State University,” is, in fact, a direct quote. Bidding started and I tried bidding in three dollar increments, but Andrew wasn’t having it. I got up to about $150 and 99 told me to stop.
We got to about $275 and Andrew offered up both an apron and himself as a date, which is when the bidding immediately flatlined. Not joking. 99 won the book. Andrew now has to take him out to dinner, which is, as they say, classic. I had originally planned to either sleep with the book under my pillow or shoot a .22 through it and inscribe a plaque with the word “pussy” on it, but 99 wants to make sure shooting it with a .22 won’t damage the structural integrity of the book (as we don’t have to worry about the integrity of the words, har har), so on my trip home this weekend, we will use a test copy of the book to make sure this plan is workable.
Eventually everyone left, as they tend to do, but not before scarfing down some bar food and watching a certain, prominent New York lush blogger try to stand straight. I later saw him from my taxi back to Astoria staggering uptown on First Avenue, texting Twitter updates, looking confused and somewhat rabid, but also slightly melancholy. If I could pick one image to encapsulate this night, it would be that. On the bright side of things, it all was, as Andrew likes to say, for a good cause. And Keith Gessen wouldn’t have a book out there worth over $1,000 either, had it not been for this. So I guess, somehow, like a fucked up, lawless game of kickball, everyone wins. I guess.
