Notes 7/17/2024

The Happy Hour

We’re at Fanelli’s and Marlowe is telling me how the waiters shushed their table just before I got there. Marlowe is there with two of her friends, a writer and a TikTok influencer. The waiters had shushed their table after an outburst of pure feminine enjoyment. How fucking dare they! The girls aren’t even the loudest in the room. “Femmephobia,” Marlowe says. Marlowe is a Scorpio and she wrote a picaresque New York City it-girl novel called Happy Hour that came out in 2020. I read the book when I got to New York in 2021 and thought that its form, the party report, would be a great vehicle for apocalyptic musings on fascist decadence. Now the waiters are taking forever to bring us our dirty martinis and French 75s, and the bastards at Verso are late on Marlowe’s royalty payments. Her book is their best-selling release, beating out such lesser writers as Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Jameson, Sartre, Marx. The book is set in 2013, so instead of meeting Yarvin, she meets Piketty. The girls are talking about how one of them went on a date with some accountant guy and he was telling her that he had lived in New York for several years and found it hard to find friends. Pathetic! Join a fucking running club, loser! It’s so over for men. They’re so lost. Don’t you think so, Michael? I agree. I think about the astrological motifs in the latest Gasda play. I introduced Marlowe to Gasda after her poetry reading at a church uptown a few days before, where the streets are perfumed, and she immediately started to confuse Gasda for Peter Vack, who she had never met, insisting that they look exactly alike. The comparison seemed somewhat forced (their relation as a pair of opposites is mostly just an invention of this Substack) and inexplicable except as a shit-test, like she was fucking with Gasda, sussing out whether he’s a beta male by likening him to a sexual rival or whatever and seeing how he responds. He probably failed. Some other people come into the bar with a big golden retriever and sit at a table across from ours. “I can’t believe the waiters are shushing us and not bringing us our drinks while also letting in that big stinky dog,” Marlowe says, “this femmephobia is incredible.” Marlowe tells me how she knows all this international literary world party scene shit from when she was a teenager, she was running around London and New York and beyond, living this life long before I ever was, she’s seen stuff I can’t even imagine. (She lives in Toronto now.) Some notorious art gallerist used to drive her around Manhattan back when she was like 15, and the guy eventually got cancelled and now he’s apparently attempting to reinvent himself in Miami. She used to hang out with Dash Snow and other vaguely familiar names from another era, people who had cool, edgy childhoods with parents who didn’t give a fuck. And she was hanging out with Christian Lorentzen in London when she was 21, and she coined calling him “the ugliest man in the world”—he was that ugly, even back then. But she’s over London now. Everywhere else is over, too. Eventually the drinks come, and the waiter brings us the check with it and says that they’re closing. “Those idiots put a fucking orange slice in this French 75 and now they’re literally kicking us out! What a disgrace!” The dog has moved from the floor to one of the chairs, and one of the waiters brings it a bowl of ice cream. The waiters are adoring the dog, taking pictures with the dog. Then they bring out food to some of the other tables. I’m starting to believe in Marlowe’s persecution fantasy and suspect that the waiters are in fact conspiring against us. There’s no way this place is closing now, they’re seating more people and taking their food orders. What time is it, even? I look at my watch and it’s totally warped and inscrutable, like in a dream. “Femmephobia! We’re lower than dogs!” Next thing I know we’re out on Prince Street, I’m lighting a cigarette, Marlowe is herding us all to Nick’s place. “Nick is great. You’ll like him. He lives close by. He’s the same Nick as in my book, you know, we’ve known each other forever and he’s always tolerated my bullshit…”