On a hot Wednesday evening a few weeks ago, I went to the The Drift magazine’s issue 15 launch party at Night Club 101 in the East Village. I was just coming off an unusually disappointing and isolating couple of weeks, and I thought going alone to an open-invite literary party would do me some good. I don’t really read The Drift, but I feel like I have a good grasp of its vibe: hip, dialectical, seductive. A client of mine who has been a staff writer at a big prestigious magazine for decades once told me that The Drift is where it’s at now.
There was a line out the door when I arrived. I asked two girls in front of me how long they’d been waiting and they said about fifteen minutes. A couple minutes later, I heard one of them refer to The Drift as a “zine.” Two other girls behind me were talking about their own writing. One said she liked to imbue her fiction with references to contemporary politics. “Oh, so you fancy yourself a regular George Orwell?” the other said, with the cheekiness of someone young enough to have heard about him for the first time in her Intro to Dystopian Literature class just last semester. I thought to myself that I’ve never read George Orwell and I hope I never do. Some writers are just too British.1 Everyone in line seemed very young, maybe sub-25. Slim men with New Yorker tote bags and striped shirts showed up alone. I felt like a soggy slice of tomato squished between layers and layers of bread in the form of pretentious NYU princesses and bisexual Bed-Stuy soft bois.
I sweated it out for about ten minutes before I got to the front of the line, where the bouncer (yes, bouncer, ready to kick the ass of anyone who so much as whispered the words “Dimes Square” or “Hegelian E-Girl”) examined my expired driver’s license, stamped my hand, and ushered me into the air-conditioned bar. Literary critic Christian Lorentzen was perched on a barstool, drink in hand, his back hunched, holding court, speaking to some brightly smiling young women who I imagine were asking for writing advice. He wore an arch but engaged smirk as he spoke and they nodded. His body language was bohemian and nonchalant. As I held open the door behind me with one foot, waiting for Senior Editor Erik Baker to check me in, I remembered my previous brush with Lorentzen. It was last October (October 3, to be exact, according to my diary). I took an edible and went to Film Forum. I thought I saw Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat—which is less about jazz than I’d hoped—but my diary says that I saw The Devil, Probably. I don’t really remember it (that’s why I don’t go to the movies high anymore). But I do remember that before it started, Lorentzen and a companion sat in the seats in front of me. I could tell it was him by his head, oval and somehow reminding me of a bust of Emperor Nero. He ate popcorn. After the movie was done, the lights went on and I saw his face. According to my diary, “I didn’t talk to him. I was too high.” Here, this time, one foot in and one foot out of the entrance, I wondered if I’d approach him.
Someone else took over door-holding duty and I was freed to face Baker, who frantically clicked around his iPad, checked me in, and then his colleague handed me the latest issue of the magazine. “Do you want the issue before that, too?” he asked. “No, I think I can only carry one,” I said. And he told me how valid that was and to enjoy myself. I passed by Lorentzen. Why didn’t he notice me? I thought. It’s always weird to see someone you admire in public because some part of you assumes they admire you, too, even though they’ve never heard of you. I made my way to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. I took a sip and looked around, first at myself in the mirror behind the bartender, and then at who was seated at the booths. No one I knew. No one I recognized. I moseyed on to the back room, which glowed with soft purple light, surveying as many faces as I could. I tried to walk like I was calmly looking for someone. If you had traced my path in that back room, it probably would have resembled an infinity sign. Everyone seemed closed-off and cliquey. The tone of conversations seemed to be somewhere between LinkedIn-career-update and first-date play-it-coolness.
Catching nobody’s eye, I eventually came back to the bar area and sought refuge in an enclave with a neon-green wrap-around bench, where two girls sat and studiously read their Drifts. I followed suit. Is this really what they want to be doing? Reading at a party? You can read at home. Surely you’re not absorbing what you’re reading. Is it rude of me to interrupt their reading? It shouldn’t be. Why am I reading the masthead? And then FLASH! I thought smoke would come out of the camera like it does in old movies. “I think we nailed the pose,” I said to the girl next to me. She laughed and we got talking. She said she wasn’t a writer but her friend was; he was visiting from out of state and on the way here. And then the other girl joined in and told us about her recent trip to a reading camp where you pay like fifteen-hundred dollars to read on a beautiful property and a chef makes you meals based on the food or vibe of the book you’re reading. You just do that for an entire weekend Upstate. The girl next to me thought it was genuinely cool and took down the name of it from the other girl’s phone, which displayed the program’s Instagram page. I feigned enthusiasm, wondering who the hell would pay that much money to read a book.
I heard the concentration of ambient muttering shift in the space and people started to file into the back room. The readings were about to begin. I said to the two girls that we should probably head in and told them it was very nice to meet you. I got up and was met by a questioning photographer, the guy with the big flash. “I work for BFA and was wondering if I could get your permission and name to use the photos I took of you on our website.” “BFA?” I said. “What’s that?” He said something like, “It’s a photography database.” “I mean, what does it stand for, Bachelor of Fine Arts?” Attempting to banter with the photographer—a new low. “To be honest, I don’t really know. It could mean that.” “What? So you work for them?” “Yeah.” “And you don’t know what it means?” “No.” The whole exchange was becoming embarrassing so I gave him my name and he told me to expect the photos to be up on bfa.com at 9am the next morning. (They showed up a little after 10.) I’m going to be famous, I thought. I am cemented in New York society now because a professional photographer took my picture.2 It’s petty to be attuned to these micro-levels of social-climbing, but my awareness of them is always creeping.
During the readings, I found myself adjacent to a lesbian couple, one of whom was short and had big glasses that made her eyes look like a bug’s eyes and who at one point glowered at me for an uncomfortably long time after I laughed at something that other people, though not many, also laughed at. I forget what it was. In fact, the most memorable thing about the readings is that no one laughed at things they would have laughed at in 2016. Trump things, I mean. I can’t even find the passages now where I thought there might be a laugh but wasn’t, but The Drift seems to have a touch-in-cheek, nihilistic tone where every piece is sort of a little funny, even if some of the pieces read tonight concerned #MeToo (Jamie Hood), natalism (Gaby Del Valle), and love (Stephanie Wambugu). By far the funniest reading was Owen Park’s short story, “Dear Lillington Families,” which starts off with someone who keeps getting calls from a North Carolina zip code telling him—addressing him as “Dear Lillington families”—that the school bus is going to be late. In the case of Wambugu’s short story, I’m now reading it in full and I can’t believe it has this line: “Remember that, Ruth, that you love him.” In high school, I started to doubt my feelings for my girlfriend so I wrote on a little piece of paper “you love her” and stuck it in my wallet. I thought that if I ever considered breaking up with her, I’d read that and it would stop me. It didn’t, and I don’t know where that piece of paper is now. But it doesn’t matter, because everyone here is glimmering. They wear glasses and jewelry and black shirts and have arm tattoos and are gay and have eyes that speak and I want to know them and I feel they want to know me.
The reading portion was mercifully abbreviated, like the main event was hanging out. But I wasn’t long for hanging out. I had been back home with my mom and grandfather in Massachusetts for a week before this, and my social muscles were completely atrophied. I was like china in a bull shop (a bull pen? a bull barn?). I was ready to break at any moment. Like a chihuahua among blood hounds. I was ready to yip at the first sign that someone wanted to smell me, socially speaking. I felt just plain lame. I’ve had this obsession with being cool my whole life. I can’t figure out how to do it, but I feel like I’m always piecing it together. I was never, am not, and will never be cool. Though I can’t help but think hanging out with cool people will make me cool. That’s why I continue to hang out with some people who I can’t stand to be around, because they’re nominally cool. Nominally, as in, they all went to the same MFA programs or grew up in Manhattan together or went to Bennington College, or worse, Oberlin. And then I hang out with people who aren’t cool and I think to myself, You’re too cool to be hanging out with these people. It’s like a constant sort of realignment, of repositioning, of finding the exact place I’m supposed to fit on a spectrum. Probably everyone experiences this in their twenties. But I’m 27. Shouldn’t this kind of searching be dying down by now? I guess it used to be worse. The scary part is what comes after that feeling. Because there’s a possibility that you could be settled in one of those two camps—cool or uncool. And once you’re there, there’s no turning back. Imagine being cool your entire life? That sounds exhausting. Imagine being uncool your entire life? That sounds sad. And yet every time I go to one of these literary things, I think I’ll finally find people who are neither cool nor uncool and who just are. Like me (the thinking goes). And then I realize that, actually, everyone just is; and it’s literally just me who is putting whatever label on them before I’ve even talked to them. Maybe it would be boring to finally know who you are.
And so I gulp down my gin and tonic, which I had actually drank pretty slowly even though I was nervous, placed it down, and made my way to the bar to close out. I happened to pick a spot to summon the bartender right behind where Lorentzen was sitting. I didn’t realize it was him at first. Now he was talking to someone different, a woman, seemingly a friend. They were trying to figure out what the next move was. “Let’s go have a cigarette,” I heard him say to his friend, and they got up. I signed the check. A few moments later, I rushed through the doors into the starchy heat and made like it was me who he’d asked to have a smoke with.
I lit up, leaned against a parking meter (one of the huge ones that you have to input your license plate information into), and texted some friends asking them to roll up. I should have texted them days before. But I thought it would be cooler if I just showed up alone to this thing and made friends, which sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. And this is just one of those painful instances when I don’t. Which I guess that has to be the way it is sometimes.
“How come nobody ever tells me about this stuff?” replied one of them.
“Idk man, no one told me.” They just sent out an email to all subscribers, free and paid.
“I’m supposed to get drinks w my friend but I might stop by.”
“I might leave, it’s so packed.”
“You have to stick through it.”
I have to stick through it.
He sent another text.
“This weather is satanic, isn’t it?”
“It’s so awful. I’m soaked.”
Dickens and George Eliot, for example, aren’t too British. They strike me as more European. I feel like Brit Lit gets more British and less continental after the 1890s. Probably has something to do with waning imperialism—a tight grip on identity before it all goes to shit.
The thumbnail image for this post was taken by the same guy. His name is Maxwell Brown. But he told me to credit BFA. So I’m doing that now. I think I’m supposed to pay to use the image. $85 just to use in a dinky Substack post? I’ll only take it down if they come for me because it’s such a great picture. This is like waiting for the IRS to knock on my door. They should be here any minute.