“‘Lifeboat Number Thirteen.’”

“Honey, we love you but you are getting into such deep … trouble here.” (Every metaphor about the shipwreck seemed applicable and loaded, but applicable to what … ? Our crew had enjoyed such clear sailing so far.)

“And who comes to it, your wreck-fest? Who has time, of a busy Thursday evening in Manahatta?”

“Three Wharton investment bankers, a sweet old gay archivist from the New York Public Library, one crew member from the America’s Cup winner last year who teaches girls’ gym at the Dalton School, and two ancient English women who lost an aunt on it and are as polite and frumpy and dentally deformed as most Brit royalty. Those are the regulars.”

“What, do you guys end meetings by holding hands and singing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’? You actually have them up here?” She looked around. I understood then—Angie was jealous.

Of a shipwreck. 1912.

Street Crime Hurts Everyone

ne night, with me carrying the “centerpiece” from a party, we waded home from Studio 5-. It was either Bianca’s birthday bash for Liza, or vice versa, or Halston’s for Truman’s, I forget. They blurred. Even during the parties. So much beautiful blurring of so much immediate drug-bright beauty. We’d later say, “If you think you remember a party, you probably weren’t at that one.”

Tonight our Mr. Gustafson, the sadistic imp, had convinced me to filch this table arrangement. Because there were magnolias in it. I’ve always hated the sight of dignified matrons leaving some bash after pulling each others’ hair to snag a $7.98 “floral spray.” As usual I lacked the strength to out-argue Robert, and so—sweet smells drifting up from waxy blooms—I carried forth this Carmen Miranda clot of leaves. Like so much else of that decade, it’d been spray-painted gold.

Talking, I was a little drunk or coked up or both. Robert’s high was “natural” as we window-shopped, crunching through minor snow, gossiping the whole thirty blocks. We slowly began to feel followed. I said, “‘Hushed are the streets of many peopled Thebes.’ Robbie, is there an echo out here or have you attracted further admirers?” He ignored me, and we went on discussing Edvard Munch’s erotic oddities. Probably our first mistake.

We were set upon by brigands; they wore do-rags, their lower faces smothered behind railroad bandannas. Two weedy kids, maybe fourteen—smaller, sourer, tighter-wound than we. If we lived “hungry,” they looked hungry.

Through magnolias’ perfume, I seemed to smell burned electrical wiring. My head cleared quick. I passed the flower arrangement to Robert. He was so perplexed, he took it. In my disoriented state, saving these flowers seemed the goal, along with doing something heroic for Robert.

“Quick, take off!” Having accepted flowers, he, confused, made two steps forward. They were on him.

Kids’ being so whip-thin only made their single huge silver gun—held high and trembling at arm’s length—appear cartoon-gigantic. They slowly explained that this was a real gun. And, in it, real bullets.