The After Party

The oligarchangels gathered in the vestibule rang every apartment until someone buzzed them in. Our own doors we wouldn’t dare open to well dressed men grinning in the peephole, so they set up carousing in our lobby, night and day, masquerading as doormen, in smart, brocaded liveries, spiriting us under great umbrellas to taxis and the neighboring deli for morning hard rolls and coffee, accepting packages we had hitherto, not living in a doorman building, oh rustic reader, so long been wary to order—consumer electronics, controlled substances, a shattered samovar with the engraving To A. Chekhov, Savage, a bottle of limited-run All In Podcast tequila with illuminated, rechargeable collectors’ presentation box—keeping the vestibule clear of drunks and beggars, recording the names and studying the IDs of our visitors, and even barring those of us residents arriving home late, intoxicated, obstreperous, with a violent gleam in our eyes, until we’d walked it off, and those of us on a diet when we grossly exceeded our target weight, and preventing us darting back inside in suit and tie, suddenly, as happens, unable to face the day, from succumbing to our cowardice, and so on, until our own sordid apartments came indeed to seem the inaccessible heaven they had perhaps been the while, unappreciated, dens of family values and touching private liberties, and in due course I too complained, with my neighbors, of the perpetual nightclub atmosphere in our own lobby, to which we were no longer except by chance or endless finagling admitted, and certainly never confessing that it was I who had, in my unthinking haste, buzzed their entry, but who’s to say I was the only one, or that it was on my buzz, anyway, that they got in.

Gentle Bubbler, I recommend this conversation in BOMB Magazine between myself and marvelous writer Kate Reed Petty.