I re-ran my analyses with new data.*

It turns out that West Campus may, in fact, be a good place to send your kid if you are white.  As may be (and it pains me to admit this) Rio Amerijuana.   But McClatchy still, consistently, beats them all.  Oh, and the surprise?  River City (in West Sac) may also make the cut.

The places you do not want to send your kid if you are white?   Foresthill, Highlands, Encina, or Natomas.  But most especially you do not want them to go to Johnson, Rio Linda, or Mesa Verde.

Interestingly, if you are African-American, you also do not want to send your kid to Johnson or Highlands.   Instead, you want them to go, yes, St. Hope.  Or Valley — Valley is also good.** 

I started looking for another city or two to compare to Sacramento, just for shits and giggles.  I haven’t decided yet on what cities to use, but I did discover something I hadn’t ever really twigged to: Sacramento is the whitest MSA in the state.  You have to get down to some really rather small “urbanized areas” (Santa Rosa, Ventura) before you can find a metro area that’s got more white folks. 

*To wit, I added in the high schools in the following districts: Center, Roseville, Rocklin, Placer, and El Dorado. 

**If you are wondering why there are fewer choices in this list, it is due to missing data: schools don’t report aggregate API scores by race if there are fewer than 100 kids in a category.  The overwhelming — and I do mean overwhelming — majority of schools in this town do not have more than two dozen or so African-American students, never mind 100.

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So…I took a class today for work.  It got me thinking.

I have often wondered about how (and sometimes whether) I should enter into my father’s business.  This is, as you may imagine, a dilemma of oedipal proportions.  It was on my mind as I sat in this class, learning absolutely nothing about politics, absolutely nothing about motivation, or speechmaking, or organizing.

And everything about discounting present values against current returns, as against anticipated costs, whether direct, qualitative, or of an externality-type nature.

It was a “cost-benefit analysis” class, you see. 

When did I turn into my maternal great-grandfather’s child?   The child of the banking, instead of the preaching, side of the family?

Ah, that tightfisted Swissman, the significand of my middle name, I hardly knew ye until now.

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So I was in a class today — which itself is a story for another post — when the guy sitting across from me said: “I know that name.  We went to middle school together.”

Dude.  It has been 22 years since I was Sutter. 

But I guess Sacramento is that kind of town.  For the record, he had a somewhat similar biography to mine: having gone to college elsewhere , he moved back here in 2003 along with all the other hordes priced out of the Bay Area housing market.  He now lives in Natomas and works for the state. 

And no, I didn’t recognize him.  He went elsewhere for high school.

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So, I’ve gone off in the past about B St. in this venue. 

Da Partner and I went to see “Spring Awakening” this weekend.  It was part of the Broadway Series that Music Circus puts on during the “regular” season — i.e., not under the tent. 

We originally went because we want Sacramento to be the kind of place that can put on this show and make money.  Especially given all that horseshit about “Choir Boys,” we figured we better pony up our money and see this one in case they changed their mind.

It was one of the most integrated spaces I have been in in Sacramento in awhile.  It was a half-house, but (and this is a rather key but) no-one left at intermission. 

That’s more than I can say for Fort Worth, where something like a quarter of the audience left during a concert by Madeleine Peyroux.

And this for a show that was, frankly, more pornographic than the last production I saw at ThrillPeddlers.   Which featured full-frontal nudity and a spookily realistic induced heroin trip.   

Good for Music Circus, I say.

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“…those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend [Christmas] making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with the oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.”

And then… we left.  Da Partner and I packed up all our things in his Accord and my Corolla and drove damn near non-stop, 1500 miles to Fort Worth, Texas.  Stopping along the way only to pay homage to an ancestor’s grave in the Confederate cemetery in Winchester, Virginia, and to sit in a floatie in the Warrior River and drink scotch and dry ginger with my aunt and uncle in Pumpkin Center, Alabama. 

I had an orchid once.  A gorgeous brown-and-black phalaenopsis my parents sent me while I was in the hospital with racing staph.  I lovingly took care of that plant in the year that followed, and was proud when it shot forth a new flower-stalk just before our trip South.  A promise of new beginnings out of near-tragedy, or somesuch.

That orchid died on that trip, poisoned by too much sun.  A portent of things to come, perhaps.  Or somesuch. 

In contrast to parties in Boston, parties in Texas took no effort at all.  Or, and which is to say the same thing differently, the costs were much like credit card debt: spent on frivolous, trifling pleasures, one easily forgot the charges that were hidden, put off for the morrow, steadily accumulating interest. 

I partied quite regularly with my workmates, for instance – it demonstrated a certain gemutlikeit.  These parties generally occurred at the house of the chair that hired me.  Did I mention the whole needing to demonstrate a certain bonhomie, a certain cultural capital?  We generally started with cheap beer, moved up to cheap wine, made a half step to better beer along about the time that the karaoke machine was wheeled out (the crowd favorite being “Trapped in the Closet,” followed closely by Pat Benatar) and leapt up to mid-range vodka and dope when the guitars came out for a jam session.  These evenings always involved a pointed discussion of just when the Da Partner and I were going to adopt a rescue pet – perhaps one that need extra care, since we were so clearly loving parents.  Perhaps one such as our host’s cat, the one with the crushed hindquarters, who got around quite fine with his compensatingly muscular forearms.  Or their dog, who had been a puppy-mill bitch and so had had to have breast reduction surgery when they took her in, else her nipples were liable to get caught in the foxtails as she ran about the yard.  Or the dog of a lesbian couple they knew, a dachshaund who lived long enough that the unspoken perils of overbreeding made themselves known: his back collapsed under its own weight, and he lost the use of his hind legs (lovingly, they hooked him up to a kind of chariot in which he could wheel himself around, leaving scuff marks on the baseboards of their McMansion, and a side benefit of which was that it caught the leavings of a now-uncontrollable bowel system).  On alternate evenings, we might be treated to a discussion of some of the benefits of retirement.  Most of which involved buying homes in places like Cambria.  Or London.  Or, as in one case, cultivating a taste for hydroponic pot and getting breast enhancements.  On that particular evening, as I recall, two of those present literally fainted from the strength of the weed.  The 80-year old with the megatits, however, remained standing.  On that same evening, Da Partner and I walked home to avoid the risk of driving drunk.  Our reward for this virtue?  To be hassled by the boys in blue on the way home, incredulous that two adult white men could be up at 2 a.m. and not up to some sort of nefarious activity. 

We threw a party ourselves once or twice, especially once we had moved into the house on College Ave – which had a pleasingly open first-floor flow that lent itself admirably to entertaining.  At our housewarming we had 50 people between my department and the Stonewall Democrats.  We later figured we’d spent something approaching $20/guest on food and liquor, but mostly liquor (do the math: it was a thirsty crowd, even given that many of them brought their own).  There was not a drop left at the end of the night, by which time the food had been so long gone that we all hiked a mile up the street to an all-night Mexican joint, Da Partner so drunk he was talking solely in German to my colleague who had done her dissertation research in Berlin.  At the restaurant, we continued the party with margaritas and chile rellenos until my beloved blacked out face first in his milanesa.  This was a better outcome than occurred for some of our other guests.  One couple left at midnight to have a drink at a local live music venue.  They woke up the next morning not at home, but rather at the office, one of them with dried blood – not his own – on his knuckles.  Piecing things together afterward, they figured they must have been slipped mickeys, but had gotten the better of their assailants. 

I have no reason not to believe that their story was true. 

Recalling the compliment given me once by an Australian, we sometimes offered our services as bar tenders.  This did not start out being a mistake, but it gradually involved increasingly queasy moral judgments.  The best of these events occurred at a political fundraiser, in a home set on the levee overlooking the Trinity and downtown Fort Worth, and decorated with canvas stage backdrops.  So far as we knew, no one puked, no one got arrested on the way home, the undergrads we hired to supervise the front door never touched a drop of booze, and we raised something approaching $2500 for the party.  Not nearly as fun was the night we slung pomegranate martinis at an auction benefit for the Arlington Museum of Art.  By 8:30 not a single piece had fetched more than $1000 and the patrons were telling us to hold the Juicy Juice.  This was fine by me as by that time I had come to realize that it would likely take at least a two days to get rid of the stains to my fingers (I was wrong.  It took closer to a week).  But this was in turn better than the time that Da Partner tended bar on his own at a birthday* at the YWCA (I was out of town at a conference); the guests tended toward the cougarish, and while there was quite a large bump in the joint accounts that month as a result of the tips, that came at not a little risk to our (by law non-) marital virtue.  I heard later that more than one guest tried to unbutton various articles of clothing on the bartender; the ladies had to be forcefully reminded that he was not, in fact, a Chippendale.  This event was, also in its turn, better than the last: the night that we tended bar at the birthday bash of the local film critic (a man whom I only half-jokingly referred to as my 6th cousin).  We should have realized that things were off to a bad start when the bar was stocked only with the kind of off-label booze that comes in plastic jugs.  It did not improve when I found myself serving a drink to one of the professional bartenders in town; this was not a problem because I was worried about his professional scorn toward my skills as a mixologist, it was a problem because the last time we had been in his bar, he wouldn’t serve Da Partner, asked me for a crossword clue (“Hey Professor: What’s a five letter word for pirate treasure?”) and groped himself through his boxer-briefs himself the minute Da Partner left the room (they happend to be all he was wearing at the time; it was that kind of bar) .  Very soon thereafter, I was asked to make a Long Island.  While I turned away immediately to pack our things (as an employee of an ostensibly Christian organization, I could be summarily fired for contributing to the delinquency of a minor) Da Partner told a story about my mother’s first husband, the one who tended bar at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap and when asked to make a Grasshopper told the lady to go to Walgreen’s if she wanted a fucking milkshake.

The parties did not get better.  I don’t know quite when I lost my expectation of possibility, my hope for a better evening.  It might have been the night we first dressed as Mormons for Halloween.  That party featured a host in a roman gladiatorial outfit, one with the kind of short skirt normally seen only at the old Ceasar’s Tahoe.  I heard later that at least one couple – straight, for the record – ended up in the bushes engaged in coitus per os.  

Or it might have been the nights I tried to register Democratic voters at the gay bars.  What was I thinking?  That I was some latter-day Harvey Milk, come to rouse the drag queens and the trannies to their civic redemption in preparation for my own martyrdom?  The only member of the Court that actually responded to my entreaties was the PFLAG mom who showed up to each and every one of her son’s performances as reigning Empress.**  God bless her alcoholic heart, she stuck a Kerry yard sign up her muslin dress and pulled it out of her ass for the grand finale of her own rendition of Marilyn’s “Happy Birthday Mr. President” that, in my considered opinion, trouncingly outstaged her son’s performance of totally forgettable Patty LaBelle number.  I believe it was that same evening that my fellow registrar, on a search for another table for our efforts, walked into the bar’s storage room and interrupted the owner helping one of the go-go boys with his penis-pump. 

We were singularly unsuccessful in our efforts to register voters, as you might imagine.  Between the undocumented immigrants who were picking up a little extra cash in the evenings as escorts, and the ex-felons, we tended not to run into very many people who were even eligible to register, much less interested in hearing why participation in the political system was going to make their lives one whit less miserable than it manifestly was.  Still, we at least got the PFLAG mom to shout “F*ck George Bush” from the stage — surely a victory my any standards.  And were modestly more successful there than by our efforts at the place up the street, which didn’t even have windows.  There we found ourselves in conversation alternately with (a) former students with embarrassing crushes on authority figures, (b) tweaked-out muscle boys higher than angels on a Christmas tree, and (c) the sort of hooker whose figure comes only from heroin or AIDS.  This bar was later made famous as the scene where the jack-booted thugs of the Texas Beverage Alcohol Task Force smashed a patron’s head so hard onto the pool table that he was in the hospital for a week with a concussion.  This particular patron was there to celebrate the birthday of my 6th cousin, the man for whom I once tended bar. 

By that time Da Partner and I were long gone, thankfully. 

The owner of that bar – the first one, not the one with the drug dealing and the skanky hoes – went to his reward about a year before we left.  He was shot in the “back 40” of the lot on which his establishment stood, the same ground on which he regularly sponsored the Post-Pride community fair, complete with wet boxer-short contest.  Whether this was a robbery or a drug deal gone awry was never established.  The cops did not express much interest in the case, and the bar closed due a dispute between the heirs to his estate.

Yeah, that may have been about the time I lost my taste for partying in Fort Worth.  The thought of dying in an empty parking lot, with nothing for miles around but dialysis clinics, all-night Mexican restaurants, and single-room occupancy apartment blocks stopped me cold.  I knew no-one would sing my ballad if that was how I went. 

Those may have been the low points of partying in Fort Worth, but it never got significantly better.  Certainly not the holiday party at the chair of my department’s house (not the one who hired me; rather the one to whom I turned in my letter of resignation).  While the company was impeccable, the food a delight, and the décor unimpeachable, the evening ended badly.  (The evenings always ended badly, as you have surely gathered by this point).  One of the attendees – who lived on the other side of town, and had school-age children – was also the sort of woman who religiously supported the booster club at her high school.  Apparently her daughter’s high school kicked the ass of the local high school quite badly in football.  Some fans, upon seeing the incriminating bumper sticker affixed to her car, used their bazooka to launch a pumpkin through the rear window of her minivan.   She could not drive home that evening; not because she was drunk, mind you.  But because there were glass shards imbedded in her steering wheel.  Again, not the worst outcome of the evening, however.  Another attendee was driven home by a member of the junior faculty, someone in whose hiring decision he had been instrumental.  By her telling, he made a pass at her on the way home.  By his telling, he was too drunk to do anything. 

Personally, I am inclined to agree with his wife, and believe him. 

However, I am in no real position to judge the merits of the matter, as we had long since left that party to attend another.  The prospect of doing shots with Thomas Kinkade’s brother, a woman in a Santa suit, and someone whose academic claim to fame rested largely on publishing an article about how her then-(married) boyfriend would brag with his friends about how many fat girls he could ride like a scooter, was not, as it happens, my idea of a good time.

So we went elsewhere.  The prospects did not improve.  The prospects never improved, no matter where we went.  That was the point of Texas, and it took me at least three years to learn the lesson.

This last party was in a house so newly sprung from the raw prairie that you could see the fences of the one-story ranch-styles on the other side of the as-yet unsold cul-de-sac onto which our hosts’ house backed.  The barely-cured concrete of the foundation slabs would have reflected the moonlight quite nicely – were it not for the glare of the klieg lights from the high school football stadium.  Still, the PVC pipes strung regularly as fence-stakes across the foreground made the back-porch bulbs of the houses across the way twinkle, almost, as might the lights of passing cars when seen through the railing of a freeway. 

This is the low to which I had sunk.  Looking for beauty in a half-built white-flight suburb. 

It was a party among friends.  I could speak freely there, even, to some extent, about the horror of having left a party at which I could not speak freely. But as I finally, finally, discerned, that did not erase the former horror.  Nor, and this most importantly, did it erase the awfulness of present circumstances.

One of the hosts was an architect.  As far as I could tell her contribution to the décor of her domestic arrangements consisted of carpeting all of the public rooms in white.  The last person I knew who carpeted her home in white was my English teacher, senior year of high school, a woman more familiarly known as the Wicked Witch of the West, but whom I give the primary credit for making me write, just enough so that I managed to pass my first quarter at Stanford with my dignity (though not my GPA) intact.

After 4 years of living in Texas, I had finally come to expect no such reprieve from that evening.  In fact, I expected nothing, not even to make it home without having to justify my sobriety to an officer of the law.  I expected only what I received, which was a pyrothecnics display from the burning plastic lawn furniture that fell into the firepit, late in the evening when the wind kicked up.

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasions and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” 

*The celebrant appeared at another party, the last one I attended while still within the boundaries of the state, in a costume involving burnt cork. 

**Her full title was Iwanna Mann Winchester, Empress XXVI of the Imperial Court de’ Fort Worth-Arlington.  I can’t figure out why, precisely, that title always makes me crack a smile.  It’s not just the “de” – as purely superfluous as Tess Darby’s “d’” – and it’s not even the extraneous apostrophe.  It’s the Fort Worth-Arlington.  Because nothing says imperial ambition as claiming the town made up of the bits that neither Fort Worth nor Dallas took the time or the energy to incorporate, and whose only real claim to fame – besides, of course, its Art Museum, housed in a former J. C. Penney store and open only on the weekends – is as the home of the Rangers, America’s own best example of corporate welfare.  The current holder of the title, in case you were wondering, is Paige Daniels, “The White Diamond, Blue Rose, Platinum & Crystal Celestial Fairy Empress.”

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I love it when statistics confirm my prejudices.

So…as an indirect result of trying to grapple with the whole St. Hope thing, I’ve been tooling around on the state Dept. of Education’s website.  Turns out they have boo-coo data on “achievement” and “yearly progress,” almost certainly to satisfy the mania of pathetic people like me.  It’s kinda surprising what all they make available: the aggregated test scores for an entire school, the test scores broken down by racial group (but only if there are at least 100 people in that group), the ethnic/racial breakdown of the school population, the educational attainment of the parents, the proportion of the school in the federally-subsidized free-or-reduced-price lunch program, on and on.  It’s like a data junkie’s wet dream.

Anywho, being a sociologist and all, I gathered up some of this data.  I was curious, see, to follow up on a conversation to which I was witness on Halloween night, on that perennial bugbear of people with children of a certain age, to wit, “school quality.”

What I found didn’t precisely engage the question of whether some schools are better than others.   But it did engage a closely-related question, namely the usual proxy people use as their measure of school quality, to wit, “percent minority.” 

What I found didn’t surprise me at all, though it might surprise others.  Using data for 11 years (1999-2009) for 30-odd high schools*, I ran a little regression predicting the Academic Performance Index scores for white students, as determined by (a) the percent of parents (of whatever race) with a BA or higher, (b) the year (because scores have been trending up over time everywhere), and (c) the proportion of the school that was white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian.**

You know what I found, right?

White API scores go up when you have more Asians.

They go up when you have more Hispanics.

It doesn’t matter if you have more African-Americans (there is no statistically significant effect).

But they go down when you have more white people.

The punchline?  If you are white, and you want your kid to do well in school?  Go to college yourself, read to them when they’re little, have lots of books in the house, make a decent living, help them with their homework, have some friends around that you think might serve as potential role-models (and babysitters).

And then send their ass to McClatchy. 

Whatever you do, don’t send them to Foothill, or Bella Vista, or even Mira Loma.  And no, don’t send them to West Campus (sorry!  Too bad, so sad, too white).  But the next time you read an article in Sacramento Magazine about “great schools?”  Help your child cut out the pretty pictures to use as a collage for their next school project.  And then teach them how to build a fire with what’s left.

*This included every regular high school (i.e., not the continuation or adult-ed type joints) in the following districts: Sac City, Elk Grove, Folsom-Cordova, San Juan, Grant/Twin Rivers, Natomas, and Washington.

** God love California.  They break down the Asian population three ways: Asian, Pacific Islander, and Filipino.  For no particularly good reason except that the categories each tended to be pretty small, I combined them.  In case you are curious, the only places that have enough kids to report API scores for the different A/PI/F subgroups are in the Elk Grove district.

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Lights were on tonight at the old house on the corner of 22nd and H.

Wonder if that means someone’s finally moved back in?

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“And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed authors who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guadalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kinds of parties.”  (J. Didion.  “Goodbye To All That”)

Perhaps it had to do with being in my twenties, but parties in Cambridge were…effortful in the best sense of the word.  They involved planning, a narrative (both pre- and post-hoc), a certain frisson of risk.  They were entrepreneurial; sparked by one (or two) person’s idea for a good time, and then fanned into a collaborative social fireworks display by friends, friends-of-friends, colleagues, exes, and sometimes just people off the street.

There was, for instance, the progressive party I attended with two friends from college (the Poetess and the Engineer): the evening started with a drink at their apartment after work, then moved upstairs to the top floor of their triple-decker.  The place was packed with HLS and HBS students.  Between which I am sure there might be drawn meaningful distinctions, though those distinctions were not on that particular evening discernable.  There I learned two valuable lessons: that B-school types are committed to purchasing only the best booze (Chopin vodka, for instance) but don’t necessarily know how to drink it (e.g., on that evening, in warm shots.  I took this to be primarily a method by which to dull the pain of an absent soul.  When I asked for ice I was told they had run out.  Who throws a party and runs out of ice, I ask you?  People that are used to having other people take care of the petty details of life).  I also learned that Californians recognize, appreciate, and are extremely jealous of guacamole – as in, when asked why there is a multi-ethnic circle hovering around a tiny bowl, scarfing down tortilla chips slathered in green paste, the reply one gives is something along the lines of “Nothing that would interest you.  Trust me!  Go away.”  Bored (and full of guacamole) we went to the second event of the evening, thrown by someone who maintained a “party people” list onto which the Poetess’s e-mail address had somehow managed to find itself.  This was in Somerville, in the far reaches of Davis Square up near the Medford line.  In a house with a host of bizarro-modernist touches, including indoor-outdoor patio stone flagging that reached halfway into the living room and a staircase that ended in a landing fully three feet off the front hallway floor.  It was the first time I had been to a party where the wet bar in the living room was put to good use.  A wet bar, mind you, with the kind of painted mirror at the back that one sees only in 60s/70s ranch-style architecture and bowling alleys; this particular one came with the inscription “Ben-Eve’s Beauty Salon.”  We put that bar to good use, watching our host sacrifice an army of key limes in the service of home-made margaritas.  From there my two friends and I cabbed it to our next destination, a party thrown by some recent graduates of the College, with the theme of Pimps and Hos.  This being the age of Clintonian post-PC irony, crass appropriations of low culture by high status individuals was not considered déclassé.  Rather it was a knowing but risky strategy by which upper-middle class (and in some cases just plain upper-class) persons of color could play Amos & Andy for a few hours.  For reasons I have never quite understood – though it may have been as simple as the fact that I and my friends were not in costume – we were denied entrance.  Miffed, we walked up the hill to yet another party, this time thrown by people we didn’t even really know – they were, I gather, friends of lab-mates of the Engineer, or somesuch.  From a combination of (a) pique at having been told for the one and only time in my life to wait behind the velvet rope at a party, and (b) the kind of frustration that comes with attending a series of parties in which one can literally smell the hormones in the air but at which absolutely no-one of the appropriate gender and sexuality is available for, well, anyway, I did what any sane person would do.  I told those assembled around the bar to make way for someone who knew what they were doing, mixed those present decent martinis, and grabbed a bottle of unsupervised Balvenie Doublewood and a pack of Dunhills and sat in the postage-stamp yard with the Poetess and the Engineer.  We spent the evening sipping our hard liquor and talking about… who knows?  Who cares, even?  It was the pleasure of their company that made the whole evening memorable, after all.  And my amusement in the fact that psych grad students have far better taste in liquor than the haute-bourgeoisie-in-training of HBS was, in some sense, merely a footnote.  The fact that that the host of the party (an Australian, this being an important detail) was impressed that my martini gave him the worst hangover in his life was merely a footnote to a footnote.  The fact that that particular Australian later went on to win a MacArthur grant is a sugar-rim garnish to a periodista cocktail. 

Or there was the summer I nearly got kicked out of graduate school.  Largely because I spent too much time throwing a 6-week series of pre-clubbing cocktail parties, complete with individual themes (gin, whiskey, tequila, vodka, bourbon, rum) and featured drinks (martinis and old fashioneds, palomas and manhattans and – because this was the late 90s, before Carrie Bradshaw and Company ruined it for everybody – mojitos and cosmopolitans).  Every evening meant I had an excuse to show off my absurd sublet, complete with cat and an astonishing collection of VCR tapes of essentially every 80s sitcom, from Wonder Woman to Remington Steele.  Every evening meant a different crowd: it was as if I had finally become cool, running a party where everyone else – or at least anyone I could imagine wanting to hang out with – wanted to be.  These were parties where friends from high school learned for the first time what it was like to be objectified, where the current boyfriends of exes brought their provincial siblings to play with the big kids in the big city, where guests threw down some cash or brought a bottle to contribute to the fun and where the bottles they brought (Maker’s Mark, Belvedere) were always ones meant to be consumed in a proper state of Veblenesque status-signaling for those of us desperate to acquire the codes.  These were parties where mean, knowing things were said in jest.  The sort of jest that Sontag tried to analyze and in so doing took all the fun out of camp.  Parties where at least one guest got so drunk they left their phone number in a series of Post-Its on the lintel, in a gesture so lacking in subtlety and panache that the intended decline to collect the memo at the end of the evening.  Parties whose entre-acte consisted of an only-somewhat sobering 20 minutes of brisk staggering down Mass Ave. to Cambridge’s only gay bar even – no, especially – on the one evening that a hurricane rolled through town.  Whose comedic interlude consisted of watching the host try to extract cash from the ATM machine while so drunk that the PIN code he fruitlessly punched in three times was for his debit card, and not for the Discover card he had accidently inserted.  Parties to which, magically, the cops were never called, and enough EANABS were provided that hangovers struck only the unwise, and somehow, someway, the dishes were always done by the end of the evening. 

Or there was the party I threw without first asking my roommate’s permission.  I cleared it with the landlord of course, being no fool.  That I neglected to tell my roommate put me in squarely in the category of “doofus.”  What tipped the balance in favor of “asshole” was that I had to be late to my own party because of some work on my dissertation.  And so in fact the people who showed up first to the party were an ex of mine and his then-boyfriend – whom I had called, asked that they drop by my office, lent my key to, all so that they could greet the first guests in my absence, and (a fact which I swear did not occur to me until after the fact) break the news to my roommate that his quiet evening of “Real World: Tijuana” was about to be interrupted by two dozen Harvard PhD students.  This was not my proudest hour in terms of social skills, it is true. 

Or the party I went to in Dorchester.  Where I gave what I hold to this day was my best monologue performance (the final speech in Pirandello’s “The Man with the Flower in his Mouth”; one that I reinterpreted as a piece on the post-AIDS disquietude of bathroom cruising) at an event where attendance required the delivery of such set pieces.  Most of the guests brought Kavafy or Whitman.  My offering, I am proud to say, was the only one to be delivered memorized (thank you Sonja Memering!).  An event where one guest was overheard to remark “I believe this is the first time I’ve ever been south of Columbus Avenue!” and where even the rejoinder “Surely that’s not true.  Haven’t you’ve been to the Cape?” was answered with “No.  I always summer on Block Island.”  An even where the one guest foolish enough to arrived unencumbered with liquor (yours truly) was affirmatively encouraged not to go to the neighborhood packie, and when this particular guest chose not to abide by this advice, was tailed by another guest to make sure that he wasn’t…oh, I don’t know, jumped.  Or something.  And, to be fair, the liquor store around the question offered Meyer’s Dark as its highest-end product, and while there were two gentlemen behind the counter, it was clear that only one was there to handle the cash (he was seated behind the register) while the other was there to handle the heat (he was seated with a rifle across his lap). 

Or all the parties I went to in the South End.  The one in the garret apartment where the host sang all the lyrics of “Part of Your World” to a friend of mine undrugged, undragged, and without a trace of irony (to this day I cannot make head nor tail of that evening).  The Halloween bash in the recently renovated townhouse where the architect-owner decided he preferred high ceilings to a second story (the cabinets in his kitchen were vertiginous, reached by a library ladder) and who outfitted his garden-level mother-in-law with a gang shower.  The one in the soon-to-be-renovated triple decker where all of the guests were invited to take home a piece of furniture, some wainscoting, a fixture – anything to rid the place of what otherwise was going to be demolished on the morrow.  Thinking I was getting ahead in this little game I chose a pretty little unframed primitive oil of Parkman Bandstand in Boston Common.  It happened to be covering a hole in the wall through which I could place my head and look, two stories down, at the junkies and whores on Mass Ave.  I left that painting with my roommate as an apology for my shitty behavior during our tenure together; I flatter myself sometimes that it is what inspired him to apply to architecture school. 

“You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.”

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