Young Men on Fire by Howard Hunt

Author:Howard Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE POETRY OF WAR

By the time the party is out in the river, Baxter has ponied up cash for not one but two rounds of drinks and had the pleasure of hearing the lower-deck DJ spin the Vasquez mix of “Creep.” There are two DJs on the main and lower decks, but the main attraction appears to be some kind of live act on deck one. There’s a drum kit on a porta-stage, flanked by two Russian Sovtek Marshall stack—style amplifiers draped in glittery tinsel, the size of which suggests that the live act will be significantly louder than the already loud techno blasting across the East River from two floors of boat.

Vasquez’s “Creep” deploys the big distorted E chord from the Radiohead breakout single, plus bizarre cuts of Monica Lewinsky chattering away to Baxter’s answering machine. Baxter is gallantly low-key on the subject of Lewinsky, but the truth of the matter is that the whole affair was handled badly. You (and he) didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that Monica had sought out fame by association and got the real thing by mistake, and that this real-thing fame was the American Dream as Ancient Mariner’s albatross: 100-percent smiling deference from the highest order of Manhattan social life, except you couldn’t chitchat to Monica about her work as you tend to do with celebrities, because Monica’s work was off the public record. Monica’s work had been done. Monica had no chitchat-worthy work to speak of. All she had was this albatross, which you weren’t allowed to look at or mention, and it was equal parts fascinating and heartbreaking to watch her circulate at parties, trying to pass herself off as a regular celebrity. Baxter had posted the very MP3 files now sampled by Vasquez in the fascination stage of their brief liaison. Lewinsky had apparently been charmed by Baxter’s ability to see “the real Monica” within the morass of skewed perception and smiling uptown deference, and rewarded him with heartbreaking candor in the form of many answering machine messages (playing right now, in fact) in which it becomes quickly evident that she’s having a rough time in Manhattan and could use a friend real bad.

Unlike Big Guy, who has taken his shirt off and gone native and is wowing the ladies with dancefloor verve, Baxter plays the game with large amounts of self-loathing. “Oh, you’re an angel!” is symptomatic of this. Baxter will go to a party and use this exact same line on every woman present, just to see what happens. It’s like he’s courting rejection. Lewinsky withstanding, he’s used “Oh, you’re an angel!” on an Easton Ellis list of supermodels and actresses, engaging them all in conversation with the withering exception of Mira Sorvino. His original take on Lewinsky was that she got what she deserved, and, along with the fact that they were too good not to post, the MP3 files have a kind of Smithsonian virtue in that they provide an oral history of an oral history, so to speak.

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