and then only half a glass—I felt I
owed it to myself and to the guests
who’d sat politely through the reading
—and to everyone in every
college and university 20th Century
American Literature class
throughout history—to get drunk
off my ass, just for the literary
symmetry of it, just for the laughs
and the high-society flap that would
surely ensue. I stood there outwardly
sober, but within I was disorderly
with the desire to be—to the very
rowdy, raunchy, reckless, and
innocent fiction of it—utterly true.
—Commodore Hotel, 2008
Todd Boss is the poet laureate of Nina’s Café on Cathedral Hill, which was named for the madame who once ran a brothel there. Todd doesn’t drink gin unless F. Scott or Nina is buying.