I called it “Cheever country,” but the name didn’t take. It didn’t need to. The close friends I invited to my bachelor party were flexible on the location, but honest: They didn’t want to fly across the country, and they wanted to relax. Some research turned out a 16,000 square foot mansion, listed as a “castle in the forest,” in Connecticut. This was a place people left when they want on vacation. Isolated, unexpected, completely alien to the way we usually lived.
Well, we liked it, and we got lucky. Two days earlier and we’d have been smothered by Canadian wildfire smoke. One day later and we’d have been nudged inside by humid weather. A fresh rain cooled it down to 70 degrees, too cold in the evening for mosquitos to get cocky. It was easy to spend time outside, playing poker and reading the three copies of Ben Terris’s “The Big Break” that three of us had brought up independently.
The house itself? Big, obviously, and strange in ways unique even to the Air Bnb house. The basement, which slept four people, was fully furnished but unfinished. Half the floorspace went to a small mini-golf course and a ping pong table. A drawing room on the first floor had a cabinet full of tiaras. A television in a master bedroom still had protective foam on it, the stuff you peel off once your oily fingers aren’t mounting the thing anymore. Tags still hung on brand-new furniture, next to a wood-carved range hood.
I was going to be in a nostalgic mood anyway, so I liked it for a reason the host couldn’t have predicted. The strangest place I lived in D.C., a group house since converted into condos, had such strangely-chosen decor, like antique Chinese screens and haunted family photos, that we could host a Halloween party with one short prep night. (Coffin brought in to hold drink mixers, spiderwebs everywhere, fake blood on mirrors.) We hosted a party so good that I, dressed as a zombie stockbroker (boring!) and a friend dressed as the Andy Warhol banana on the first Velvet Underground cover (his fiancé was Nico) had to repeatedly throw out crashers. Days later, I sat on the tiny front porch with a wrought iron enclosure and drank coffee as two neighborhood kids smashed the lightbulbs in the yard — then, looking straight out me, denied that they’d done so. The house was sold out from under us in six months, but time passed slower, and it felt like we had a year in our little gothic mansion.
It was good to catch up. I needed it after a long week complicated by the pork producers’ convention in Des Moines. Only a few of the people flying in this week were there for Mike Pence. Hundreds more had rented rooms and cars so they could network and grow their shares of the pork industry. They packed the city like reporters only do for a few days around the Iowa caucus. Politics seems like a niche interest in an off-year, when you realize how little space the players take up.
So, we traveled in Lyfts and Ubers, which led to my favorite moment of the week. I had left Pence’s stop at a Waukee location at Pizza Ranch, and was riding to my hotel. The driver asked what the police presence was for; I said it was for Pence. He was colorfully unimpressed, then he started talking about how useless the whole political class seemed.
“Why don’t they at least pass an infrastructure bill?” he asked.
“That actually did pass,” he said.
He processed this instantly. “Explains why there’s so much construction.”
Had some decent conversations in Pennsylvania, too, with extremely moderate, Biden-voting Democrats showing up to meet Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to check whether he could be an insurance policy against Biden’s age. When I asked where Kamala Harris fit into this, the answer helped me understand what Pence was doing: They hadn’t heard of anything she’d done since getting elected. Many normal people, the ones too busy to talk constantly about politics, don’t necessarily know who these people are, but they’ll vote out of a sense of obligation.
Fairly light week, though. Digging in:
The Best Thing I Read: Finished just two books: “The Big Break” by Ben Terris and “Boys Weekend” by Mattie Lubchansky. It’s a pleasure to read Ben at length, in a study of a small group of grasping D.C. operatives that’s told in profiles and vignettes. Lubchansky’s wrote some of the funniest modern comics I’ve ever seen, but “Boys Weekend” is on a different register, putting Sammie, the author’s surrogate, on a journey into a libertarian hedonism paradise in a seasteading city.
Both recommended.
The Best Thing I Saw: Just one movie, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” seem on a date with my fiancé after realizing I had just one night at home all week. The first wave of critics over-rated this — the animation is spellbinding, even when one of the many plot threads drags. Within the first seven minutes, a Vulture from an alternate reality still living through the Renaissance crashes into a less-weird world, and gets into a fight at the Guggenheim. This Vulture looks just like a Da Vinci drawing, and when he fights, instead of “biff!” and “bang” onomatopoeia, we see equations fly off of him. Hard not to like the movie after that.
The Best Thing I Heard: Paul Schrader’s conversation with Marc Maron. Exhausting week, great way to end it.