Golden Gatecrashers

We wound up at a house party last night held in a four-story post-industrial bachelor pad that must have metastisized off of Los Angeles at some point and bubbled up to the top of a hill in Pacific Heights. The downstairs living room, appropirated as a dance hall, had a pool running down its length with a thirty-foot movie screen set into the wall above. We never got concrete information about whose hospitatlity we were abusing. Having slipped past a preoccuppied bouncer with the square shoulders and distant looks of People Who Know Where They Are Going, we had to collect information discretely. Rumors circulated that this used to be mayor Gavin Newsom's house, that the summer sublet was costing its inhabitatns fifteen thousand dollars a month, and that pulling on one of the wall sconces triggered a secret door. When pressed, we would claim nebulous connections to "Steve" and mutter about a gallery opening. Thrilling, but being well-dressed and packed in among hundreds of other guests, we were never in any serious danger of ejection. Later, I was drafted to carry a keg by someone in a hat who seemed to be in charge. It could well have been Steve.