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		1980-2003: Glitz Attacks With Bret and Jay in 1987 The Jazz Age: the sequel. You had to be there, but then again, you were. You were there, in your $400 topcoat, outside Odeon, the World Trade Center glittering over your shoulder like twin East Eggs. Out of a swell college, you’d come to define your era in the Big City. You were an icon, like Gatsby and Holden C., who also wore a (rumpled) winter coat on his book jacket. Your brain was stamped with the bootheel of marching Bolivian soldiers. You got to sleep with models. So what if the eighties weren’t the twenties the way everyone pretended? How many writers had it as good as you, your picture in the paper, in a cab to MK and Studio after the last shrimp roll at Indochine? Afterward, there were crack-ups, failures. No one goes to Odeon anymore, the WTC’s been knocked out of the sky. Sometimes you hear snickers. Still, you had your fun, and Bright Lights, dim swagger and all, will always be a better book than Bonfire of the Vanities. But you knew that. "You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch, F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up." — Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City.
Photo: Dafydd Jones