I’m not exactly in the mood to baby-sit my inner child, but it’s Christmas Eve and on the tree the little stars are a-twinkle and at its feet the gifts demand I recall how I used to have my eyes open wide and my mouth into an “O” when I unwrapped each gift.

And anyway, I’ve long stopped being a child, since I was orphaned first by my father in 1989 and then by my mother in 2015, oh and by my lola, with whom I was ever the grandchild—always at her side, ever hungry for her stories and her company—when she died at some point in the early aughties.

Christmas is for children and I was never really a child, having grown up between the covers of books no child should ever be allowed to read, in whose pages I learned the ways of the world, like sex and depravity from a Harold Robbins paperback, to which I jumped, and just as soon adulted, from the last of the Wizard of Oz books when I was maybe six or seven or eight. Besides, I was bored in childhood. I spent it all wanting to be a grownup, wanting to have hair in my armpits and pimples on my face, wanting to drink and smoke and “be merry,” not in the manner of a Hallmark Christmas card but, you know, in the haze of cigarette smoke and the inebriating atmosphere of a club like Studio 54 in New York.

If I had any regrets, not that I have any, it’s that I was born too late for Studio 54. No club had been crazier before or since, except maybe back in the day of the Roman and Greek hedonists.

I was a child of the ‘70s, though I would not be legal for drinks until over a decade later. Boring as my childhood was, on the page it was hot and happening and wild and wonderful, replete with naked Santas on the dance floor.

In grade school, I might have sought refuge among the trees in a secluded part of the campus, away from kids my age, most of whom I found boring and with whom I was mostly shy and awkward, but perched on a branch of a lush tree, hidden from sight, with my books and magazines, and mostly in the exclusive club of my imagination, I was in the company of Andy Warhol and Diana Vreeland or even Elizabeth Taylor “be-bopping with gay porn stars,” according to Vanity Fair, when she threw what would go down in history as Studio 54’s wildest party ever.

The key of the success of Studio 54 is that it’s a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor. —Andy Warhol

Look, drunk and drugged and passed out on the sofa is some socialite-who-must-not-be-named just as Bianca Jagger arrives atop a white horse being led by a man naked but for some glitter all over his body! Look, only 11 years old, there’s Brooke Shields right inside the DJ’s booth and, just a year or two older, Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, later seen with her! (Who let these children out, though I wish it were my mother!) Look there, that’s Alec Baldwin, then a busboy, in supertiny shorts and nothing else, and across the dance floor, there’s Michael Jackson moonwalking and Liza Minnelli and Diana Ross diva-dancing on couches! In my short pants, and with barely any facial hair, I was in my head partying with Grace Jones and John Travolta, too, doing “Moves like Jagger,” though the song came out decades later to be a hit among a generation who never really quite saw how Mick Jagger moved. But where is Truman Capote, probably down in the wild, wild basement or the VIP balcony doing serious damage to his liver, still mourning the loss of his bestie Babe Paley and the rest of the New York swans.  

Young as I was, and rather introverted and antisocial, except with the adults around me, the older, the more relatable—sometimes at the risk of running into pedophiles!—my idea of fun was in places like Studio 54, in which the guest of honor was the devil of the disco, to whom, you must sell your soul, if you wanted real fun. Check your virtues at the door, lest the famous doorman Marc Benecke, more like the quintessential door bitch, only 19 back in 1977, keep you out, although chances are, looking you up and down, he would keep you out, like he did the likes of Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, and Frank Sinatra.

Ah, the parties of yore—and I’m glad, though I live decades and thousands of kilometers away from Studio 54, that I’ve had my share of wild nights in places like Giraffe in Manila or CBGB in New York, where, too, as Diana Vreeland used to say, “A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical.”

Now, with a pandemic not quite done with us yet, with Omicron swooping in like a party pooper, a wild night in the club is a dream again that, at my age, in these youth-obsessed times, might be an impossible dream by the time this nightmare is over. (But how old was the 1903-born editrix Diana Vreeland when she used to hang out at Studio 54? And “Disco Sally,” the lawyer, was 77 when she swept the club by storm.)

But for now (or for God knows how long), the holidays, unless you dare, unless you’re devil-may-care, are silent night, holy night—and Christmas is for children, to which your inner child is invited.

I wish I never grew up.