160 years. What a whole education might do for you. Think about looking the same for the last 140 years. Witnessing everything, forgetting nothing, and having to listen to the fads and fantasies of all the intellectual heavyweights of the day.

Longevity is a curse. Why? Because all the arguments that purport to be new and salient are old and yellow. I heard MacClellan argue for peace with honor, Woodrow Wilson proclaim a new age of international responsibility and the inevitability of improvement in the basic human condition. I heard FDR orate about the end of inequality. I watched Stalin use the principle of equality to grind everyone into dust.

Throughout, I was just an ageless pretty face. I was Dorothy Parker’s boy toy at the Algonquin round table. Had something to say but couldn’t get a word in edgewise. New York intellectuals are unquestionably the stupidest creatures on the face of the earth. Only a spectacularly successful and free society can produce and tolerate such utter nonsense. I learned to hold them and the Three Stooges in the same light. Repetitive routines that are supposed to be brilliant but aren’t unless you’re the moron audience for which they’re intended. What can you do?

So I waited. Never cared for Rita Hayworth or Grace Kelly. Always knew they’d die before their time. You get a feel for these things. Thought maybe Katharine Hepburn was the ticket, but she became a parody of herself, weighed down by that accent and all those Oscars. Talked to Greta Garbo once. Learned she wanted to be alone because she had nothing to say.

Have I mentioned the artists? Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Leroy Neiman Marcus, all of them. Drunks and whoremasters and queers and poseurs. They never cared to put art back together again. They were like kids who shredded the works of alarm clocks and left them lying on the floor for daddy to deal with. Only daddy had left long ago.

Yeah. Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The first a small man with a big talent. The second a big man with a big talent and a death wish. But neither with a big brain to accompany the talent. And then came Thomas Wolfe, a tall man with a big talent and nothing to say, Faulkner a drunk man with a big talent and said it all the first time, and then all the pretenders like Mailer and Roth and Styron. Somewhere in there were some originals, but originals always burn out early. Why there’s less than a hundred thousand words of Nathanael West, and Malcolm Lowry actually used his one novel to finish drinking himself to death.

It gets lonely. When all you are is a pretty face in proximity. “Hey, Dorian,” they say. “Get me another drink.” Evelyn Waugh actually spoke to me once. He said, “I’d ask you for another drink, but I can see you wouldn’t get it for me. Congratulations.”

And I’ve been to the wars. Which is partly how I can parse the artists and writers. Just old enough to have seen the final chess match of Grant taking Richmond. Chess measured in how few thousands of dead each pawn capture entails. Why HE drank. And I saw part of Sherman’s March too. Why I’ve affected his beard since then. The only general I’ve known who hated every minute, every death, of his victories.

And World War I. And World War II. Pretense aside, I was alongside my putative grandfather and my putative father as they suffered and feared and nerved themselves up for impossible challenges. Longevity. If you asked them today, they might have some memory of an infant, a little boy, an adolescent… But it would be a fuzzy recollection. What they do remember in detail is the grown up pretty boy who resisted their notions of how you’re supposed to be.

Because I’ve been here for many ages. And the truest thing about it all is that I have the imagination most people lack. Because I’ve been there. Pretty boy and all.