The greatest party ever was the Welcome Home Dick Queen party. It was held at the height of summer, a long time ago now, two weeks after Dick Queen, who was all of 28 years old at the time, was released by the wild-eyed Iranians who had kidnapped him and 65 other Americans in November 1979. The Dick Queen party was everything you could ever want in a party—slightly too much to drink, melodramatic but harmless fistfights, people making out in cars and closets, a guy driving a car onto a porch, a cop arriving to break it up but staying and having a beer and eventually walking away laughing, and it didn’t end until two days later. The only thing it was missing was a horse. Somehow a horse always makes a party better for reasons that are murky.
Anyway, Dick Queen was released in July 1980 after the Iranians noticed he was getting really sick. They were nuts but they weren’t crazy, and they realised that a dead hostage would be bad press for the glorious revolution, so they let Dick go, but 13 other hostages had been released before he was, so when he arrived back in the States it wasn’t an especially big deal. This bothered my friend Jack, so he and his wife Susie decided to have a hell of a party for old Dick Queen and even invite him, all expenses paid, which they did, or at least they said they did.
The party started a lot earlier than it was supposed to because Susie, as she was painting a bedsheet with the words WELCOME HOME DICK QUEEN!, dipped into the party favors, and that sent Jack over also, and a few friends dropped by early to help set up, and they all got going too, so the party was roaring long before I got there after work on Friday. By sunset there were more than a hundred people throbbing in the little courtyard where they lived. It was a dense, hot night in July and their apartment complex was right by a huge river so you could hear boats and owls all night long.
By midnight there had already been a fistfight, so people were talking about that, and also two girls had slapped each other, a cold shocking awful sound, and then a guy no one knew showed up with a case