Cocktails at the Playboy Mansion, poolside.

A tall, gray-haired gent in a white Saturday Night Fever suit is dancing wildly, while a plump, ethereal blond girl in a floaty costume stands by in an attitude of beatific servitude.

«Who are you?» I ask. I'm a journalist, so I get to do this.

«My name is Kaytoo,» the man 'says. «That's K-2, like the mountain. We are involved in a quest to make it possible for mankind to live up to its full potential, which we regard as a transmutation in a psycho-neurophysiological sense. A mutation in the brain cells! The human being doesn't live long enough to mature!»

I compliment him on his shirt.

He gestures to the floaty acolyte, who slips her arm coyly through his and smiles into space. «She made it,» K-2 says. «She sat in a hammock in Cozumel for two hundred and fifty hours and made this shirt!»

I thank him for his time, and slip away. «The human brain is detrimental to life itself!» he shouts like a battle cry over the drumming disco.

A woman in a business suit accosts me, wearing a desperate look. She grabs my arm. «It goes against everything I believe in,» she says with intensity, leaning in close, «but where are the Bunnies?»

I look at her with a fair imitation of sympathy. She's probably a D girl at a TV production company, or a studio publicist, or a story editor. The kind of woman who admires Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon, and Emma Thompson, without ever considering that they all have great tits, power tits, tits like big hairy balls, the breasts of the justified. No, there are no Bunnies here tonight. Those days are gone. We don't need Bunnies anymore.

«Haven't you heard?» I say. «The cold war is over.»

I leave her looking puzzled and abandon the cocktail crowd, wandering down past the koi pond, among the pink flamingos, peacocks, mallards, and other gaudy birds resplendent in their mating plumage.

Excited whispers drift across the lawn:

«Have you seen the hot tub?»

«I hear there are monkeys down there.»

«I saw penguins.»

«Is this a Massengill commercial?»

«Is that Brad Pitt?»

The sound of visitors to a museum. I dub it the Titty Museum. Here we have the ancient art of psychoanalysis, as practiced in a Herman Miller ponyskin lounge chair.... And here's the coke spoon Warren Beatty used in Shampoo.... And over here, we have the herpes virus.... you remember the herpes virus?

I wander farther down the hill behind the Mansion, where I can hear nothing but faint murmurs and the sound of ice tinkling in my glass. It seems loud, like the last thing you'd hear before the flash and the mushroom cloud and the big shock wave. This was wishful thinking, in a way, a kind of nostalgia for a time when nihilism was literal and the self was an enigmatic frontier, an era that peaked in 1967 with the sentimental hysteria of James Coburn in The President's Analyst. I've watched this movie four or five times in 1996. Hippies. Free love. The Russian spy with the heart of gold. The villain turns out to be the Phone Company, which is run by robots.... Oh, for the innocent paranoia of those Good Old Days!

The fifties. The sixties. The seventies. The eighties. The Titty Museum. It lasted until the Berlin Wall fell, at which point Hugh Hefner got married, had kids, and hung up his purple pajamas for good. Tonight he is in a suit, probably Armani, though I hope for the sake of historical integrity that it's a Pierre Cardin.

I make my way back to the pool. I need a loo, and find one in a pool cabana that looks like a seventies wine bar, the kind of place that was always called The Hobbit. There's a dimmer switch next to the commode, and a bowl of bobby pins next to the sink. On the way out I bump into a woman in a tuxedo. She has a cigar in one hand and a sushi roll in the other.

I spot Mel Torme.

At the bar, I try to get a drink, but instead I end up in a pitch meeting with a loathsome, tubby creature who claims to be a movie producer. «It's a John Wayne, Tom Cruise kind of thing!» he exclaims. «A musical kickboxing thing!» As I turn to leave, he slips me his business card. «I went to college with Stallone,» he whispers.

I lose him, because the fifty-four-year-old Nancy Sinatra is about to make her comeback by performing «These Boots Are Made for Walking» on a cramped little stage.

The whole evening seems less like nostalgia than like some kind of traumatic flashback. To be nostalgic, you have to actually miss something, and I don't think anyone actually misses Nancy Sinatra--or even, for that matter, the bunnies. What we're feeling instead is separation anxiety, a neurotic suckling whelp's attachment to the past. Yes, I'll be the first to say it: I miss the Soviet Union. I miss living in fear. I miss Freud. I miss tits.

Once upon a time there was the Evil Empire and the Playboy Mansion. There was the objective end of the world on the one hand, and on the other, the seemingly limitless potential to discover an even better rack of goodies. It was the world according to Hef and James Bond. For 007, Saving the World was just an excuse for another titty safari, and there was no question that sex was on an existential par with nuclear Armageddon.

In the nineties, tits are no longer shaped like missiles, but melons. Like all domesticated wildlife, they are no longer angular, no longer dangerous, but round and tame. They stay corralled right where they belong, even without a bra. There is no longer any mystery, any lore, in the search for great tits. They're everywhere. There are no more titty safaris, no more narrative adventures around the search for the perfect nipple. How did this come to pass?

I remember when Mariel Hemingway got tits in order to win the role of slain centerfold Dorothy Stratten in Star 80. It was a darkly glamorous occasion, as I recall, like De Niro beefing up for Raging Bull. Her act, and the way she handled herself around the press, displayed true cojones, the kind of swaggering, sentimental narcissism that made twentieth-century America great. Hemingway, like her grandfather, belonged to a race of overachievers in the field of decadence; their saving grace was that they were entirely willing to put a gun in their mouths and pull the trigger should things come to such a pass.

You could say that Mariel's radically gauche and somewhat brave act did for sex what Papa Hemingway's career did for fiction: through no fault of their own, more harm than good. Culturally, there is almost no difference between a cut-rate mammoplasty clinic in Utah and an MFA writing program in Iowa. These two seemingly disparate institutions end up at exactly the same place in the end: the world is finally safe for democracy, and we all will have to live with the consequences.

Hef, I hear, has bought the grave site next to Marilyn Monroe's. And the Playboy Mansion is up for sale.

On the way out, I see a crowd and make my way toward it:

Nancy Sinatra. She's holding court, receiving journalists and well-wishers. When it's my turn, she smiles, glassy-eyed, and introduces the man at her elbow. «This is my doctor,» she says. It's gothic. Her jerry-rigged face looks like the front end of a Buick. I imagine the good doctor shooting her full of Thorazine in one of the louche velour bedrooms of the mansion.

I have to get a quote, now that I'm face-to-face with her, so I ask Nancy what she thinks of her upcoming tour to promote the six-page spread of her naked in Playboy. She pauses. «It's going to be easy,» she says at last, «because I won't have to do sound checks.»

«These boobs were made for walking,» someone behind me wisecracks. Yes, I hear Nancy thinking, and one of these days these boobs are going to walk all over you.

The party is over.

© 1997 by Hillary Johnson