It behooves me to confess—and I haven't been behooved in over a week, by the way—that my wife and I took a certain amount of pride in the fact that we hosted the affair. I speak of the somewhat notorious cocktail party in what was our home at the time on Sunset Terrace in Fort Worth, the social event that inspired a particularly hilarious scene in this novel by Bud Shrake, one of the city's very own, and as fine a writer for my money as ever fondled the English language.

A novel, mind you. A book in hardcover. Not a page out of the old Fort Worth Press, where the two of us labored side by side, covering desperately important sports events in the region, and sometimes even in Houston. That was back when we were working under the guidance of the legendary Blackie Sherrod, who was either our Mother Teresa or Don Corleone, depending on his view of the story you'd written that day.

Yeah, a novel. Something men who wore beards and women who wore glasses usually wrote when they weren't sitting around sidewalk cafes in Paris, discussing pathos and humor in Russian literature. A thing to put up on a shelf and blow smoke rings at, or take down to gaze at the jacket photo and wish it had been taken when you were staring out wistfully over the Bosphorous.

When But Not for Love came out and actually turned up in bookstores, Bud's pals, all of us, couldn't have been more excited if the title had been Moby Paschal or Farewell to the TCU Drug.

For one thing, Doubleday, a big-time book company, published the novel, and this confirmed what we'd always hoped might be the case: that you didn't have to sit around sidewalk cafes in Paris to become a novelist. You could sit around Herb Massey's on 8th Avenue.

Herb's was our Algonquin Round Table in those days, but better. Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman and the others didn't have any truck drivers, railroad workers, and liquor salesman to converse with, or chicken-fried steak and cream gravy to dine on—or a puck bowling machine, for that matter.

Not that Bud wrote the book then. The all-night table at Herb's, the all-day booth at the TCU Drug, and all those hours in the quaint city room at the Press were merely where his talents had been honed. Incidentally, the quaint city room at the Press was where almost any writer would have found inspiration from the soot that rained down on his shirt from what was supposed to be the cooling units in the windows or the editor who ate cold green peas out of a can.

The fact is, Bud didn't write But Not for Love until he'd moved on to the Dallas Morning News, and he practically wrote it with one hand. With the other, he was covering the fun-loving Dallas Cowboys of the early ‘60s and various other sports events. Meanwhile, of course, he didn't miss out on any social functions or tavern closings, which you might could say made the effort all the more heroic.

There's a saying that the two greatest motivations for a writer are poverty and deadlines.

Bud knew back then, as did I, that there was an infinite truth behind the humor in that. We had wives and kids and car payments, and the two of us had yet to be called to toil for Sports Illustrated amid the steel and glass towers of Big Town Gotham the Apple. Thus, we learned to type faster, and one day But Not for Love simply crawled out of his old Smith-Corona portable.

A quick way to describe the novel is to say it's about the charm and zaniness of Fort Worth vs. the cold-blooded money-grubbing of Dallas. Critics of the era liked it as much as all of us did, as well they should have. To quote the blurbs, "Multimillionaires . . . ruthless, amoral, sexy . . . their palatial homes, yachts, and decorative wives . . . it's vivid . . . violent . . . excellent."

The house where the big birthday party occurs in the novel was the one my wife and I had discovered and bought and remodeled. It was near the heart of downtown, hidden on a leafy, block-long street that ran along a bluff and offered a view toward all of West Texas. Painters and poets who gathered at the rustic Brooks Morris apartments and "art colony" across the street knew about Sunset Terrace, but most people in Fort Worth weren't even aware it was there.

The party that evening on Sunset Terrace was one of those things we did quite often, in honor of the fact that it was Friday night. Good friends from Paschal and TCU and Texas A&M and Texas, those who lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, would gather for food, beverages, weighty discussions, wicked criticisms of current lifestyles, occasional divorces, Sinatra on the hi-fi, and replays of all the parties that had come before. And smoking. Everybody smoked incessantly, which brings to mind the immortal line of writer Fran Liebowitz: "Smoking is the entire point of being an adult."

Some people say it was the blackbottom punch, which contained every known form of alcohol, that caused the game of "nekkid bridge" and encouraged so many of our women friends to participate.

There is still debate as to whether the game was invented by Bud, Gary Cartwright, or Jerre R. Todd, "Jap" Cartwright and "Rounder" Todd having been cohorts in those giddy days at the Press. They all detested the serious game of bridge, which my wife and I played with other friends two or three times a week.

In any case, it was a party game in which numerous gentlemen and wives and girlfriends stood around the dining room table in front of a large picture window and were dealt hands from a deck of cards and were commanded to ditch an article of clothing each time the hand didn't contain enough face cards.

That game of "nekkid bridge" was much more tame than the one in But Not for Love, although several guys got down to their boxer shorts and two attractive ladies, one giggly wife and one numb girlfriend, were rather fetchingly reduced to their panties and bras before an alarmed June Jenkins, my wife, rushed out of the kitchen to call a halt to it all.

I should mention that my mother and grandmother had recently moved into the two-story house next door, and while they should have been reading or watching TV, it had been easy enough for them to see what was going on through the big dining room window.

We didn't know until a few days later when my ladylike grandmother smiled and nicely said to Bud and me, "Who was that basketball team you all were entertaining the other night?" I think I said it was a combination of Paschal and Arlington Heights.

Looking back on it now and enjoying But Not for Love again, it's easy enough to understand how almost everything that went on back then was all about something that would be in a novel someday.

Bud knew it first.

Dan Jenkins

Fort Worth, Texas