In the middle of the throng at Solas last night, I was listening to Samuel R. Delaney, the former sci-fi writer and all time polymath, read a preposterous molestation scene from his latest, Dark Reflections, when I heard the thump of a head against either the bar or the floor as its owner lost consciousness.

“Someone call 911!” someone shouted.

Delaney, a veteran of perilously over-crowded, jungle-aired literary events, kept reading in his strange, somehow soothing, completely ignorable, rising and retreating cadence, and the woman quickly recovered. It was the heat and maybe the booze—not Delaney’s story “about a black, gay, poet who lived in this area” (lower Manhattan)—that caused it. Not to harp on Delaney, but it was nothing to fall down about. He’s best know for his science fiction, work which even Díaz says “drove [him] in part to be a writer.”

Solas had it set up so that Díaz and Delaney each read twice, once upstairs and once downstairs because they didn’t have enough space. Díaz came up just as the paramedics were leaving with the (perfectly fine) girl and said, “Let’s do this thing.”

Delaney finished up, and—after a traditional soupy introduction probably comparable to the lavish praise I layered on in my review of Oscar Wao— Díaz got on the mic. “This really ain’t shit,” he schooled the crowd. “It’s not that hot… In Santo Domingo this shit would be legitimate, man. So you all can fucking write this down in your journals”—now, in the squeaky voice of the typical male student audience member—“That was some bugged out shit, man.” But, in Santo Domingo, “we get bugged.” (One could hear the pens already scratching on the slick paper of a hundred Moleskines.)

Díaz had to borrow a book from a kid in the audience, telling the people around them to make sure they got him some drinks, because “Guys, honestly, I’m the guy that always gets stole on.” Someone, in the rush after his first reading, made off with Díaz’s own copy of his own book.

After apologizing to all the people who haven’t yet read his Pulitzer winning novel, he went on to read two scenes from the very end. Surprise! Oscar dies. If it weren’t for the guy next to me stroking and smoothing his girlfriend’s ponytail, I might have been even more moved by Díaz’s reading of the last 27 days of Oscar’s life than I was the first time I read it. His speaking voice, unlike Delaney’s, is strong, clear, and always cool.

In the Q & A afterward, someone—and, God, I hope he was from the New School—asked, “What percentage of Yunior is you?” And Díaz, baller that he is, corrected the eye-rolling crowd. Saying, on the contrary, that “it’s a good question” because “You write to escape and you write to explore yourself. These are the two tensions. Yunior is a grotesque expansion of everything I am… I’m just too much of a chicken to be that evil.” And went on, “Guys, I’m fucked up, man. I wrote the book!”

Someone else—and this too was inevitable, so maybe Díaz’s spot on response was a little prepared—asked how much he changed over the 11 years (that’s right, 11 years) he spent writing Oscar. His response was enough to chill any aspiring writer, and he delivered it, as always, with sincere originality:

“This book—11 years of failure—took all the arrogance out of me. What I learned was that I was lucky to finish [it], and, really, I’m not all that good.”

To the last comment—You might say so, Junot, but the Pulitzer and the crowd and the girls who cried at the end of your reading won’t have it. If they have to, they’ll wait another 11 for the next.