The cardamom gang and various chums of chance played dead poets’ society at the White Horse Tavern this past Saturday afternoon when the day was fairly adolescent and still yet in thrall of its own potential.
In attendance were the usual suspects, old salts and hands at this Greenwich Village après-ski by now, gamely and namely: the most estimable Lord Jewels, lending both credit and creditability to the proceedings; the poetess Sybl doing her best Holly Golightly (tres fou!) but actually a spot-on analogue for Edie Sedgwick circa
Blonde on Blonde; our delicate Daffodil of the wildfire eyes, diamond teeth, maybe the occasional cigarette loitering around her mercury mouth; and last and most certainly least, yours truly and unruly, a sensitive but resilient pillar of debauchery, Sir Richard O’Sugar Jr., B.A..
Also in attendance were honorary members: Mr. Glorioso Hallelujah Esq. and the Princess of Parallelograms, sweet, unassuming Josephine.
The White Horse’s inferior interior was found, daresay, over-stocked with douche-baggage and caucasian cock-blockery, so dare says Sybl, braless and drinkless in the midst of a four hour alcohol fast; her vain attempt to remain abstemious from base and goatish looseness.
This temporary teetotal perhaps accounts for her impotence in “establishing a connection” with Dylan Thomas, not that the most sober of women has ever had very much luck on that score.
On the other hand, two pints of oat soda erected adequate fornication fortification ála Dutch courage via songs for the girls off the jukebox to vainly attempt to tempt Daffodil while escorting a smoking around-the-block wander to duck down a dark den or make a break for that St. Croix of the Virgin Islands.
Hence to Bank Street – where the rooking girls are cooking popcorn, inspiring mayhem and disarray, and finally arm-wrestling like meteoric, though amateur rock stars.
Daffodil serves apple slices on the point of a knife.
About this time Princess Josephine decamps for more academic pursuits, and what with provisions nearly exhausted an exit is prepared the destination to which is promptly forgotten by the time this dream team reconstitutes on 7th Avenue.
Among the confusion someone suggests lonely pizza until His Highness points with conviction to the superiority of his aerie in Chelsea and on winged feet absconds with Sybl to Whole Foods for hors d’oeuvres.
His pad is but dimly lit so soon the booze soon arrives and fully 22.22% of Memory’s daughters assume their positions as odalisque hostesses.
Trivial pursuits are pursued.
After a time and repast of pizza and pasta, all whilst sipping lukewarm Hefe-Weizen in the semi-dark, Glorioso Hallelujah bounces and bounds away on his ambiguous quest after ambiguous young women (amen).
Not this, but the open window of midnight sends a shiver down the spines of the remaining revelers who huddle under eiderdowns, donning sweaters of cashmere and camaraderie; such naked feet as there winkle soon smoothly socked.
And the gods smile, and the Dom Perignon does not detonate in the freezer, and our host with the most toasts concisely précis’s his theories on dispassion and non-dualism with a single sneeze; in reply to what, we haven’t the foggiest notion any longer.
Whether inspired by said sneeze or enthused by the Dom’s ambrosia is hard to say, for soon the sibylline sisters begin conducting their own experiments in non-duality.
Hypothesis: “All dichotomies are illusory.”
Conclusion: TBD.
Sybl provides play-by-play of mine own sub-blanket hand-warming hi-jinx while Daffodil delineates the exact proportions and scope of her favorite erogenous zone.
Hint: With a sat upon cell phone set to vibrate, my missed calls do nothing for her.
Go ahead, reread Steppenwolf.
Lord Jewels sprays our faces with herbal mist.
Sybl models a sari, suddenly an Olympus refugee.
Daft nymph, herself a bed sharing prodigal daughter of Byron’s dictum, “. . . All who joy would win / Must share it; Happiness was born a twin.” (Don Juan, Canto II.172)
To be truly scientific though, isolation and perhaps darkness are demanded and all four of our subjects shortly inhabit rather than inhibit separate rooms at the same time.
Daffodil therefore in the bedroom is a silkworm cocooned, our Lordship’s duvet the envelope of an ovule, seemingly sleeping well though blooming quite awake with an irresistible invitation to lie beside her in the springtime of her under-wire.
A rather outré instance of inspiration: to lay my head at the foot of her bed and wrap my arms around her stems.
You won’t find that move in most recent editions of the Kama Sutra.
Daffodil pours forth from her integument on not making love in 3rd person bedrooms and a bronzed, blonde English teacher she would have more than bloomed for in the supply closet among the chalk and the erasers.
Sybl inspects this less than connubial arrangement and improbably coins the action, “tonseling.”
Upon a certain curtain descending interval, and spurred by the sound of no voices talking, just intelligent dance music from Hong Kong thumping, the bedroom is abandoned, myself momentarily marooned watching a bitching party through the window.
The cozy couch reveals a Buddhist Pietà as Sybl strokes his Lordship’s un-laurelled hair.
LL Cool J felled by bubbly grape juice!
Sybl suggests we take lovers, Daffodil suggests we take tea which entails an excursion for milk and honey passing the dormant doorman and back before the other two could possibly have removed any clothing.
We return to find everyone wide-awake and laughing like softly.
The tea boils away, becoming more concentrated and less; all the more precious.
Finding a marijuana seed between the cushions but no glue on the cigarette papers, your drug-test flunkey becomes convinced that Daffodil seen sideways from a couch-eye-view is the platonic ideal image of a super-hot hip hop Latina from Washington Heights with a crooked hat we once knew someone who once knew.
“That platonic shit is platonic nonsense,” this chick used to say.
And the sun also rises on a Bollywood movie marathon, his Lordship having retired to his chambers as the sirens sandwich their enthusiasm for psychedelic heebie jeebies, now and again catching a glimpse of true beauty exploring the insight gleaned when I call one by the other’s name.
When it is time to leave no one can move.
“Jeez, I can’t find my keys,” someone whispers under their breath.
The day lies before us like an anesthetized patient.
Our begoggled Muses hail a phaeton and make for the ends of the earth, perhaps to a safe-house they know amongst the galaxies.
On queue at Starbucks, Ahab’s own best caffeinated first-mate, Lord J turns to me and says, “I guess those mushrooms on the pizza worked.”
Walking home like a ghost in the mist at 9am without a thought in my empty head the obvious occurs to me.