You smirked at the producer as you made it apparent you didn’t care if you upset his carefully oiled spiel. He was half-way through gouging some poor schlock for the funds to make yet another totally mediocre movie.

The producer is a fat man, even his calves are twice the size of hams, and he wears layers of loose black. He is convinced of his own genius and forces it down the throats of those in his midsts. He is like an addict. He is addicted to talking these folks directly out of huge sums of money.

To make barely-watchable movies. Could there be a more frivolous purpose? Don’t forget none of these folks will see their money again. If they did, the producer would go tap old wells. He needs fresh necks upon which to feast with every kill, I mean movie. 

The last flick was a navel-gazing movie about the making of a movie specifically the fund raising and ass kissing elements. Such as when the producer laughs too long after the financier’s unfunny jokes. The emperor’s new clothes, and no one said a word about the obvious. That it was a big reveal. The uselessness of this conman and his urge and need to be great. To be something. To be known. To have a name that precedes him so that when he is introduced he can watch that light gleam inside a person’s eyes as they marvel in the honor of kissing his ring. Which he offers,metaphorically, as he offers compliments, roles in movies, and they are in his trap. Then he begins the sucking.

Recently you tarried beside him when he was engaging in this unseemly behavior. He was in the middle of a ‘pitch’ as it is known. They should call it a theft. “You trying to get money out of this guy!” You say, you laugh, light a cigarette. The producer cuts you a glare, a death ray stare. Damage done you melt away.

You awaken, it could be any day, at any time. The clock reads one minute after midnight and that means, after some basic calculations, it’s your birthday. Sickening thought. Officially old. You don a jacket over your ankle length nightdress and pull on a hat. You do not stop in front of the hall mirror on the way out. The lock clacks shut behind.
You hide your key in a clot of threads of a banyan and carefully pick your steps on the crumbly path to the street.
There’s no plan oh you kid yourself. You’re ambling, occasionally shooting quips to strangers, revealing little, tossing out firecrackers seeing what pops. Your cool is so see-through to everyone but you. You find Sasha at a bar. You chat, you are so funny you instantly forget the plot.
Too soon it is 4 AM and the bartenders bar the doors with exhausted casts on their faces.
You don’t want to be alone again, not yet. You tag along to the after hours club. It’s as morbidly filthy as you’d expect. For no reason you allow a manly woman to kiss you on the mouth. Reflexively you pull back and then she squirmed her tongue into your mouth, and you gagged.
Sasha laughed at you and steered you to a cozy realm. It was comfortable to believe. Familiar ground although a mirage. Then came that moment when you were both standing too close.
You’re sexy, he said and kissed you. Alpha, confident. Your mind cracks from lightning, clarity piercing your ego.
I could be your grandmother, you say, embarrassed. You shove free.
I like you, he tries.
You’ve been a slice of birthday cake. Thank you, please walk me home.
Daylight slaps you in the face. You stroll with tremors of reality thrumming. At your gate you don’t want to send him away but you have to. Welcome to your mortality. Say hello.

In the kitchen sometimes from boredom you’d open cabinets. These cabinets were empty, shelves wiped clean leavening nothing but streaks. You’d rather food, you were always hungry. There was nothing apart from curvy silver pots filled with pebbles of dark sugar to be served with coffee for guests.

Guests visited often. These charades were faintly traumatizing. From when the doorbell trilled, to being dispatched to ‘make coffee’ which you never ‘made’. It was merely a respite when you could escape from the mayhem of ‘darlings’ and ‘you look so…’. you rushed the steps down to the kitchen which occupied the length of the basement of the house, and here the world changed.

In the kitchen the air was bright, the smells were inviting, the human company fortified you, the staff shared their food with you. You asked for the coffees, reported on how many were desired and only reluctantly retreated your steps, pressing your body against the hall wall slowly re-entering the fray of grownups blasting off.

The living room, skirting a courtyard and reached by a hallway, was always cold. Despite Louis Armstrong on the record-player and life-size portraits of a nude woman seated and coy, charcoal on paper, hung interspersed with mirrors, and despite the inviting sofas with cushions of Siamese raw silk, it was always more full of ghosts than guests in that large square room. It was always cold, full or empty, despite two raucous fireplaces and the southern exposure of a wall of glass there was barely enough light outdoors to tamp the damp within. England in the wintertime, like life itself, is not for sissies.

When the ‘growns’ evaporated to parties elsewhere this room was your room. This space was your music studio, a place to rummage the stacks of 78s and gently drop the stylus into that first groove. You couldn’t know it yet, when you danced around that room, sometimes to Beethoven other times to Oldfield, music was your sustenance.

Photo of CO and Sam Green (RIP) on Fire Island, feeding birds and friendly swans, 1986

Cross-legged he sat on a mound of moss beside the ravine when a glinting bottle bobbed along. A bottle he recognized as the finest of local whiskeys. A favorite, and he hooked it with his walking stick.

Turned out within it, downed galleon, was a letter, protected from the water with a cork from County Cork, no less. The best.

The note, penned in ox-blood ink from a quill of gold flecks, spoke words to crack a man’s heart. Told the tale of a chance long past. When he last saw or felt his own youth. When he had it all, his strength his looks his energy. At least he could never lose his charm.

All these treats, which he mistook for traits, they would disappear. Atrophying imperceptibly, until, almost overnight, they were gone.

He knew for sure it was all over when one day he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and thought he was being robbed. He did not recognize himself.

If he were to be honest his confidence took its first big hit when the proposal went unanswered.

He had asked for her hand in marriage, told her to meet him at the docks if her answer was yes. But she never showed. And then he lost her. His reaction was he retreated to his dismantled life of a person who sleeps but never dreams despite his favorite whiskey for a soporific.

On clement days he visited this riverbank, to keep a semblance of routine in his near astral existence, inebriated at most times.

The note told him her answer was yes, she would meet him at the docks. Where he never saw her. Was she lying? Had she boarded a boat? Had she run away, to a convent, to a whorehouse, to America? This was all some years ago now. Fiercely, squashing time, he wanted to communicate with her. He had questions, and he had resentments. He wanted to reach out, but he knew he should not.

The island feels lighter now that you’re gone. Lighter, brighter and better without you. Hopefully forever but doubtful. I know you cannot stay away.

You blew on out with your new girl and your old bad habits.

You have her believing things will be different, now that all is new. You’ve both agreed to delude yourselves. In psycho-parlance it’s termed ‘a geographic’. When you move fast like that, rash like that, quick and confusing. A sleight of hand to befuddle your partner, the onlooker, chaos filling the space where otherwise they’d see you for who you are. They will, but only after all this moving around, packing and hauling and driving. Dry leaves swirling in an autumn storm to help distract. Tricks only work their mysteries for so long, the leaves will settle and the pattern they form will become discernible. A message of truth.

One single word, the leaves will read, ‘leopard’.

You can change your domicile but you cannot sweep free of the mess. You’ll see, when things crumble with your new lass, since you’ll continuously change the narrative, keeping her off balance so you don’t have to commit to anything substantial. Until eventually she’ll notice. One day your good looks will wear off and their magical effects will not be felt. If anything you’ll see a whole other look in her once gullible green eyes. And then you’ll move on.

She will learn from you how much she dislikes expensive companions. And when the shine of your confidence tarnishes she will be shocked. This will wake her, shake her, remove her from your grip, your miasmic hold in which she had trusted. She had wanted to. She had her own issues, how could she not? No one gets through this game unscratched.

These lost boys and girls, they find each other.

“I gotcha!” he thought, watching her figuring she was older than he. Since turning twenty he’d enjoyed a decade of women vying for his attention. He was habituated to pockets filled with phone numbers.

She dawdled along alone preoccupied and when he ‘bumped’ into her, she said, “Excuse me.”

Except this was no accident and he maneuvered immaculately, “I have been looking for you!”

He threw her confusion into confetti until she was in his sway. As in most cases, while the beholder was awestruck by his cherubin glow, countenances slackened suspicious eyes, incurring self-conscious smiles. He was confident he had her.

He fell in step and made sure to entertain, to focus on her. When she mentioned a project he pounced.

“You deserve me,” he soothed.

She tittered but kept her claws retracted.

With the project concluded she was done with him. He was flirtatious, that being his currency, but inexperienced with rejection. For a while he enjoyed it, if only for the novelty, the challenge.

He felt her unspoken sentiments but he couldn’t make sense of them. They didn’t fit the narrative so he didn’t question. A mistake. But to him it was a mathematical impossibility that she was not besotted.

With the windfall of cash he’d earned he bought a toy. He loved this toy. He fussed with it and messed with it and showed it off to all his friends. Their envy was his joy.

She disconnected from him, and he didn’t care, he had already moved on. This was his modus operandi, a redistribution of the callousness he’d suffered as a child, but that, as I often say, is another story.

One day she happened upon his toy. It was unattended. With her claws out glinting like swords she aimed a hefty rock and smashed the toy to fragments. “I saw you coming!” she laughed and carried on along her path.

Careful what you play with.