Serendipity 3 was a famed ice cream parkor on East 60th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Stephen Bruce and his two associates, Calvin Holt and Patch Caradine, were the smiling headmasters for the fey waiter and busboy staff, who served the best sundaes in the world as well as a frozen hot chocolate drink to a clientele in love with Bruce’s epithet, “Life is delicious.”
Famed stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O regularly frequented the lavishly decorated restaurant.
Andy Warhol was a welcome guest before he was Warhol.
Everyone working there in the 1970s loved the Joan Crawford movie MILDRED PIERCE. Their given names were abandoned in favor of female appellations. I was hired as a busboy. The boys called me ‘Pebbles’ after the Flintstone scarlet-haired daughter. Bird, one of the longtime waiters said, “You look so Neanderthal.”
Upstairs lived a gang of Hillbilly queers. We were all good friends. The night of the 1978 Blackout a troupe of us failed to liberate a gold lame Elvis suit from the disco emporium Fiorucci. Sadly I lost most of them through the AIDS epidemic.
Andy Reese was a brilliant writer, thief, and hustler as well as a gifted ballet dancer, although he once blamed me for one of his theft. The gang turned against me then, they never really trusted ‘Bam-Bam’.
Upon his death he bequeathed me an elephant’s foot. Stumpy resided at my East Village apartment for decades. I tried to sell it once to a curio shop and the owner sneered at my possessing such a relic. Stumpy and I have together for almost forty years.
Last month the curator of the Fort Greene Conservatory said, “MY wife says it’s time for Stumpy to find a new home.”
I understood her request.
Stumpy had always been a little gnarly.
I carted Stumpy down to my storage place underneath the BQE.
He rested on a wall.
Stumpy was taking his time.
No one sad anything about hi,
That part of the world had never seen elephants or parts of elephants.
Stumpy was ready for a rest.
I tenderly lifted him into his 5′ by 5′ residence.
“I’ll be back one day.”
It was no lie.
I only wish I could say the say to Andy Reese.
