Ten years ago I returned to New York after a long time in Thailand. Culture shock had been minimized by staying at my friend’s $2 million Ft. Greene brownstone, however after a week I had acclimatized to fat people with loud voices, young people walking with cellphones in their hands, and the lack of serious conversation. My biographer called and asked me to recount the circumstances of my exile from the Land of Smiles.
“Come meet me at Lucien’s on 1st Avenue. I’m interviewing Taylor Meade.” Dannett was a man about town. He had been a child star as a child. As a man he was still a boy and so was I.
I showed up late. The beat poet had drunk a bottle of whiskey. Dannett was conversing with a young Russian boy, Chad, who was clearly smitten with the respected obituarist’s infectious joi du mots. The magic of Dannett’s perpetual youth had that effect on some people and the bon vivant introduced me with an ornate flourish, “Meet my new protege. He likes older women.”
“Why doesn’t he like older men?” Taylor Meade was upset with the inattention.
“Older women are more intellectual than older men.”
“How’s that?” I asked in search of finding an answer to why I had divorced my feeling for a married woman madly in love with me.
“Because older men are only interested in younger cock.” Chad was street smart which Taylor and I both admired.
“Older men are rarely interested in anything older than themselves.” My Thai wife was 24. She was pregnant with my son. I had come back to America to make another fortune. The last had been blown overseas.
“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter,” the angelic boy quoted Rimbaud and purported himself like a gentleman.
“I prefer ‘I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance’ It’s a little more cheerful.” Dannett had a repertoire of quotes memorized as a child actor.
Taylor and I contested their quotes by emptying our glasses, but I was jealous of Dannett’s protege. He was 23 and looked 12. His life was life ahead of him. I was almost three times his age and no one had called me young in decades.
“An older women like cut cock,” I interjected from behind a glass of wine. We laughed, as Chad assessed the intent of the statement. None of us expected him to say, “That’s anti-Semitic.”
“Anti-Semitic?” I was having none of this. “Chad, what does a cut cock have to do with anti-Semitism.”
“Jews have their penises cut.” His cheeks burned with indignation of the supposed slight.
“I was just joking.”
“Jokes like that are meant for the Twentieth Century.” Americans and especially young ones had lost their sense of humor after the indoctrination of political correctness.
“Lighten up, unless the mohel schobbed off too much prepuce at your Bris. You know that the mohel was buried with all the foreskin he had ever cut off?”
“Prepuce.” Chad had never heard the term.
“Yes, the foreskin of Jesus.” The Holy Bris of Jesus was reputed to have been preserved in a jar of spikenard and this relic has passed hands throughout the royalty of Europe. “They rubbed it for good luck and it turned into a suitcase without any wheels.”
After this quip Chad excused himself from the table. Taylor followed him to the bathroom, looking to get lucky, while Dannett admonished me for riding him a little hard, however I do believe in the Freedom of Speech unlike France, whose courts had been seeking a $23,500 fine against the withered beauty, Brigitte Bardot for inciting anti-Muslim hatred in her letter to the then Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkosy accusing the nation’s #1 minority of destroying French Culture by not listening to Johnny Hallyday or eating crepes.
I shut off Dannett’s lighthearted harangue and drank my wine, thinking that maybe Chad could help her with this problem. After all he has a thing for older women, as do I, especially blue-haired heiresses dipped in Botox, then again I’m no gentleman and Brigitte Bardot never gets old in AND GOD CREATED WOMEN.