It was Lothar's opening for his new artisanal hors d'oeuvres shop. I
don't know how many linen shirts and seersucker suits I counted. It must
be the season. It was unreasonably humid, granted. It felt like I was
back in New England on the Friday night yacht club cocktail circuit,
pounding Cape Codders and staining my Docksiders with enough spattered
oyster liquor so they resembled a Pollack. But I'd left that transient
life behind decades ago. If I caught myself drifting into that
adolescent reverie, I felt nagged, like the sense of a flea jumping
around on your body that you can't catch. No fleas here, though. It was
tick season.
The band showed up, but they just mimed, never even playing music or
plugging in their instruments - just total silence. Called themselves The Dense. What
horseshit. I was annoyed. The only reason I showed up at this opening
was to promote my new version of the Montecito Yellow Pages, which was
going to be the first phone book that could be injected into a human being's
blood stream, and read with a microchip that could be comfortably
stapled to your perineum. Dad would call this another one of my "harebrained ideas" but screw him, I'm a goddamn stallion.
"These are actual poached kitten lips," Lothar cooed into the ear of one
of his wealthy, Silicon Valley benefactors. "It took hours to remove
them." Veined tusks suddenly grew out of his lower molars, piercing both cheeks, as everyone in his immediate range took a few steps back,
agog, avoiding the sudden spray. He quickly tried to alleviate their
shock. "It'ss jusht...it'shsh..durnt worreh abourt it." This was my cue
to gather these startled buffoons with their open wallets and show them
the real genius behind a good telephone directory. The strained beauty
of its indexing, the velvet nuance of the philately section.
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