A is for Alexandre The Great, or all young men arrogant enough to try and conquer the world…. SAMO© I mean you!
So the Basquiat Green-Wood trip was too long and too OMegg centric not to go forward and tell you how I Met the better half, or yin to my yang, or is it yang to my yin, or is it wu-chi and just graygreygrisgris…. We shall call her Sylvie to protect the innocent (or guilty as the case may be)
One of the more amazing things in the world is that some genious built a commercial bread bakery right across the street from the Grand Gothic Gates of Green-Wood Cemetary. As you visit the dead, you smell the baking bread. Prozac be damned, there is nothing that shall lift you forth from the funk better than the smell of baking bread: It truly is the staff of life… now remember Gentle Reader: yours truly is a Grand Son of a Basel Baker… during Fasnacht Morgan Streich we all stood before the old store front (bakery lost in Depression…stop) and rung in the Fasnacht… Bread…. oh bread the body… My father’s rants on why America was doomed if only because you couldn’t buy a decent piece of real bread (thank god, like beer and wine this is no longer true if you have $$$$ and live near a major corporate cash center (red or blue I think)
This is God Son of Peter The Basel Butcher and Stone Of the Rock Church Speaking to you of The Greatest Love Story Never Told: or Happy New Year!
MP beneath the blossoms with wine and sunset.
Now like young Fred in the Yellow Submarine, all music was fading from Pepper Land. We were out of College and I’d survived Brown, but not without a damaged ego. I was spending a lot of time with my Art Dealer’s daughter… who was dating a silent Korean, who loathed me, becaudse… I suppose now… she and I could talk, and she and him… well couldn’t without kissing and just making those squishy noises… He was a handsome architect… I was an ugly artist.. he had me beat, I think… anyway… I get an ivitation from her to come to her New Year’s Eve party… okay… I bring my favorite Greenwich Brunian/graphic designer… he shall be called Bruce Lee to annoy the innocent…
I tell this story as an antidote to death… Call it Karma… Call it Fate… sometimes God shows up in your life and if you’re real lucky, God is hot and Korean, and carrying three bottles of blood if you know what I mean.
You know what? Fuck God, cause you know there ain’t no devil, there’s only God when he’s drunk? Well, to me anyway, this was the sort of Wu-Chi grisGRIS moment when GOD throws you a banana peel in the middle of the road.
Bruce and I went outside to have a smoke…. Midnight had fallen and there was no champagne, only Papov vodka and Conch y a Toro red wine… miserable I was and to top it off no one would talk to us because of the odd vibe with the Architect… all the Hostesses hid up in their room… probably doing exotic drugs, or hell hording Champagne… it sucked…
I had been having some sort of flash back affair with the dog-fish-shark-Hawaiian/Japanese… but she was out of med-school and off to Paris to see her five year boyfriend who was in from Tokyo and I was just alone with my damn Korean Buce Lee who was telling me all about a font he’d just made and copyrighted while going to Parsons to get a descent commercial portfolio together… (Bruce worked for MTV and VH-! for a long time and is now art directing at major television networks).
We sat there, him and me, on the steps… bored…. smoking… sipping Papov Screw Drivers… Missing Champagne and our Greenwich, CT sense of propritus wine: when in the distance a music video dry ice ground cloud parted and there did appear a vision of Korean beauty so intense that I think poor Burce Lee pissed his pants slightly and smiled knowingly… knowing I loved Asian girls and said….”Ha ha ha… you are in trouble now.”
“What?” I asked Bruce.
“Look what I see coming.”
I turned and saw her… She was, it is true, in a crowd, but I can’t tell you who, nor how many… because (cliché alert) I only had eyes for her…
I stood at attention, like a rodent catching the smell of a nut.
She was carrying two bootles of Chateau Lafite and a Magnum of Moet Chandon Champagne… she was in red, with tassles (like the Hippies meet the British coming to my Paul Reveare Heart), under this was a shiny black shorts suit with black hose and the cutest shoes… and oh yes, pearls, pearls, pearls and red lipstick to match the redcoat…Devil in a Red Dress…
I turned to Bruce and said, “Please, whatever you do, don’t let me talk to this girl. I can smell the trouble from here.”
Bruce shoots back, “Of course we’ll talk to her… She has Champagne!”
“Shit,” I mumbled as Bruce called out in Korean, “Happy New Year!”
She landed at our shore like a grand ocean liner… bringing with her in tow inferior vessles at her wake… What yacht could be so yaar?
Like a scared squirrel, I tried to flee, but the Moet needed opening and the Koreans had no grasp of the wire as they talked about Paiks and Lees, and Parks, and Chois and Lees, etc.
“Give me that,” I said, twisting the pop in a moment as they listed cousins, or tribes, or whatever it is in Korea… and I got the glasses and poured the wine and said, “Hey, Happy New Year!” and I was thinking of the dog fish shark girl and how alone I was as the Koreans smiled and ate Doritos with the wine.
So I was watching her as she talked with him and she had a gace and stature of a statue looking at Libertpy and her nails matched her lipstick and her dress…. she was shocking hot, but for the moment I was safe. She was talking to Bruce Lee.
Suddenly, she turned on him with a snap, “Well, you’re boring, what are you about?” and I saw it all in slow motion, her eyes turned first, and her head and neck followed like a Willow branch moving in the breeze to find my eyes.
“Who are you?” she asked.
My heart exploded in a blue flame… and I remember moving my lips and breathing, but the words escape me… corks flew and fireworks, and lightning, and thunder and nonsense and then they were throwing us out on the street….
We eneded up in Bruce Lee’s car with keys and bottles of wine to move the party to the East Village and then Bruce let us out of the Toyota and popped the trunk with the wine and then sped off, leaving us drunk and alone and the rest, I suppose is better left as history.
It is my greatest story… she tells it like this:
I got drunk and then there was this guy with red sox and red briefs and I laughed…
