I perused a short note from Irving of Berlin, a small time piano player I met decades ago stroking ribald tunes on an upright in the corner of the "Half a Century Too Long Ago" bar, as can-can corners on a coaster tore themselves apart under my touch.
"Don't tarnish the ivories" it read and I immediately drew lips closed around my newly purchased dental offerings.
I asked for a straw from the strawberry-blonde in stars and stripes thigh-high skirt and she pulled a sterling-silver tube of about 2 inches in length from between her plastic-factory breasts and offered it up for inspection in the glow from the twin candles that sat on the table.
"For my drink"
She snorted at the air like the doped favourite in race 6 when it's locked in the starting gate with a stewards overpaid finger stuck up its arse waiting for the gate to open so it can attempt a kick at the digital sodomites head in the name of a flying start.
She pirouetted on a sharpened stiletto and two mounds of glutinous-maximus jiggled away from me as they fought over a mint-drop and which of them would get to tear my wrapper into the longest strip.
I ducked as a handful of 6 inch plastic tubes flew the intervening distance between mine hostess with the mostest and me..
She wouldn't have understood the warning, and how could I explain that Irving had never been wrong before. Not since that night by the wall when the sweet Fraulein from bunker 12 had offered herself on the whisper of a name sounding some-what Aryan, atop a brown shirt bearing seams fit to burst. I'd seen Irving sink to the waist, then chest to knee, then neck to ankle deep, and saw the smile in his eyes and the glow on his lips as his hair stood on end and an unholy scream fell around us. As God is my witness.
I hadn't seen Irving since that moment but had continued to find endless scraps of paper with tips and pearls of wisdom strewn throughout my travels in his scrawl.
On a losing lottery ticket in a near desserted newsagent I'd spied a chance in a million at a poodle toting socialite gone to Valium and midday television. Irving had written "Raise the shade" and with this in mind I proceeded to take infinite pleasure from trying to find suture scars behind ears and the point of entry into the upper thighs and buttocks where the gym had failed.
As a toy-boy I make good Lego and as a lover I make good Irish stew, all meat and vegetables with lashings of magic ingredients.
I plucked a straw from the pile on the table and no other straw moved so I took another, still none moved and so I kept picking until I'd built a complete replica Cutty Sark in blue plastic tubes without anyone catching me move a single straw. I thought one moved once but with the flickering light I gave myself the benefit of the doubt and picked on regardless.
Strawberry-stripes-forever comes with apologies to the Beatles and all those girls whose Catholic school education precludes the shaving of thighs and higher as I slurp the last of the liquid through the nights first ice.
She stands waiting for the unenviable chore of replacing what I've just finished knowing full well I'm going to peer dazedly after her departure.
The blinding light of day gores the dark and through gate 13 comes not one, not 2, but 3 all time, wild-haired swamp-cats on the verge of a quicksand bath at the hands of Harry our quite sensorially handicapped barman. Harry pours by weight and selects ice from the bucket by name and bottles from the shelf by their percentage over content. I once ordered bourbon with no ice and a little coke and ended up drinking some woman named Susan, with and ex-husband, dry over easy with the rind removed, on a terrace overlooking long dammed country canals.
Harry's the kind of barman who knows. Know what I mean?
My drink's come back as it's twin and from the way I know Harry if there isn't a late gestation, grain-fed, dream-machine hidden somewhere below a blinking Elvis effigy pumping out clones ad infinitum then Irving lives in a shack beachside hunting blood-worms with rancid meat and used stockings.
"Sit with me Strawberry"
She lowers herself like a goods lift at lunch time all hardness against skin, all business and bullshit about an early afternoon appointment with Chairman Cheese and Tomato toasted just brown, an orange juice to go because the mobile is ringing and I'm late for life.
Just like that woman from what seems like days but is probably months ago she has this habit of crossing and uncrossing then recrossing her legs as if in some way she'll relieve the boredom. Me I'm fine spectating the first onset of age that bubbles on the underside of her thighs up where her skirt rides highest and thrills seem trickiest.
For each uncross back to a recross a flash of unclad forest sneaks past her knees to my knees and then through the bush telegraph to my eyes blinking in time with the movement of her legs and the candles dancing flames so as not to miss even the slightest bit of excitement. It's become hypnotic and I'm tranced, with one hand locked around a glass stuck to the bottom lip, while the other hand pushes insinuation away from a lap threatening to cause a scene.
Strawberry smiles a smile full of teenage-braces and Irving scrawls again somewhere ahead for me to find.