THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 10, EPISODE 3

 

 

A ROSY SERVICE!

Eileen's beard's a charming fellow - pasty-blond, with a scent of museums and antique galleries, let's remember him as Silent Joe, Egg... I'd seen him round Aeon, maybe, never with Eileen, before or since. She'd never admit it either, but I think she's been a lot longer in getting over Brendan than she cops to.

At least she's stepped back into circulation... only a toe but, as Eileen was my eyes and my ears, I'm compelled to worry about pills, the Pernod, shards of razor glass... homicidal or chemical consolations. So hold onto your projections, this is a... nice... fellow, standing in "Annie's" lobby next to Bud, looking stately and suave in tails. That was the day Neil and Jack let Bud sit in on the Big Names Caucus, tall Republicans with big chins and hair deconstructing psychological profiles... why ministers make better salesmen than teachers, the superiority of modern, single-syllable products over classical-era power strophes... Continental, Zenith, Imperial. All day Big Words have tumbled off tongues... hyperflation, interactive markets, rigid standards of performance, rings and modules.

So why shouldn't a tall, gleaming usher approach to show us to our seats with an armful of roses?

"Compliments of management," he says, presenting me with half a dozen flowers in heavy paper, "and, Mrs. Kyle, for you..."

"Thanks, but I'm not..." Eileen flutters and I notice something at the center of the bouquet... an asp...

"Consider yourselves served by Mr. Brickman, ladies," dropping the charm almost as quickly as I let go of the bouquet. Bud stepped forward, fists balling, and the fake, dyslexic usher edged back, flicking a blade out. Some old lady began to scream as he backed towards the fire exit, waving the knife, bouncing it left palm to right to left while pushing the EXIT door open with his rump. Screams and alarms and theatre security... a fat old geezer with a flashlight... made its waddling arrival. We point and gesture and, while everybody's staring out the door, I pick the papers up which have, of course, something to do with the fire. Everyone's in show biz, even process servers... wild pigs rooting for wild truffles... too bad Manny wasn't around to shoot the sonofabitch in the kneecap or prick. Of course the show was ruined; if I'd been thinking straight, I would have picked the roses up and looked for an orphan or cripple to donate them to, but I just kicked them round the lobby and Bud, foiled again, ground miscellaneous petals into the carpet. Nothing to do but endure apologies from the real theater management, grin and watch the ruined show. It's still a damn better thing to be Daddy Warbucks than Little Orphan Eve.

Tom Wendell makes a cheerful old Beelzebub... "a man isn't a man until his seventh lawsuit" he grins. By his standards I ought to have balls the size of Mickey Mouse ears and fur growing down my back... Aeon New Years' patrons never agreed with each other or Brinkman so, as of our departure to Costazul, forty one separate suits have been filed... some cross-complaining against us with Brendan, with the City (for perventing perfidy by shutting Aeon down and the rest of New York too), Con Edison, some company called Plutovac, who did the ductwork... a mess of star-collapsing, whining pettifoggery. One of the plaintiffs, a pruny Countess I run into last month on Fifth Avenue, asks when's our outrageous new place opening and will I comp her... nothing personal, she tells Angela, who's sitting in because Lentex held Aeon's lease, and will Angela let her and her East Village-famous feminist counsel share their taxi too? Hire your own broomsticks, Angela had replied, these our transactions in shifty language. And that's the way the quasons crumble...

"One advantage about fighting really big wars," Sopher points out, "...the lawyers used to know their place and, by God, they kept to it... otherwise we'd all be speaking German."

 

 TOMORROW:

"OHHH... RUDY!"

And sing along to "Tomorrow" when you obtain one of the several editions of or books about the Broadway play "Annie", comic strip anthologies also may be found...

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