Yesterday, after a long afternoon of volunteer bereavement counseling and then reading to blind residents at a local nursing home, I go to Le Cirque. I drink something like 14 martinis. I get into a fight at the bar with the president of the Jersey City firefighter’s union over a woman we’re both trying to pick up. I kill him with a single roundhouse kick to the side of the head. I leave with the woman, who’s cooing to me in something that sounds Portuguese. When we get to my apartment, I dump out the contents of her pocketbook: loaded jade-handled pistol, Quaaludes, Thai “golden eggs” (vibrating anal-stimulation balls), a packet of pharmaceutical-grade morphine, a little black book with private phone numbers of Pentagon officials. I get up on the bed and dance to Swami’s “Desirock,” my hard-on glowing in the dark and keeping time like a metronome, and then we fuck until dawn, strangling each other almost to the point of unconsciousness with kimono sashes each time we climax.
The next morning, I prepare a Jerusalem artichoke and spinach salad, and a pureed chestnut and chocolate layer cake, and I bring it over to Sister Norberta for the homeless shelter she runs at the church. I write for the rest of the day—extended, lyric, almost psalm-like meditations on the redemptiveness of love.
Will I ever reconcile my inner contradictions?
The next morning, I prepare a Jerusalem artichoke and spinach salad, and a pureed chestnut and chocolate layer cake, and I bring it over to Sister Norberta for the homeless shelter she runs at the church. I write for the rest of the day—extended, lyric, almost psalm-like meditations on the redemptiveness of love.
Will I ever reconcile my inner contradictions?
