Plenty of People Who Could Have Found Me Disgusting

I have this photo of me for European transport in which I'm wearing a very thick wool sweater. And goddamned handsome. A very heavy boat-necked wool sweater. I'll find it for you.

In 1984 I set out on a grand European tour. The English part recounted. But what happened was that I got to Paris in late June and just stopped touring.

There was this one day -- I won't tell you what I did the night before -- where I had to go to a Gare to book my ticket south, and I showed up at the station and just didn't do it. It was going to make me too sad.

I was always not doing things in Paris. I was not going to museums and not contacting people whose numbers I'd been given and not finding restaurants where I was supposed to meet people for lunch. I guess that constitutes irresponsibility.

But there was so much going on in my head. I couldn't believe how beautiful -- you know what, never mind, I can't tell you what I felt. Just that I felt more.

I took a hovercraft over and then a train into Gare du Nord, and then (no notion how I would have known this: Fodor's?) queued up to get a hotel assignment. In French, naturellement, the brusque lady asked, "Right or Left Bank?" In 1984, no self-respecting fellow would ever have said anything but Left.

What's remarkable is that she sent me to the best place I could have imagined! It should, by reason, have been a bad place. But the Hotel de Nevers Luxembourg changed my life. For two months, I lived on the sixth floor (cinqieme etage), after the oriental carpet runner ran out, up two flights of linoleum stairs, nobody above me (recipe for the rest of my apartment life), and there was a sink in my room with a sign above it that said something to the effect of: Do not do laundry! (C'est interdit.) I did laundry in that sink every other day.

When I arrived in Paris it was sunny. And, because I'm like this, I went for a little walk, six or eight hours, from the edge of the Fifth up to the Eiffel Tower, and then over to the Sixteenth (where I ended up living for awhile) and down the other side. It is doubtful that I've ever been happier in my life. I didn't stop for a drink or a bite to eat; I just walked.

Eventually back to the Nevers, which, by the way, cost $7 a day. There was a WC on every floor, but only one salle de bain in the building, and you had to pay for that.  So I took A shower A week. I went to the pool every day, so I don't think that anyone found me disgusting. And there were plenty of people who could have found me disgusting.

(This is a boy I vaguely remember.)

There was a café next door on the rue  where I had two crèmes every morning and smoked cigarettes and wrote in my journal.  Don't judge me. The Luxembourg part of the equation was a block away, and... just bury me in the Luxembourg Gardens. I have never been in love with a place like the Luxembourg Gardens. A bit later, I discovered the most gorgeous painting I ever saw (fuck the Louvre).

So what I did, Georgetown graduate, big scholar (I paid attention in three classes -- why was I so bad at school?), was learn the town. I know it better than any place I ever knew. You could blindfold me. You shouldn't, but I could still get you to the Opera.

That's a good line.

Back then, I always got lost. But being lost in Paris is winning. One time I tried to meet my girlfriend
Agnès who worked at Galleries Lafayette... and never found the café. It was a particularly sultry day and I was particularly hungover, but still expected to find her and the sandwich. That's when you sing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CAzwewVjZ0


Agnès was from Velizy, which is near Versailles, and her mother eventually did my laundry (properly, not in the sink, although French people didn't have dryers). The missed lunch date may or may not have delayed my laundry by a day.

I was just an ass, but I had a good time.

My day would be like this: Wake up, drink a lot of coffee, go to the pool.  (Not so many museums.)  The pool, which no longer exists, was the Piscine Deligny.  (I have a very good French accent, better than yours.)  I would walk over to the pool around noon -- that walk through the Sixth is the best walk in this world. The pool was on a barge in the Seine. I took everything for granted then. If I wanted to see a Monet, I could. (No.) Or.... just tan on a barge in the Seine.(Yes.) From the Deligny, you looked up at those beautiful white/off-white French apartment buildings with orange awnings.

There was this song (there were so many good songs that summer!) by Isabelle Adjani called Pull Marine. There is hopefully a pun here but my French ends short of it. Pull means sweater. It's a very bad song.

What was good that summer is anything by Tina Turner and (apologies) Girls Just Want to Have Fun and You Take My Self Control by the amazing Laura Branigan and -- most important -- It's My Life.

It's My Life defines Paris in 1984.

Eventually, deciding to be productive, I took a class at Alliance Francais. (Later, as a slightly more serious person, I used to take classes at Alliance Francais in New York. With broadcasters. At one point I got kind of good at French.)

My Alliance class in Paris was filled with a motley crew of tourists like me, none of us from the same country. We had an outing in the Luxembourg Gardens, and the thing to know about the Luxembourg Gardens, my resting place, is that they have these impossibly lovely little cultivated mini-gardens that will break your heart. And we all sat in one -- I could take you there -- and talked French. In the midst of it, this Spanish guy, a real card, stole my wallet to be funny. I had no idea he'd even touched me. Precursor to this other not-funny guy who thought about pushing me into the Seine but settled for stealing all my francs from Olivier's apartment, which... Separate post coming about living chez Odile and then chez Olivier. (All French people, truly, having left Paris for Aout.)

I couldn't tell a good French joke to save my life. Or take a decent shower. Or judge a pony club competition -- I forgot to tell you about the pony club. Agnès and her younger sister were horsey, I guess, and took me and my American Friend Brian to Fontainebleau one rainy weekend for the pony club competition. We stayed in a vacant dorm -- can't explain it -- straight out of Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Brian and I so hated the dorm that we went out in the pouring rain and put up a pup tent. I don't know why there was a pup tent, but Brian was backpacking through Europe.

The competition, however, was amazing. In Fontainebleau, they had these paths through the woods and the judges (comme Agnès) had walky talkys. And our job was to hide behind trees and then communicate the results.

You can write this on my tombstone in the Luxembourg Gardens:  Obstacle Numero Trois Bien Franché! 
That will always make me laugh. I can't find any record of this word online, so take it with a grain of sel.
Sleep deprivation from a pup tent?

I did nothing well in Paris except be handsome and laundered.

Agnès would scratch my back in the morning and those guys were all bad news.

There was an Army radio station that had like 25 songs on heavy rotation. One went, "I could get over it, if you could get over here,"  If you can find this song I will give you a thousand dollars. Love Will Tear Us Apart and Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now were present, along with Talking Loud and Clear.  Were they trying to kill the armed forces, or get them dancing?

Agnès had a boyfriend (of course) from Munich and he came to Paris in August and drove us very badly at night. Uli in the Etoile was petrifying. But he played Talking Loud and Clear. And of course he loved me, the guy sleeping with his girlfriend... The only big surprise was that we'd come out of Le Petit Prince and his antenna would be snapped and his car keyed and I'd be upset and he and Agnès nonplussed.

He had German plates.

Euchre Uber Alles

Recently wrote about the oddity of Montrose having a jukebox on the lawn. It's actually funny to think about everything Montrose-related. Like the tadpole stuff in the water and Euchre, which seems a very random game to have adopted, Gretchen. And just the worst food! Cotton candy and popcorn and hot dogs and Coke. You would spend the entire day there eating... And then be STARVING for dinner. I have never been so hungry in my life as coming home from Montrose.

For some reason we felt it necessary to do everything. You'd driven all that way...  So, for example, I dived off the high dive. The scariest thing in the world. Obviously played tennis on all of the courts. There were courts up high, and courts down below. In the winter, for a time, they put a bubble over the upper courts. This was when tennis was booming.

My best memories, though, are lying on the lawn by the jukebox and playing cards by the baby pool with Gretchen.

Don't tell your friends about the two of us...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhDtQtYZL8E

The Year of the Cat

Only alluding for forty years seems like an increasingly poor strategy.

In tenth grade, when we were fourteen or fifteen, Charlie died. I was the most stoic of the bunch -- and the one who never let it go.  

Initially my mother picked me up after swim team, in "November dinnertime darkness" was how I put it. Among many things that break my heart, she said, heading up Garman hill, something like, "Charlie and his dad didn't come back." (From a fishing trip in Michigan.)  And I didn't respond well.

Through some confusion, Firestone High School let a substitute teacher announce to an English class that C was dead, and then Carolyn found me in study hall and we were by definition hysterical, racing into the teachers' parking lot crying and laughing.

There was no attempt at school counseling, and sad to say useless parents. "You just seemed to want to be left alone."

Yes, I did. I wanted you as far away from everything that mattered to me as... really, there couldn't have been anything more grave, and I wanted your hands off. You had left me alone since four or five, you'd never inquired about my cuts and bruises, you'd never done anything that parents do except love me. And I was easy. 

About Charlie: Handsome, great hair. Mom says she always thought that he was too pretty, which is funny, because I think that people thought that of me. He looked like all of us, which was slender with a big sweep of 70s brown hair and some freckles and... brown eyes? I don't remember thinking any of us were so good looking; just that all of us were better looking.

Charlie misspoke, said "I don't matter" one time, mixing up I don't care and it doesn't matter. That'll break your heart. But he also wasn't particularly nice. He picked favorites, caused rifts, reacted badly to any kind of literary overture. But always went for guys like me and Steve and Pat who were literary.

So much of what you do from 6th to 10th grade is listen to music, and Charlie learned guitar. Today I hate a good 50% of what we listened to (I can't bear Elton John or Kiss or Queen or a bunch of guitar bands I've forgotten the name of.) I resent it. I think about being downstairs in the den by Charlie's bedroom, in the Reymann's modern house... A house made of cedar, I think, with cut-your-hands rough stucco walls inside, and many levels off a siloed staircase, all on a hillside just beneath the railroad tracks, overlooking Lafayette. Belleau Wood. I could be making these words up. 

My parents were vaguely appalled by Charlie's house. (Anytime they disapproved of something it was vaguely, silently for the most part, and yet we always knew.) They thought that cars were dumb and that Akronites were ridiculously snobbish about a not particularly fancy town. They saw no reason to join a country club, not being golfers, and rightly judged the tennis courts at Montrose to be far superior to those at Fairlawn Swim and Tennis. Dad found a place to sail and Mom joined League of Women Voters. Dad took anyone who wanted to ski every single weekend.

I was fond of Charlie's house, weird as it was. There was a loft in the silo above his parents'  room that I particularly liked, where we listened to A Wizard, A True Star over and over. At  Charlie's  house, as at my house, there were rarely parents around. Were they all out dancing? At a secret parents club?

There are a bunch of songs that I associate with Charlie. One, Baby I Love Your Way, is unlistenable to me. (When they played it in Reality Bites I almost left the theater.) All of Frampton Comes Alive is off limits. Todd Rundgren, as mentioned. Daniel by Elton John -- the only tolerable Elton John song and it makes me think of Charlie and Steve Wise, who is another story.

And The Year of the Cat. It was a big radio hit but for some reason I think Charlie's sister Liz introduced it to us. It made me think about how DRAMATIC life could be, which is appealing at fourteen. Well, always appealing, until you figure out that the drama in your life is just going to always fucking hurt.

Madison Avenue

It’s a little souvenir

of a terrible year

I was already off track

No one really lives
on Madison Avenue

No one spends money
at D'Agostino or buys grilled cheese
behind Eliot Spitzer

No one has a fancy bike stolen
and refuses to believe
looks around for weeks

I will grow older for not having
had to carry that
piece of shit  up stairs

In July a French girl
knocked on the door

Below me, below my
nearly nonexistent apartment
there was gas in the air

Messing around with matches
and a pilot light
we could have
gone to hell

But no

On my shin
six years later
a crocodile scar

The ugliest thing
you ever saw

There weren’t always lovely
French girls downstairs

There were dogs in distress

And I guess I’d take a scar for that

I guess I did

I’ve got the worst
goddamn scar on my leg
from being kicked in a corner
at the top of a staircase
on Madison Avenue

Where no one ever lived

Sportif

I watch a ludicrous number of sports on TV for a ridiculous number of hours a gruesome number of days a year.

Numbers! Watch sports even occasionally and you'll be overwhelmed by numbers. Quarterback ratings, on-base percentages, triple-doubles... And everything in tennis, my true love, corresponds with a statistic ― many of which fly in the face of the reality of the match.

(Btw, I am watching the Miami Open pre-game show as I write this. Tennis Channel is killing it!)

Anyway, I figure I could profitably cut my sports watching in half and apply that time to reading, writing and arithmetic (or perhaps two out of three). Here is how that might look:

Football ― 70% reduction. Well, I should really give up on football entirely. The concussion problem is real and the league is corrupt and Goodell is a Trump-worthy villain and the two biggest quarterback stars of the past decade are liars. But when fall comes around and there is a close game in a packed bar on a crisp, sunny day, it taps into a lifetime of cozy feelings that fight reason. So for now I'll just watch the home team. I do like that Kirk Cousins... This will leave dozens and dozens of hours for Proust.

Baseball ― No reduction. The nice thing about baseball is that it's ideal for multi-tasking. I CAN actually read while watching baseball; the sounds of the game, learned over a lifetime, inform you when to look up. You'll almost never miss a home run or a double play or even a steal. And you can put down that book when Scherzer is five innings into another no-hitter. I love baseball and see no reason to adjust my habits here.

Basketball ― 65% reduction, already in effect. Last year was the first year I watched an entire season of pro ball, and I didn't get what the journos were saying about the lead-up to April. This year I do: There is no reason to watch regular-season basketball. Wait until the playoffs, which go on for months anyway. I'll be watching every Cavs game and maybe a few others. But really it's all about the Cavs. (Oh, and this year I gave up March Madness too. If Georgetown ever makes a serious run again, I'll opt back in.) Result: Several blog posts, several poems, return to a journal.

Golf ― No reduction. I take a lot of guff for this, but I love watching the majors. This too can be accomplished with a book in hand, and in any case it's only the weekend rounds that really engage. P.S. I have been on a golf course once in my life and remember nothing about it except that I didn't know what I was doing. Proof that you don't need to have played a sport to understand its difficulty, to appreciate the superhuman talent of the athletes, to get into the drama of a close finish/playoff.

Soccer is an every-four-year activity for me. I couldn't love World Cup more and couldn't be less interested in day-to-day league play. Hockey I am immune to. Boxing is only to be watched live, on someone else's
(Remy Martin's) dime. The Olympics ― well, all bets are off.

And now Tennis ― 30% reduction, no promises. I think that I could probably give up every tournament between the Australian Open and Indian Wells without too much damage to my equilibrium. And eventually I do grow weary with the long clay court season. But the North American summer hard court season is the most happy-making sporting stretch in the world. Okay, I probably don't have to watch quite so many first- and second-round matches at EVERY tournament. It's just that tennis is the only sport I actually play and the one I really understand inside-out and I probably have seen all Top 100 men and Top 100 women in action... There's just too much water under the bridge to bail out now. And you never know. Perhaps there's still a broadcasting career in my future.

I should get on that. I'm good with numbers.

Provincetown (I Can Be Your Buddy)

On a night like this
you can’t brush away 
all the faces in the street

Shep flew into Boston and killed some hours at the art museum by the ferry. It was a good show of photographers, so he spent more time than usual with it. Nan Goldin, with whom he’d played pool, and some other folks that Nadia knew from Cambridge. Then lunch by the boat, with wine. He shared his table with this woman from St. Louis or Kansas City, some place he’d never been, got a little bit drunk and then boarded. Boston Harbor was amazing to pull out of, gorgeous. He had a beer or two and smoked some cigarettes and listened to his music. Eventually the city was gone and there was just sun and sea spray and… It was loud and Shep put on his earphones and listened to The Clientele.  

Darling, there's a big fog up ahead

We ferried into Provincetown in the mid-afternoon and Nadia met me at the dock. She had a place for me to stay up Commercial Street.  It was a carriage house at the art gallery end of things. The big famous author of Provincetown lived across the street. We went there for weirdly stiff cocktails and then Nadia left to perform.I have no idea what happened for the next few hours.

Presumably Shep took a shower in an unfamiliar place and got good-looking again. And went to a show, or a couple of shows. That was the August of the girls who did circus tricks. There was wholly enjoyable silliness at that one club that looked like every house he lived in growing up, in Alexandria, Maplewood, and Akron. Like a gin and tonic in a salty room.

And then Provincetown closed.

So the deal is that you go and have a slice of pizza with everyone else. And it’s lovely. It’s a street party and there are these cute Irish kids managing the pizza distribution and you are starving for that pizza and looking around at guys, at midnight. It had been a very long day and Shep was sort of exhaustedly reeling at the side of the road when he saw Leo. They started laughing at each other immediately.

Shep said you look like you are from Argentina and Leo said Shep looked like he was from Germany. And that became their schtick: “Argentina.” “Germany.” Shep had a long crew cut and was sunburned from the boat and as always with a sunburn his eyes looked very green, and Leo was baked from a summer in Provincetown with olive skin and light blue eyes anyway, so... Somehow the mutual-misattribution made sense.

They traded numbers, touched hands, and made plans to meet the next night.

The usual thing in Provincetown, having gone to bed absurdly early in a party town, is to wake up and find a cup of coffee and get on your bike and pick up a sandwich and ride over to the place where everybody chains them, then walk across the flatlands, through sand and shallow water, to the dunes. (Well, it’s all I ever did. Maybe other people drove. Lesbians with children certainly used the parking lot near the water.) Up over the steep sand hills to the beach, a none-too-wide strip with painfully sharp rocks. No East Hampton. No North Carolina. Unless you are me, you probably don’t even go in the ocean.

Nadia and her guys would walk up and down the shore along with all of the other performers, passing out flyers for their show.

After a full day at the beach, I got myself some dinner at the bar of a restaurant overlooking the bay and talked to a nice female couple from Boston. I was killing time. I’d told Leo I would meet him at some place at midnight, after he got off work. He was a waiter. A big Russian financial genius working as a waiter. Leave it to me to find that kind of guy. On the beach, everyone had been funnier than me. My jokes did not come off. But the Boston ladies found me hilarious.

After dinner, I saw Nadia's show and then another, both uproarious (P-town does comedy so well, if you choose correctly), and then headed to the after-hours alt-piano bar (rock 'n roll and subculture patter) where Leo was to meet me. At first I had a great time with my group of stand-ups, trapeze artists, drag queens, etc., but the clock was ticking and eventually I became agitated to the point that I could no longer hear a word that anyone said.

And then he came. With his fucking beautiful lugubrious Russian attitude. "Oh God, the restaurant made me close because somebody didn't show up for work. It was very irritating." The great thing was that shining through his accent and his affect was his own agitation. We got drinks and held hands a little bit when we thought no one was looking and laughed at each other. Then I took him back to my place and we had a beer and climbed into the loft.

I think I’m such a sweetheart. What if I’m a brute?

Leo was well gone by the time that Shep woke up, and Shep was foggy. Nadia and a bunch of guys came by and grabbed him and drove him to Truro, to a clear water hole in the middle of the woods. Shep left a message for Leo about their destination, but didn't hear back. The water was glorious and he swam joyfully. And then they broke for lunch and a snake slithered past them into the water. It was all he could do to get himself back in afterwards, but he bucked up and did it. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, in the tree-dappled sunlight, he said something ever-so-casual about Leo and it turned out that this particular Russian was famous. He had a boyfriend back in New York, it was said. He was part of some non-specific Russo-Boston Mafia, it was said.

Shep was still wondering what he may or may not have done the night before.

Between his hangover and the snake, Shep was feeling slightly negative (entirely negative) by the time he got back home. So inward-scraping that he didn't notice what Leo had left for him by the doorstep. He was very unhappy, so he chose to go get Provincetown drunk. Life is not fantastic when you wake up on a gorgeous day fuzzy but excited and then find out that the handsomest laughing man you have ever met has another boyfriend. Who is presumably superior to you.

But it was my vacation, so more Provincetown theater was in order. I was on my bike, as ever. Very little walking is done in Provincetown. I knew that Leo was waiting tables, knew I wouldn't run into him, but still did a pretty ineffectual job of the night. I left wherever I went early and was wheeling my bike up Commercial Street, all energy drained, when I heard a voice -- a guy sitting on a fence.

Shep was walking his bike up the road and this guy went, “Hey?” A cute boy with a big smile. He was parked on a kind of wrought iron fence at the edge of a property. He was very sunny for such a dark night. Pleasantries were exchanged,  humorous banter, though Shep was in the opposite of the mood.

“I know how to do stuff.”

“I bet you do.”

He’d parked himself beside the road and he was pitching me.

“I’m not good at walking, but…”

For all his faults, Shep had a severe tenderness for guys with ambulatory challenges. And folks with bad teeth. And people passing out flyers on the corner of 14^th Street. (Just take the fucking flyer! You can throw it away on the next block!)

I’m not an asshole, so I helped him up the hill and apologized for being otherwise smitten.

I walked in. I walked in now. I walked in with nothing

The next morning, Leo showed up bright and early at the house. He brought pastries and coffee and pointed out the flowers he'd left the day before. It was a rainy day. No, first it was a sunny day. He must have cared a bit about me, because he’d arranged some flowers in a way that I was suppose to see. That spelled my name.

We ate what he'd brought, then walked across the street to where there was a small patch of sand and went swimming in the bay. Splashed each other, lunged at each other and laughed. The kind of behavior that would make you cringe if you were served it by a movie. But all I ever wanted.

We went back to his place over a garage and Leo made a more elaborate breakfast -- eggs and bacon and other stuff, probably potatoes, all great. He told me about leaving the flower pattern and how insulted he was that I hadn't picked it up. I didn’t tell him about the guy on the fence. He was still a bit embarrassed about how… masculine I was. And I’m not like that. I just thought he was so beautiful. So Argentinean. I asked him if he had a boyfriend and he said no, just a guy he saw in New York.

So I fell in love. I damn well vetted the situation. I didn’t just jump into the water like the day before, without awareness of snakes.

By now it was raining, so no beach in the plans. Instead we got into his bed and had fun. And napped. And then got up and watched Miss Congeniality while I wrote him a business school essay. We spent a long afternoon on the couch, accomplishing things, feet touching. 

Around four or five we went to the market and got oysters and wine to take back to my place. Then met Nadia and her parents for a drink.You know when you’re newly in love with somebody, not truly in control, and you go out for a drink? And your only options are to sit silently or laugh too hard? To say nothing or to talk non-stop? Nadia’s parents must have thought I was nuts.

Back home, Leo stabbed the shit out of his hand trying to open an oyster. Considerable blood, no Band Aids.

When I was a kid we stayed in Hyannis. You could stamp on the sand and the oysters would shoot up. We took a bus into Provincetown and went up in the tower. And made spin art.

Shep thought that Leo was as beautiful as that. He encompassed every bit of happiness Shep had ever felt by the beach. Once in a while, on a street car in New Orleans, on AMTRAK, in a plane or some other mode of transportation, Shep fell in love with the idea of love… His problem was that he didn’t ever like specific boys that much. Having determined that he preferred them generally, he was a failure at the particular. He would often rather kiss a girl. A shy waitress or an outgoing acrobat.

On Horatio Street, at his most lonely, he'd had these long drawn-out situations with guys, mostly men who were Nadia’s best friends. T built shelves for him an D hung out on his bed talking about books – great books, too. And they were both fantastic-looking men and he couldn’t wait for them to leave so that he could write about it.

There was another guy at Scott’s parties on Christopher Street who was even more beautiful and clearly didn’t care for him. One time, Gay Pride, Nadia gave him mushrooms and while he didn’t really feel anything psychedelic he did feel bold enough to make a pass and old Tom Jones just scowled at him like, “you’re out of your league.” Which made him laugh. Perversely.  

But Shep digresses. After the second night, Leo broke down. "I can't keep kissing you. My boyfriend in New York..." You'd think Shep would have been angry, but he wasn't. He felt that Leo should have a boyfriend and, honestly, thought he might still win. Which he didn't. And he was too far gone to care about character. He just wanted Leo around. All the time.

The boyfriend, by the way, was said to look  a lot like him. Nadia met him later and said, "He's very good looking in just the ways you are."

Which makes you think, well, what do I have to offer? I have nothing but allegiance. I can take the ferry and I can be your pal. I can laugh at you, knowing that above all things you want to be laughed at. Nobody is jumping at this opportunity, but…

I can be your buddy.

About England - Part Two - London

As good as my memory is, I don't really remember when I went back to England. For the sake of convenience (for the sake of this blog) I am going to say it was with The Macallan in 1998. A long time from 1984. I flew first via Heathrow to Aberdeen, where a cab picked me up for the hour and a half drive to Speyside. My driver was a talkative motherly woman with a dry wit. All Scots have a dry wit. She spent most of the ride telling me that she did not believe Monica Lewinsky. All Europeans love Bill Clinton.

On not much sleep I arrived at The Macallan manor house and was immediately served a whisky. It was 11:00 in the morning there and five or six for me, so... This was followed by lunch with much wine and (seriously) haggis. It was a gourmet kind of haggis and I like weird food anyway, so that was fine. A day then learning about whisky-making and salmon. The guy who ran the salmon place was very handsome and charming and it turned out my companion for the evening. At the Craigellachie Inn (since gotten much fancier) we sampled other single malts and had a fantastic steak dinner. The next morning I had an astonishing hangover ― a clear-headed outright headache and gueule de bois... Thank God for the steaming bath. (Still no showers in Great Britain!)

I flew back to London that night, remember having a Barr's soda from the vending machine at the airport (not good, like Vernor's) and went immediately to a Macallan dinner at one of the trendiest restaurants in town. Perhaps in Chelsea. I think that one of the most glamorous moments in my life was walking into that restaurant, directly from the airport, in an Armani suit. Heads may literally have turned.

They'd put us up in this ultra-twee small hotel in Kensington. A couple of blocks from Harrod's. My primary memory of that place ― other than how tiny my room was and how extremely plaid ― is that you could not make it in or out of the lobby without somebody saying "Mr. Barr..." Barr by the way is a Scottish name but the English say it terribly. It drove me crazy how they said my name and even more this insistence on identifying me as I walked in and out.

I probably knew where I was ultimately headed, which was to the bars in Soho to meet young men who might want to come back to a terrible twee hotel. Oh and I had formal tea there with the client, which was just not something I am inclined to appreciate. Formal tea is not my thing. Tea is not my thing. Formality is not my thing. Social occasions in which spirits are not involved... not my thing.

There was an event, there were meetings... and whenever they were over I was on Old Compton Street as fast as I could get there. I met this Cockney kid who was great and who spent a couple of nights teaching me rhyming slang. On Sunday he helped carry my luggage to the cab as I departed to a chorus of (slightly aghast) "Mr. Barrs."

Stay tuned for Part Three...