Sex and the Other City

You guys are all cracking me up today! I wouldn’t know where to begin commenting. rob, DIBS, you’re both in rare form today. Kudos to Park Sloper and Heather! (Muffy, you gotta lighten up already!)

Nice hook, dibs! I am now curious!

The rain was coming down even harder now, and Benson had no umbrella. He stood outside the door of the converted coffin factory where the writer’s group was meeting. He couldn’t go back in, he just couldn’t. Just as he was about to amble on home in the rain, the door suddenly opened. It was the young blonde, her quivering mounds more beautiful than ever.

“You forgot your hat,” she said, handing it to him. She opened her large umbrella and held it over both of them.

“Are you heading back to Park Slope?” he asked her. “Maybe we could grab a drink together somewhere on Fifth Avenue….”

OK…seriously. I started to write a book awhile back; quite awhile back, but never get much done on it. Here’s the first chapter:

Prologue
A Drink

Among the strongest cocktails for trouble are an insatiable appetite for sex mixed with the fear of being alone.

It was a Thursday night about 9:00 PM in May of 2009 when I had just sat down to have a cocktail – a Bombay Sapphire and Tonic- at The Regency. The Regency is one of those places that I hated frequenting but the bartenders there usually made a good drink even if they didn’t know you and it was only a few blocks from my townhouse. They knew me. It’s not your regular kind of parquet floor and juke box kind of bar. This place, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; had a nice Tartan plaid carpet, pale green wainscoting, wide stripe maroon and gold wallpaper and those 2” wide venetian blinds with the wide strap belting. The bar itself was mahogany. It had a solid brass bar rail and waiter station. The ever-present mirror to the back was panel cut glass.

It was fairly quiet there that night; a few men at the far corner of the bar, the backroom a bit more crowded with a piano player pounding out something I hadn’t yet recognized. I was trying to mind my own business until I saw a couple of guys come in and proceed to sit down next to me and order. The younger of the two asked for a Heineken. He had a Cantonese accent which meant he was born in southern China or, more likely Hong Kong which, after the 1997 handover is now part of southern China. The guy was wearing black pants, light wool, Italian cut. His shirt was buttoned up to his neck and was a custom made Egyptian cotton, a deep green with a fairly narrow-collar. Oddly though with this ensemble were the cowboy boots; real ones…Stetsons. The other one who I had guessed to be about 30-35 and older than the first He was dressed in chinos, a brown plaid sport jacket and a yellow Oxford button-down shirt. I didn’t happen to notice the shoes. What caught me was his heavy Thai accent and from my knowledge of that country, he probably was born on the Thailand-Laos border. He ordered a Chivas–coke. Now you may think this a strange combination but not if you spend any time in Asia. Asians order all kind of concoctions that might seem strange to Americans and Chivas-coke or Brandy-coke are not at all uncommon. The odder combination was the was to see a native Thai befriending a native Hong Kong guy.

They were of course speaking English when they ordered and in their conversation to each other. It seems that they had both just flown into New York. They had asked how each others’ flights were and how the hotel accomodations were measuring up. Heard that the Chinese guy was staying at the Plaza Athenae and the other one was at the Mark. Both of these I would consider five-star hotels and the Plaza Athenae has one of the best eggs benedict I’ve ever had…topped with a goodly amount of truffle shavings. They seem to have not seen each other for a number of years as there was a lot of catch-up talk about travel and sexual conquests. Amazingly they had just figured out that they had both had just been in Sydney, Australia around the same time last year and they had even figured out they might have been in the same bar the same evening. All of this took place over a few rounds of drinks and the conversation got a little louder with each roud so that by the time they were on their third, my second, I could follow the whole converssation from two seats away with little trouble.

It was during that third drink that the conversation went like this:

The Thai fellow said: “It looks like we’re all set. We both know what he likes and he’ll be pretty much wasted on coke at the party.”

“Yeah, this Goldman Sachs guy is such an easy target. If this weren’t going to be the last of our escapades we’d probably settle for robbing his penthouse of some artwork and be done with it.”

“We’re in a different league now, Kevin” said the Thai.

At this point I need to begin explaining how in the world I might be able to ascertain that one of these guys was Thai and the other was Cantonese. Well that’s where this story really begins.