A Fig, a Red, Red, Rose, and Eggs Benedict

Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Greenwich Village (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A view of the park showing the Washington Square Arch and the central fountain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Parish church in the community of Wolfsberg - Sacred-heart-altar - Aaron Deutsch: Pfarrkirche Wolfsberg in der Gemeinde Wolfsberg - Herz-Jesu-Altar - Aaron (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1180 Raymond Blvd., Newark, NJ (Photo credit: SheepGuardingLlama)

At fifteen, in Greenwich Village, he was discovered by a woman whose prominent husband, Raymond, had a sexual predilection and member of a clandestine network. Those with intimate knowledge of what occurred in these private clubs, had to adhere to a code, insuring that those involved would remain anonymous. These were often successful members of society and they had to conceal their esoteric sensual souls for fear they would lose their position in our social hierarchy. They required the indoctrination of young men, and some women, who had to perform compositions the members of this collective had created from the compost of screen reminiscences. These performers had to possess certain physical attributes but more important than their look was their empathy, tolerance for the macabre, and without flinching in the heat of the most inspired execution of the character they were hired to assume.

Given the joys of gossip, it was difficult to refrain from discussing their clients uncommon behavior, and if hey could not control the temptations inherent in gossip, they faced the most dire consequences that based on my own harrowing experiences, included death. The actors embodied roles scripted according to those who paid them to realize their most idiosyncratic sexual scripts. Most patrons devised these performance with consummate attention to detail. In those days, many unenlightened and rigid members of society would have deemed their associates sexual appetites as malignant flowers in the bouquet of human sexual behavior. Personal physical allure was dependent on its correlation with the roles those who paid Aaron and others as disposable objects, performers, and disposable surrogates.

Since paraphilias, abnormal loves, or erotic hatreds are almost the exclusive territory of men—and heterosexual men in Aaron’s case—physical beauty was less important than in more traditional sensual fantasies. A client’s compositions often had complex roles and they had to remain interred and gaffes in decorum, it bears repeating, often had lethal conclusions. If the toxic winds of human gossip exhumed these intimate tales this breach in etiquette provided their less enlightened competitors, enemies, friends, and even lovers with what they might have considered perverse, or a weakness they could exploit. At best, they would appear odd, leading to disastrous personal and financial consequences.

Such unconventional behavior in their social strata made this form of exploitation, blackmail, and or worse, and were the very reasons that necessitated the creation of this surreptitous network. Aaron soon learned of these dangers subsumed beneath the giddy mask of sanity many wear to conceal the malignancy of their pathological sexual desires.

This world was so alien to the façade of pristine virtues in suburbia where the boy lived that the cultural transition was a profound emotional shock. All the concomitant acts of violence a player learned, either too late or not at all, were instances was an agreed end game by those that had seduced children to perform on this underground stage in the theater of the most absurd.

None of these perils occurred to a fifteen-year-old kid from Great Neck bedazzled by his roiling hormonal squall, making him incapable of passing on an invitation from a woman, named Lana, whose comeliness elicited in him a most profound visceral hunger. Prior knowledge would have failed to make him hesitate when she had proffered him an invitation to dine at her home with her and her husband. Aaron had thought he knew and had become habituated to the shock of the Village in comparison to the suburbs would learn the false illusion of youthful immortality made fools of us all.

If he was concerned about his existence, and what fifteen-year-old child could ponder the stench of senescence while blinded by the odd paradox inherent in youth that despite the biological conclusion of our lives, Death had failed to seduce him into thinking he was anything but inviolate and he belived, while all evidnce led to the contrary, that he was shielded from the erosions of the flesh, plaguing those less fortunate. If not for that delusion, Aaron’s precocious sensual soul, like many boys his age, manifested itself as a form of madness.

The thick cords of Lana's hair formed a diadem atop her crown. When worn without pins, the red highlights of her auburn mane tickled her sacrum as she sat in her chair at one end of the table that night. Across the mahogany divide, her husband, Raymond, the hulking owner of a famed Village bistro, sat in his purple velvet smoking jacket, and a matching eye patch over his right socket. The interstices in the weave of her black chemise permitted Aaron a glimpse of her silken flesh. He had met her in his parents’ beauty salon where he worked every Saturday. Lana’s green eyes, or Aaron’s jejune sense of the world, had failed to reveal any reason for anxiety and not a dissociated tickle of dread foreshadowed the intimate nature of his implausible postprandial audition.

In their russet-colored townhouse near Washington Square Park, he thought they’d invited him because Lana was a kind and amiable customer, and her gratitude for the consideration she had received was handed down to Aaron in the form of this invitation to dinner. Chicken Kiev—served by their Japanese houseboy—while the simplistic overture for the modest play that initiated him into the network. Raymond was an intimidating presence whose palpable sense of menace was enhanced by his eye patch. Aaron wondered if Lana’s beauty was worth the sense of horror and foreboding he had begun to perceive once he was seated.

Dapper in his ascot and monogrammed smoking jacket, Raymond began delving into Aaron’s precocious sexual history. Raymond’s fascination for the details of the boy’s juvenile amatory journey struck Aaron as bizarre but inherent in this situation, it triggered Aaron’s need to please and he divulged the maddening details he etched in the slim volume of his life devoted to the feminine somatotype and sensibilities.

As Aaron spoke, he saw his sexual longings as if an aberrant erotic prison, and whether his disclosure increased his perturbation and desire, he could not say, given Lana’s beauty and presence that served as an unguent and if it did not diminish his angst it provided an unguent. She induced in Aaron a mental stammer whenever he noticed her wry smile eliciting the slight tremor of her upper lip, a wink, whose image violated him, causing his heart to slice extra beats especially when he noted a corresponding smirk ruffle Raymond’s lips. His quest for the nuances of Aaron’s affection for girls continued to inspire Aaron’s account. Aaron believed, an accurate appraisal, this voyeurism aroused his host whose seat squawked while enduring Raymond’s mass and the childish pleasure he derived from each stroke as Aaron’s verbal brush clarified his erotic self-portrait. Whether, or not, Raymond’s patch was a conversation piece, or a necessity remained a disturbing mystery, a shroud draped over the rendering of this pseudo plunge into his premature historical intimacy.

Describing his avarice for every pretty girl or woman Aaron increased the unsettling force Raymond projected. He drew the boy into what Aaron conceived as a vortex his cloaked eye concealed and for what purpose remained unknown. His patch struck Aaron as irresistible and the thing’s insistence for him to return and stare at it with the same attentive visual caress as Lana had inspired. As if it existed on its own, the patch throbbed and Aaron found this force drawing him ever closer to something unspecific and Aaron needed a substantial conscious effort to suppress a maniacal scream. Aaron’s hands demanded an equal exertion to restrain from ripping the thing off the furtive wound, in his fancy, it cloaked. The more he spoke, the more compelling the impetus to grab it, and the restraint needed challenged his endurance and his will.

The patch its unknown but iconic meaning, amplified the pressure in Aaron’s chest, making him strain to breathe, and to control his sweaty hands. This feeling of sustained fear, and the curiosity regarding their invitation, caused Aaron to vacillate between mild approbation and terror. Yet, he found his confession as if drawn from the nexus of his soul by Raymond and it forced Aaron to dig deeper into the nadir and depths of his brief sensual life.

Raymond smiled then slapped the table and, “I knew it. I mentioned it to Lana and she thought I was nuts. You see darling, I have an eye for such things. Why the moment I saw you I knew you were perfect for…” His lips seized and silence reigned, the boy couldn't think but thanked his hosts as Raymond’s smile widened, and this demonic puppeteer with his huge head and oversized lone eye horrorified Aaron. He asked Aaron to tell him about the first time he had sexual intercourse. He chastised Aaron for skimming over details, and Aaron had the sense that if he did not tell him everything that happened it would… well, he did not know, but he knew he was in some initial stage of jeopardy.

Aaron’s impropriety registered in the swelling of Raymond’s concealed socket that defied reason and grew with every word until it had a slight but discernible gravitational pull, growing more robust and tumid with the explication of every disgorged detail, transforming the purity of Aaron’s lost virginity into an obscenity, and he could have sworn the fabric cloaking his empty orb had pulsated faster in his imagination with a dim auditory thumping. Yes, he would have sworn to all that violated reason and the laws of physics that the thing issued a clunk, an embryonic heartbeat whose volume escalated with each detail Aaron disgorged. He had the horrifying sense that it had a simple nervous system energized by Raymond's vicarious thrill in Aaron’s vivid composition. He tried to concentrate on Lana’s comeliness, but the lure of the bizarre organism breeding in secrecy was then in control of his consciousness.

Was the patch covering an injury? Was a new replacement being sized and prepared? Was its alternate soaking in their bedroom like dentures in a glass, or did the piece of cloth hide an empty socket. Given what ensued, Raymond might have had a miniature camera placed behind that curtain. Raymond despite his visual limitations, and advanced age, could've torn Aaron apart if events dictated the need for an aggressive response, and his dread in concert with his modesty soared.

We sipped Irish coffee and nibbled on pastries, and Raymond decided to step out for a bit of fresh air, and Aaron knew with disconcerting certitude that Lana and he had another destination. Anxiety and discomfort he perceived as a sense of physical and mental compression as Raymond’s departure defined his destiny. He had the brief thought his pelvis would crack while his scrotum contracted and expanded like a ragged accordion.

Lana clasped his hand and escorted him upstairs in silence and into a Victorian bedroom with a marble fireplace, a walnut bureau, mahogany bedside cupboards, a cheval glass, a four-poster, and paintings. Within an instant now, but an eternity then, they were on the bed as lone single hermaphroditic entity, and her exquisite face and body, despite the erosions of memory, her comeliness made him shiver, more in the future, then on that night. Tumescence was almost a constant in those testosterone-driven days—a car ride induced an erection—so short of severing his brainstem its painful and often embarrassing protuberance did not defer to dread and had he been older, given the alchemy of desire and awe, he may have disappointed his hosts.

Melding in oneness with Lana, a defiant crash usurped their combined greed, when Raymond, Aaron later learned, had dropped his camcorder, which was then the size of an air-conditioner. The clamor made both Aaron and Lana stifle a nitrous oxide laughter, but given the occasion, as if in the midst of a eulogy, they managed to contain their hysteria while the comfort he found in Lana’s laugh and subsequent smile caused but a brief interlude in their avarice. Despite Raymond’s muted groans and ham-handed destruction of his cinema verite’ composition, the show did indeed continue until the curtain descended.

Aaron wondered if Raymond screened his work for an upcoming family circle meeting. Aversion became joy, as he stared into the glaze of Lana’s eyes, and her smile, which contained a serene air of stoicism that concealed her mood. Aaron imagined the big pirate with cock in hand, seminal spew dribbling on his slacks as if an exclamation point to his catastrophic gaffe and ludicrous attempt to salvage his night's effort like a botched vaudeville act.

The less than fantastic denouement—to this routine script by the standards Aaron would portray in the circumscribed world of perverse loves whose rocky terrain he had surmounted when Lana’s silken thighs cuddle his head while his knees indented the velvet ottoman as if he had eaten a ceremonial wafer. Aaron’s behind, if Raymond regrouped to frame the scene for his camera, had to have been an appropriate concluding shot. Yet the humdrum events that transpired, the scotophilia enjoyed by a man of means and sophistication, and the odd sensation Aaron felt while falling in love with Raymond’s gorgeous wife was incomprehensible.

At the evening's conclusion, they sat in the library drinking brandy and eating pastries. Imbued with a sense of surreal disorientation, Aaron felt vertiginous. Based on Raymond’s recitation of the virtues of the brandy, Castello Banfi Grappa, Aaron decided it was a tad more expensive than a small nuclear device.

Raymond held a snifter up to the light. “Well, my friend, did you enjoy the evening?”

He swirled the brandy and sniffed it while staring at Aaron, and he wondered if under his eye patch, Raymond had winked.

“Yes, I did.” What would have transpired if he said he was bored?

“Did you enjoy the meal?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Good. My wife is a beautiful woman, isn’t she?”

Lana had a whimsical smile on her face throughout the night, and appeared to have interred her thoughts and feelings. She decided then to excuse herself to freshen up. Aaron considered that he might have misinterpreted Raymond's tone, its sense of menace as he slashed his words with a resonant baritone scratched by his heavy smokers’ corrupted larynx. Lana’s vaginal ambrosia mixed with semen in Aaron’s Jockey's, as he stuttered, “She's gorgeous.” His words were discharged as if buckshot as he vacillated between losing consciousness and mania.

“Then maybe we’ll see more of you.”

The temptation was torture as he choked back his splintered words. Unless you’re planning to give me a barium enema, you've seen just about all of me. “My calendar is open.” Sweat exploded from his every pore.

“Excellent.” He sipped his brandy, and Aaron followed suit.

He again sloshed his brandy studying it in the light, “This has a splendid waxy nose of fruits and lanolin.”Was he referring to laundry detergent? “It’s light, very ethereal, and crisp on the attack, with a fruity, light-to medium-bodied, perfumed green apple jam flavor. Am I right, Alan?”

I hesitated but corrected him. “Aaron.”

“Oh, of course, I’m dreadful with names. Ask Lana when she returns from dawdling. She has a cleanliness fetish. Did you know she douches several times a day?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“That was a joke. How could you possibly know?” He stared at his brandy. “Arno...David, uh, Aaron, take a sip. Notice the palate-tingling wave of peppery heat. It’s a nice fruity grappa without a bitter note in the entire symphony.”

He looked at Aaron, who was petrified, staring at this imposing Cyclops. Raymond asked if he wanted to preview a movie, he had shot. Before he could answer, Lana returned with an envelope. Inside was a check for two hundred dollars, a fortune. “For your trouble.”

“If this was trouble, you may…” His unarticulated thought was ‘if that’s trouble you can disembowel me with a Bowie knife.’ Lana heard, “Trouble me at your in … your convenience.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Lana winked which underlined his absurd comment. “You’ll have to leave now. Raymond wants me for himself now.”

His brain produced yet another inane comment, “What a hog.”

Lana escorted him to the door and kissed his fervid cheek. This mundane script had far more fantastic variations before its abrupt conclusion. Raymond and Lana introduced him into a labyrinth of wealthy and respected members of Manhattan society, many of whom were philanthropists, devotees of the arts, involved in television, film, theater, and business moguls who needed to maintain their mask of sanity.