ROLL OVER JOHN LENNON (AND TELL KURT COBAIN THE NEWS)
Fabio is a sixty-year old visual artist who lives and works in a loft on Forsyth Street. He was born in San Francisco, came to Manhattan in 1966 to attend Columbia, and has been living in downtown Manhattan since the mid-70s, first in Soho and later on the Lower East Side.
Gerard is a thirty eight year old composer who lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Suffolk Street. He was born in London, moved to Manhattan at eighteen to attend Julliard, and then moved to the East Village, originally to a squatter building, in the early 90s, right after graduation.
It’s Happy Hour at The Wobblie Wonk on Rivington Street. As “I Wanna Hold Your Hand at the Hotel California” begins to ooze from a satellite radio station, Gerard and Fabio, who had been sitting silently next to each other, begin talking.
G: Fucking Beagles really suck… Fucking boomers really suck… Why has this bar started pandering to empty nesters from the ‘burbs who have just bought brand new pied-a-terres in our once dangerous neighborhood?
F: I actually don’t share your disdain for the new arrivals. They can be amusing to talk to, if somewhat limited, although you’re right, their music does totally suck. But junkies are way overrated as neighbors. I’m rather happy they’ve gone somewhere else to nod off and overdose.
G: But don’t you object on a cultural level? Isn’t this music extremely painful to listen to?
F: That’s a different matter. Boobus boomerus, whose geographical range extends from North America to Europe and Japan, is closely related to boobus americanus, the species of human being first identified by H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, and only found in the United States.
G: ’Cuz who needs a CD by Billy Joel/Is dat all yuh get faw yaw munnnney…’
F: Isn’t it curious that the Greatest Generation spawned the Lousiest Generation?
G: But you’re a boomer aren’t you?
F: No. I am in the same age cohort as the boomers, that’s undeniable, but by all standards of taste, civility and intellectual orientation, I am most decidedly not a boomer, as the term is popularly understood.
G: The most typical examples of your boobus boomerus I ever observed were a mom and dad in their late forties or early fifties out to dinner with their ten year old son at a now defunct barbecue restaurant on Varick Street. This was about ten years ago. Dad had a receding hairline and a greasy ponytail. Mom was soft and flabby and wearing clothes that, given her body type, showed way too much flesh. Both of them were wearing Birkenstocks over their dirty feet. Mom and dad were on one side of the booth swaying back and forth Kumbaya style as they serenaded their embarrassed offspring with an off- key rendition of Sweet Baby James’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
F: Who along with his astonishingly bovine ex-spouse won a Crummy Award for Most Ludicrous Honky Cover Of An R&B Classic for their emetic version of “Mockingbird”.
G: I want to blow up the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and sample sounds of the explosion in the last movement of a symphony. That little cunt Rhymin’ Paul “Fifty Ways to Leave Mama Pyjama And Still Boring After All These Years” Simon was “elected” to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That’s about as valid an outcome as George W. Bush’s “election” in the 2000 presidential race. All communiqués to the media about the bombing will be from The G. G. Allin Liberation Front. He should be in the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not wankers like the aforementioned or fucking Elton John and the cocksucking Bee Gees.
F: Or is it “….the fucking Bee Gees and cocksucking Elton John?” But in any event I would advise you to save your Semtex for a less risible target. Especially since that twelve-tone composition of yours, “Roll Over John Lennon (And Tell Kurt Cobain The News)”, would make you an obvious and highly visible potential suspect.
G: I saw your friend Jennie Lee in action at Verlaine two nights ago.
F: Jenny Lee is a real Action Faction throwback. What was she up to?
G: Minding her own business, sitting at the bar, when this young hedge fund type, quite full of himself, sat down next to her. She let him buy her a drink and they talked for a few minutes.
F: Let me guess. Jenny Lee, who can charm the skin off a snake while constructing formal logic problems in her head, accidentally aroused certain urges in young Mistah Hedgie.
G: Who leaned into her like he would lean into Jamie Dimon when closing on a bridge loan for a buyout. He put his arm across her shoulder as he said: “You are sooooo fuckable.” To which she smiled broadly and sweetly replied: “I am sooooo fuckable.” Then she grabbed her glass of Campari off the bar and emptied its contents in his face as she snarled: “But not by a swine like you.” And sat there laughing as he dashed off to the gents to try to get the Campari off of his $2,500 pale gray Thom Browne suit.
F: That encounter was no doubt caught on video with an assist from someone on the bar staff. My guess is that it will appear in her upcoming show at Pattie Wilkerson’s Wastrel Gallery on 24th Street. Young Mistah Hedgie’s face will of course be blurred beyond recognition or substituted for. The working title of Jenny Lee’s show is “Provocations.”
G: Darts?
F: A splendid idea.
G: Two games, double or nothing, a hundred dollars a game?
F: You’re on.
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