I got inside, and got the tailgate shut behind me. The station wagon lurched forward just as the light turned red. The honker behind us didn’t make the signal and went on honking his distress at us as we sped away.
“Where are you going, Mad Poet?”
“Call him Larry. Can we call you Larry? Where are you going, Larry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you have a home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So we’ll take him home with us.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be brittle!”
“Utterly peanut. Should we kidnap you, Larry?”
“No one would ransom me.”
“Then we could keep you forever, and feed you peanut brittle and marmalade.”
“And treacle, and weak tea with cream in it.”
“How super if we could kidnap him.”
“Go ahead,” I put in. “Kidnap me. But treacle makes me ill and weak tea with cream in it is very hard to find. I’ll have jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, if that’s all the same to you.”
“Mad Poet knows Alice.”
“Mad Poet knew Alice long before you ever fell down any rabbit holes,” said Mad Poet. “And Mad Poet feels the same way about little girls that Lewis Carroll did.”
“Oh, super! Mad Poet’s a dirty old man.”
“But not that old.”
“How old are you, Mad Poet?”
“Thirty-two.”
“We’re sixteen. Except Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is fifteen.”
“A mere child,” murmured Naughty Nasty Nancy. She was one of the two in the back seat, and wore a peaked witch’s cap and granny glasses.
“Hey, Mad Poet! Where do you want to go?”
“Wherever you’re going,” I said.
A forest of giggles. “But we’re going to Darien!”
“Excellent.”
“That’s Darien, Connecticut!”
“Only Darien I know,” I said.
“Do you really want to come with us?”
“Wherever you want to go,” I said, “that’s where Mad Poet wants to go. Be it Darien or Delhi or Dubuque. Whither thou goest, Mad Poet shall go. Mad Poet loves you.”
“All of us?”
“All of you,” I agreed. “Mad Poet loves one and all, including Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is a mere child of fifteen. Mad Poet loves the daughters of Lancaster.”
“And the daughters of Lancaster love Mad Poet,” said a small voice at my side.
“How nice,” said Mad Poet. “How nice indeed.”
How nice, friend Steve. How nice indeed to be the Mad Poet, at once disarmingly drunk and brilliantly sober, joyously kidnapped by six winsome refugees from the Convent of the Holy Name. For six little maids from school were they, Steve, six little maids from one of those cloistered mausolea to which the Catholic aristocracy condemn their most nubile daughters for the duration of their delicious adolescences. They had stolen away that night shortly after bed check (bed check!) and had borrowed the car of their algebra teacher. Merry Cat was doing the driving. Merry Cat’s name is Mary Katherine O’Shea, and she possesses a license which allows her to drive in the State of Connecticut during daylight hours. If anyone had stopped Merry Cat, she would have been in a whole lot of trouble. No one did, and she wasn’t.
Merry Cat is sixteen, as are all of them but Naughty Nasty Nancy, the fifteen-year-old witch-girl whose last name is Hall. Merry Cat does have a feline face, with sharply sloping eyebrows and a quick grin. Her hair is black and her skin very fair, and what she looks like is a very classy Irish girl, which is what she is.
It is also what most of the rest of them are, Irish or Anglo-Irish or Castle Irish or Ascendancy or whatever. Shall I describe the rest of them for you?
All right, I think I will. But only because you insist, Steve-o.
Let’s return to the station wagon and do it geographically. Merry Cat, as I said, was driving. Sitting beside her was Dawn Redmond, a soft and quiet girl, soft of face and soft of body, with hair the color of a freshly opened chestnut and a slight complement of freckles on her cheekbones and across the bridge of her nose. She has exceptionally large breasts, and their sensitivity seems to be in proportion to their dimension. She goes all glassy-eyed when they are stroked, and can achieve orgasm from such attention.
In the back seat Naughty Nasty Nancy sat directly behind Dawn. Naughty Nasty Nancy does not speak too often, but her occasional remarks are always incisive. There is a distinctly fey quality to this girl, Steve. If you were casting Hamlet, you would pick her instantly for Ophelia.
On Nancy’s right was B.J. B.J. is Barbara Judith Castle. She looks enough like Merry Cat to be her sister, but isn’t. They may be cousins. I’m not certain. My memory of the conversation in which that part came up is somewhat vague, and I don’t know for certain whether they are cousins or lovers. I’m sure it’s one or the other. It’s possible, of course, that they are both.
Now for the luggage compartment, where I was sitting in a modified lotus position. On my right, Ellen Jamison, red-haired and slim-hipped and flat-chested and freckled. If her father ever loses his several million dollars, she can always earn a living posing for Norman Rockwell. She even has braces on her teeth.
Let me tell you something, Steve. Nothing brings you all the way back like kissing a girl with braces on her teeth. It makes you want to go home and stand in front of the mirror and squeeze blackheads. An ultimate nostalgia trip as the tongue-tip tickles all that shiny wire.
And on my left, chubby and giggly and bouncy and rosy-cheeked, Alison Keller. She wears her dark-brown hair in a Dutch cut, and her bangs fall upon her unlined brow. She is happy and bubbly and exuberant, and one is so delighted with this side of her that one doesn’t suspect there is more. But she paints, does Alison, and I have seen some of her paintings, and they are dark and mordant with echoes of Bosch and Dali, and they are weirdly wonderful, and so is she.
“We are truly kidnapping you, Mad Poet,” they kept saying. “And we will keep you hidden away in a cellar and smuggle scraps of food to you from the caf, and every day we will all steal down to you and make mad passionate love to you, and we will never never never let our Mad Poet go.”
How nice indeed.
The only hangup on the drive to Darien was that Merry Cat kept bitching about having to drive. “It’s not fair,” she would say. “Everybody else gets to neck with Mad Poet and all I have is the steering wheel. Doesn’t anyone else want to drive?”
No one else had a license. Except Mad Poet, but no one ever had the temerity to suggest that he drive.
“You’re always pestering to drive,” she accused them, “and now when I’m perfectly willing to let you, nobody wants to all of a sudden.”
So I could only neck with five of them, which was a shame. If life were perfect, we would have had a chauffeur. But why carp?
Steve, this was as perfect as life had ever gotten. Incredible.
You know, I shouldn’t have bothered with that geography shtick. It didn’t apply for very long. By the time we hit the West Side Drive, Dawn had climbed into the backseat, and she and Nancy and B.J. had done whatever it is you do to the backseats of station wagons to flatten them out, so that the backseat area just became part of an expanded luggage compartment. So there I was with the five of them, still in this same alcoholic haze and still sober regardless, and I reached out and kissed one, and the little devil opened her mouth instantly, and another one cuddled up and put my hand on her breast, and from there on you can write your own script. I never knew quite whom I was kissing nor whom I was touching at any given time. Nor did it ever quite matter.
The trouble is that I’m making it sound like an orgy, and it wasn’t at all like an orgy, not in the least. First of all, there was an air of utter innocence about the proceedings that couldn’t have been greater if we had been playing Parcheesi. We all liked each other and we were all having fun and it was all a lazy, giggly, delicious, magical thing.