THE YEAR OF THE HAPPY IDIOT SMILE a Darlings & Monsters Excerpt

A transitional into the ELLE and BREAK-UP part of DARLING & MONSTER'S Breakup under Analysis.

ALL IT TAKES IS ONE HAPPY IDIOT SMILE or: The Year of Swimming from Breast to Breast!

The year that drew a near infinity of happy idiot responses that resulted in no end of “quickies” and several  affairs, had its inception, I think, at my sober talk to the Bulgarian Writer’s Union; an address that ended with this bit of indoctrinated propaganda: “And now I’d like to meet some writers who are not in the Writers’ Union”; it was the kind of statement that elicited the instant, hilarious unisono reply: “All the writers in the Writers’ Union are those who do not want to be in the Writers’ Union,” and then we all made love – no, we all started to laugh and I about meself and I started to have fun, I, a piece of cultural USIA exchange, realized how they knew how to finesse the KGB; (they also knew how to conserve their paper allotments to get the books published that they cared most about) and I replied to my literary KGB minder bottle-neck Trayan (there’s a first name to encounter in a Slavic country) Ivanov’s threat that “maybe I would not be around next year” with the tit for tat “Well, maybe you won’t be around either!” and after a hard-working four weeks of meetings and a wondrous trip to Plovdiv and having a gypsy steal my satchel and getting a rough Bulgarian shaving kit to replace the  stolen mine, I got the  U.S. Embassy to move the Marine guard off and away from the library and the Buggers their watchdog in their sedan from stationing itself across the way, and started to feel victorious for having won a victory, small or big in retrospect, a cultural victory, I who had averted the Bulgarian Mata Haris’ overtures (one, my minder, who shared literary proclivities quickly exchanged for a sturdy philosophical faculty student] my hosts and I got along so well they asked me to stay beyond the scheduled month, but I couldn’t, I had the most delicious of young, unconsummated lovers waiting  – “intim aber keine Intimitaeten” she quoted Karl Kraus -  we had an assignation in Vienna at a Pension, and I had no way to contact her to change our date, a young lover that then got cold feet, but would not have, I suspect, if she had encountered the kind of big happy idiot smile that her groom brought back, wore upon his return from Bulgaria, to which every  pretty one - starting in Vienna - responded with the equivalent happy idiot smile, obviously we could not wait to make love, happy idiot time had tolled!
Whence that charge that the battery got in Bulgaria? Back in New York someone says “you’ve got to be taking something,” but no, I wasn’t taking anything, I was high on Bulgaria, perhaps it had been the air I inhaled in the ancient city of Plovdiv the air that alluvial Black Sea soil exhales, my swimming, a charge that made a bugger of me, the Slavic side of me was breaking out and had induced the smile to which the lovely one in Vienna - in lieu of the  broken date – responded, who thought I looked like  the Sorger in Handke’s Langsame Heimkehr / Slow Homecoming – was the first to respond, a book I had just started to read and that I responded to as to few others, it resurrected brought back, seemed to summarize an ancient experience of Alaska of mine, aI was about to visit the book’s author, yet my admiration of the book did not allayed a quarrel I had with him and so I did something I had never done  - veni vidi vici  - I  out-played him it was at Tarok a game this cardsharp had never played before and doing so for a specific reason, not out of general obnoxiousness or grandiosity, it was child’s play
http://www.kultur.at/lesen/set01/roloff01.htm
it was that easy, and elicited the response that therefore I would not get to see the wife, who seemed to have returned to the author after having run away, in other words an anything but humorous response. What did he knew who perhaps knew that this time she would run with me as she didn’t the first time when I could not run away with her? He of the deep insights and senses, when he was awake.
The next morning I took my usual swim - during those days of swimming every morning - with the Austrian National swim team in the Hotel pool, not a single lovely amongst them, how right the author had been to keep me from his wife who would have responded the way she had once before, when my smile was more discrete. Traveling on, to Lichtenstein, upon my return to Zurich – months of hard work achieved, ah I can relax – I start to smile an even brighter smile lights up across the aisle! - two idiot smiles that consume each other, a darling Swiss school girl and I, at the Grand Hotel that has a pool with ocean-going waves, whose motions enters us, as well as the 727 back to the Big Bright City swooping in and out of valleys like a jet fighter, I congratulate the pilot, he must be happy too, to fly that way, winging swimming our way back to the Big Bright and Dark Big City where I continue to smile and pull the failing firm one last time from out under but fail to take care of the money-sluicing partner – it can wait I tell myself ~ I need a vacation - and on St. Simons Island Georgia, on an early morning run, a set of big mutual idiot smiles greet each other and entwine in From Here to Eternity right there in the mild November surf, Amanda, the first of a maelstrom of happy idiot smiles on over-drive a year’s worth, a Beatrice,  Colette and her pretty panties, a Darcia and Euridice a Frannie a girlie Girlanda, Heloise turned out to be a scratcher and had to have her arms pinned. and an Irene, Judy guided her heart’s desire to her ass, and Katie liked it through her panties, Linda was no Lovelace and a Miranda and a Natale and her sister – and an Opal, who sang “a sweet so lo lick” and a Patrice liked to be kissed through her panties, too, all those pretty panties of those who still wore panties, especially Collette, and a Querulanda and a Rucile and a Sandra and a Tatjana and and and Ursula and a Yolanda, a Xantippe and a Zelda, each quickie a vignette, an alphabet soup of venues too, back- and front seat and closets of all kinds, bridge spans, either her or my bed, at once who could wait, big happy idiot smiles, museums, on the street, in bars on the subway Ms. Texas and her bling, big idiot smiles hooking up, brilliance and bimbos, from one breast to breast to the next, sometimes several a day, exchanged midstream, my adolescent photographer’s dream, on a cross Atlantic trip, that the top of each wave as it foamed as it broke was a breast seemed realized, materialized into what I called my year of living Flaubert’s dream, occasionally tarrying, posting Sephardic beauty Jody’s photos all over, Jody, the Sephardic beauty, Patrice a near miss, such a wealth of salad-leaf kisses from Patrice it was just too much, who married all the men she loved, a year of idiot smiles and a breast deluge that culminated in their summa in fateful Elle .     

     

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