Underage Limericks

Jeffrey Epstein is gone. Suicided?
The conclusion is still undecided.
A libidinous god . . .
or a jewel for Mossad?
The tribunal is deeply divided.

Mr Epstein is gone . . . wonder where.
Is he dead? All conjecture is fair.
Was that him on the slab?
We all hoped we would blab;
his declassified secrets to share.

While her In-N-Out burger went cold,
Madame Maxwell held secrets untold.
She looked young for the times;
Let her pay for her crimes
and we’ll help the fine lady grow old.

This procurer of underage tail
made the Post, and then later, the Mail
Let us sing a refrain
for recruiter Ghislaine:
we would like her detained without bail.

Had Me Pegged

The loves of my childhood and youth were romantic obsessions which fuel and inspire me to this day.
The most magical of my loves were the earliest, and the most sublimated.

♣ Peggy was fifteen in 1979, a freshman at our prep school. Sephardic soul in a tawny body, she had a mane of frizzy dark hair which usually reeked of cigarette smoke. I learned to love that magic smell. Sometimes she wore Candies™ high-heels and encased herself in tight jeans.

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She did interesting things with her hair: some days in a bun pinned with massive hairpins, long oriental tendrils trailing; other days a Pre-Raphaelite look, locks beatifically bound at her shoulders. I recall twin pigtails of dark delight as well as a massive Pocahontas braid once. Her eyebrows sloped at a dizzying angle. They made her look like an enraged dakini-goddess, but the fearsome brows only accentuated her inherent kindness. I don’t know if she plucked them that way or if it was an exaggeration of the natural line, but they dazzled me to no end, those crazy eyebrows.

We were in Biology, Music Theory, and French together. In one math classroom she had scrawled ‘Planet Darvon’ on the desk. Peggy was somewhat extreme, for a 15 year-old . . .

As the year progressed we started sitting together in Biology. We passed notes and generally mocked the teacher and certain classmates. It amazed me that she seemed to enjoy our friendship. I felt privileged in her deigning to favor me. We got high in the woods a few times. Peggy drank and smoked somewhat. I remember one morning in music class she looked at me with her crazy-beautiful olive smile and said:

Hook, I woke up this morning and did 6 shots of poison before breakfast.

She meant Vodka. I could barely conceive of such a thing. The amazing aspect of it all was her effortless ability to live this way and get good grades. She was musical; she taught herself the piano solo in Skynyrd’s Call me the Breeze and played it for me like it was nothing. She had hard-rock albums by April Wine and Crack the Sky. The fact that I recall the names of these bands proves my infatuation with her. When Boston played at Boston Garden, she saw them first and told me about it. I saw them a show or two later. She also had Skeletons in the Closet, a collection of Grateful Dead hits. Years later, I learned to appreciate the Dead due to memories of her.

There was a dance that spring at a venue next to a country club with a golf course. I remember her mischievous smile when she informed me that she had scored a bottle of apricot brandy to drink together. We sneaked out of the dance and lay under the stars on an immaculately-trimmed putting green next to a sand-trap, partaking of the forbidden libation. Whenever I hear More Than a Feeling, I think of Peggy.

The fragrance of that amazing mass of hair impregnated with cigarette smoke overwhelms me once again. I see her semitic gray-green cat eyes and the arch of her brows, I recall how perfect she looked in her designer jeans, her laugh, her walk, her voice, sitting next to me in class passing notes. I didn’t deserve that she should even gaze at me.

She left my school after that spring to attend another, and as our romance faded, all she offered in parting was a bottle of vodka she was hiding from her parents and a nonchalant

well Hook I guess this is it—bye bye . . .

then she walked away into oblivion, through a corridor of trees lining Main Street in dazzling late spring light, just like Maryann in the Boston song. I never saw her again. I still think about her almost every day. It is strange what the feminine other can do to an impressionable mind. I am still stoned on memories of a girl who will always be perfectly fifteen in the spring of 1979.

Someone Else

The loves of my childhood and youth were for the most part purely romantic obsessions which fuel and inspire my soul to this day. Until the end of 9th grade, I had never kissed a girl. The most magical of my loves were the earliest, the most sublimated—and the most childish.

♠ In 1976 my family moved to East Africa where I attended school with students from all over the world. From the swelter of America’s Bicentennial Disco summer I was transplanted to live in Kenya. ABBA was topping the charts as I fell hard for the Nordic girls in 8th Grade. It was still a sublimated yearning type of affair, the truth is I had not even reached puberty yet; my late-blooming mind was unable to assimilate these Scandinavian maidens. They had wild names that evoked Varangian longships and fjords in morning mist: Inga Johanssen, Erika Skudal, Kristen Hafstad, and Else-Merete of the red-gold hair. I had schoolboy crushes on most of them, but it was more a sense of awe and pre-pubescent infatuation. Sometime at the start of 9th grade, my second year at the school, I noticed a rare creature on the schoolbus. I recall her silky shirt and her slender face. I can’t recall quite what it was. . . but this new girl made a massive impression on me. I learned that her name was Else and she was Norwegian. She was one year behind me, in 8th grade, so I only caught glimpses of her here and there around campus, yet she seemed to have cast some sort of spell on my soul. She awakened a hormonal interest that had lain dormant until her arrival. Yet, I rarely saw her and had no chance to even utter a word to her. I knew I was leaving that school next year. My unspoken longings intensified. Many of my cohort were already getting high, talking locker-room raunch and making out at parentless parties I never attended, but I was still an earnest, skinny youth.

Then, at the end of that year, it all came together. One day I found a note slipped into my locker: You are a cute boy. I was elated and panic-stricken all at once. It turned out that Else and her Ethiopian friend had put the note there. Someone told me: she likes you. I think I asked her friend about this. I remember some girlish giggling and the onset of a long and intense euphoria. I wound up slow-dancing and making out with her at the last dance of the year. I still couldn’t believe she liked me. I became aware at close range of her beauty. I went out with her to a movie where I held her hand: rocket to Venus.

We made out some more on her sofa. She lent me her older brother’s records. Because of Else, I will adore Santana’s Greatest Hits (white dove on black breasthttps://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91AbPrpoYXL._SS500_.jpg) unto the grave and beyond. I listened to Queen’s Day at the Races over and over, just because it was lent to me by her. I still think of her when I hear ‘Drowse’ and ‘Tie Your Mother Down’.

A Nairobi vignette: The first time I got dropped off at her home near Westlands for dinner, I was met at the door by her younger brother, who was about 6 or 7. He scowled up at me and pointing, said: You—Pakistan. It took a while for me to grasp that he thought I was Pakistani. Soon after that hostile welcome, Else told me in a fearful hush that she had noticed something strange.

Come up on the roof with me, she whispered.

We crawled out of a window of her home, which was one in a line of contiguous tract-style ranch houses with small low-walled courtyards in each adjoining house. She pointed down to an irregular dark blot on the ground of the neighboring yard as she spoke:

The people who live next to us are African. There used to be a dog constantly barking, every day and all night. But a day ago it became completely silent. I think that is the dog’s skin there.

I craned my neck to peer into the silent courtyard of Else’s neighbors. The dark blot was indeed something like a freshly flayed animal skin pegged-out around the edges to dry on the grass . . . maybe they were not African. Maybe they were Korean. But I know what I saw.

Else’s Icelandic mother offered me some unfamiliar food, I think it was fish in some sort of dill-sauce. Else’s father told me his daughter had been sleepwalking recently; they had found her gathering things from her closet after midnight. When asked what she was doing she had answered, somnambulistically, that she was going somewhere with me. I soon left Africa to begin 10th grade at a boarding school in New England.

When I saw her again at Christmas vacation, 3 continents and 6 months later, the magic was gone. I had become a self-conscious zit-faced adolescent geek and she was going out with her Ethiopian friend’s older brother.