Conclaves with a NYC Poet
I arrived at the Explorers Club fifteen minutes early, as I’m prone to do. I enjoy sitting in old leather chairs next to fireplaces, and what better place than in the lobby of a private club?
The chairs in this club were blood red, the walls were adorned with unusually dark wood, as if they were harvested from Germany’s Black Forest, and the fireplace was masculine, studious, and ancient. You can tell the age of a club by how quickly a single match could turn it into a tinderbox. If I had to guess, the Explorers Club, like most of the clubs from nineteenth-century New York, would take less than a minute before resembling the sack of Rome.
As I took a seat, the cushion slowly compressed as my spine settled into a bow. The feeling of sinking into an old chair is one of life’s great joys. I was tired, it was hot, and my suit was screaming to be taken off. The red chair was a vacation, a long weekend, and a sick day without a doctor’s note rolled into one.
There was only one other chair occupied. In it sat a man in his 60s: unattached and effortlessly stylish. He wore a wrinkled linen suit, a cotton neckerchief, and loafers sans socks. His glasses were dark and thick, framing a symmetrical, weathered face. I saw scads of stylish men in New York, but this Lower East Side poet was sprezzatura incarnate.
His energy was infectious, as was his smile. He was instantly engaging and laudably authentic. No bullshit, no ego, no agenda. In a matter of minutes, he gave me a book he had written and offered to take me on a tour of the clubhouse, to which I immediately replied, “Hell yeah!”
After the tour, I exchanged numbers with the poet, met my host, and spent the evening smoking a cigar on the secluded patio. If there was a soundtrack playing, Fred Astaire would’ve been crooning, “Heaven, I’m in heaven, And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.”
I read the short story I was given the following morning—three times. Avant-garde stuff; the kind of writing I really dig. I reached out to my new friend, paid him a compliment, and we agreed to meet at his club the following Friday.
For the next several weeks we met at the club to discuss travel, religion, art, history, philosophy, poetry, politics, and writing. P I G H E A V E N for this ole boy!
Sometimes we’d sit in the red chairs, and other times in a tiny library on the sixth floor that looked like it was straight out of a Wes Anderson film. He would inevitably take a photo or two of me, either wearing his sunglasses or in front of the fireplace—very Slim Aarons. Art permeated the air, and I loved every minute of it. I’d always leave with a book of his and jazzed for our next conclave on East 70th.
Only in New York… only in New York.
