No. 87 - Conclaves with a NYC Poet

I arrived at the Explorers Club fifteen minutes early, as I’m prone to. I enjoy sitting next to fireplaces in old leather chairs, 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.

On this particular day, I was slap worn out. It was hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock, and my suit was screaming to be taken off. The red chair hit the spot—like a long weekend, a vacation, and a sick day without a doctor’s note all rolled into one.

There was only one other chair occupied. In it sat a man in his sixties: 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 worldly, weathered face. I saw scads of well-dressed 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 a secluded patio. If there had been a soundtrack playing, Fred Astaire would’ve been crooning,  “Heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speaeeeeek” ♬.

I read the short story he gave me the following morning—three times. Avant-garde stuff—the kind of writing I 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 ol’ 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.      

*Composed, Edited, and Published in Atlanta, GA