Exclusive story: Two Men Sat On Chairs In The Street; Forgotten Suns art; Poem: Youth; House/Disco Mix: Here, Now; Tales From The UniversE 49 - newsletter from the meadows
An arcadia of imagination
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1. Short Story
Two Men Sat On Chairs In The Street
Part One
Outside Desmond O’s house Ralph the Fox and Desmond O placed chairs at the small table on which stood two white mugs and a steaming silver samovar and china teapot and they sat and watched Bulkeley Road.
Cars drove by and people walked from the direction of Dickens Lane to Waitrose. They walked the other way. The sky was a paper mache affair of spooling white cloud and early morning blue and Ralph poured water from the samovar into the teapot and the leaves inside. After two or three minutes he poured brews they took black and sipping their mugs felt February sun and the first fingers of spring coming through what remained of winter.
Desmond O pointed at the sky. ‘The light today is like LA. Can you believe Sunset Boulevard?’
Ralph the Fox said, ‘Sunset Boulevard is a person I have to believe now?’
‘That it exists how it does is what I mean. 25 miles all the way through the middle of Los Angeles and west to the Pacific Ocean. Remarkable. That it exists, at all, as it does.’
Ralph the Fox indicated the street before them. ‘Bulkeley Road is as remarkable.’
‘The Strip part of Sunset Boulevard - unbelievable.’
‘You’re 71 and you never mentioned before you’d been.’
‘I’m 72 and I haven’t. I read about it, watch films.’ He tapped his head. ‘Daydream about it.’
The Fox sipped tea, watched steam billow out the samovar into the brisk and clear air.
‘Daydream.’
Desmond O nodded. ‘The sun always shining on the Strip. The bars and clubs and the mafia, the corrupt LAPD, the roughhouse LA County Sheriff. The whole street scene of the Strip. How that golden Los Angeles light is like honey over it all. The famous. All those rockstars, popstars, moviestars who have partied there. You don’t get any of this on Bulkeley Road.’
The Fox stared at Desmond O a moment then scanned the street and pointed.
‘You get Vincent and Hubert.’ He pointed where Vincent walked his sausage dog. ‘You get whatever the woman’s called who sold her house to you and moved across the street where she bought her next house.’
‘You get us forgetting her name she’s so memorable.’
‘You get the knowledge that beyond Bulkeley Road are the hills and Higher Poynton, the sheep and cows and birds. All the villages around here.’
Desmond O sipped tea.
He said, ‘Picture what Sunset Boulevard goes past and through. Echo Park, Los Feliz, Downtown, Figueroa Street, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Bel Air, Brentwood, Santa Monica, Vine Street, Pacific Palisades, Vermont, West Hollywood, Radio Row, Billboard City, Dead Man’s Curve, Whisky a Go Go, The Viper Room, Paradise ReFound, The Disco Bar-’
‘You think penises age?’
‘What I’m grooving on at the moment is Donna Summer in the late ‘70s, disco, the beat of it, the sound of the night, the beautiful and the glamorous dancing into dawn the next morning. I was a young man then and had no idea-‘
‘I ask,’ said Ralph the Fox, ‘because my penis does not seem to be ageing but I’m looking at Vincent who has only 10 or 15 years on Ralph the Fox and the way he looks his penis has to be decrepit, dropping off, wrinkled. Unlike Ralph the Fox’s penis.’
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